coat."

"If you can imagine it," added Anna-Rose politely, ready to explain and
describe further if required.

But Mr. Twist could imagine it. He readjusted his picture of Uncle
Arthur, and this time got him right,--the tall, not bad-looking man,
clean-shaven and with more hair a great deal than he, Mr. Twist, had. He
had thought of him as an old ruffian; he now perceived that he could be
hardly more than middle-aged and that Aunt Alice, a lady for whom he
felt an almost painful sympathy, had a lot more of Uncle Arthur to get
through before she was done.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, accepting the word middle-aged as correct.
"Neither of his ends looks much older than yours do. He's aged in the
middle. That's the only place. Where the bomb is."

"I suppose that's why it's called middle-aged," said Anna-Felicitas
dreamily. "One middle-ages first, and from there it just spreads. It
must be queer," she added pensively, "to watch oneself gradually
rotting."

These were the sorts of observations, Mr. Twist felt, that might
prejudice his mother against the twins If they could be induced not to
say most of the things they did say when in her presence, he felt that
his house, of all houses in America, should be offered them as a refuge
whenever they were in need of one. But his mother was not, he feared,
very adaptable. In her house--it was legally his, but it never felt as
if it were--people adapted themselves to her. He doubted whether the
twins could or would. Their leading characteristic, he had observed, was
candour. They had no _savoir faire_. They seemed incapable of anything
but naturalness, and their particular type of naturalness was not one,
he was afraid, that his mother would understand.

She had not been out of her New England village, a place called briefly,
with American economy of time, Clark, for many years, and her ideal of
youthful femininity was still that which she had been herself. She had,
if unconsciously, tried to mould Mr. Twist also on these lines, in spite
of his being a boy, and owing to his extreme considerateness had not yet
discovered her want of success. For years, indeed, she had been
completely successful, and Mr. Twist arrived at and embarked on
adolescence with the manners and ways of thinking of a perfect lady.

Till he was nineteen he was educated at home, as it were at his mother's
knee, at any rate within reach of that sacred limb, and she had taught
him to reverence women; the reason