superior and blessed kind that suffers green apples
gladly--she sought out the nursemaid, whose name, too, confusingly, was
Anna, and led the conversation up to heaven and the possible conditions
prevailing in it by asking her to tell her, in strict confidence and as
woman to woman, what she thought Onkel Col exactly looked like at that
moment.

"Unrecognizable," said the nursemaid promptly.

"Unrecognizable?" echoed Anna-Felicitas.

And the nursemaid, after glancing over her shoulder to see if the
governess were nowhere in sight, told Anna-Felicitas the true story of
Onkel Col's end: which is so bad that it isn't fit to be put in any book
except one with an appendix.

A stewardess passed just as Anna-Felicitas was asking Anna-Rose not to
remind her of these grim portions of the past by calling her Col, a
stewardess in such a very clean white cap that she looked both reliable
and benevolent, while secretly she was neither.

"Can you please tell us why we're stopping?" Anna-Rose inquired of her
politely, leaning forward to catch her attention as she hurried by.

The stewardess allowed her roving eye to alight for a moment on the two
objects beneath the rug. Their chairs were close together, and the rug
covered them both up to their chins. Over the top of it their heads
appeared, exactly alike as far as she could see in the dusk; round
heads, each with a blue knitted cap pulled well over its ears, and round
eyes staring at her with what anybody except the stewardess would have
recognized as a passionate desire for some sort of reassurance. They
might have been seven instead of seventeen for all the stewardess could
tell. They looked younger than anything she had yet seen sitting alone
on a deck and asking questions. But she was an exasperated widow, who
had never had children and wasn't to be touched by anything except a
tip, besides despising, because she was herself a second-class
stewardess, all second-class passengers,--"As one does," Anna-Rose
explained later on to Anna-Felicitas, "and the same principle applies to
Jews." So she said with an acidity completely at variance with the
promise of her cap, "Ask the Captain," and disappeared.

The twins looked at each other. They knew very well that captains on
ships were mighty beings who were not asked questions.

"She's trifling with us," murmured Anna-Felicitas.

"Yes," Anna-Rose was obliged to admit, though the thought was repugnant
to her that they should l