ping."

"I believe you'd have liked Kipps," said Anna-Felicitas meditatively,
shaking some dust off her hat and remembering the orgy of tipping that
immortal young man went in for at the seaside hotel.

"What I like now," said the youth, growing more easy before their
manifest youth and ignorance, "is tips. Guess you can call it Kipps if
it pleases you."

Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse "It's horrid, I think,
to ask for presents," she said to the youth in deep humiliation, more on
his account than hers.

"Presents? I'm not asking for presents. I'm telling you what's done,"
said the youth. And he had spots on his face. And he was repugnant to
her.

Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a shilling. He took it, and
remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it, went away; and
Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist knocked and
asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.

"He might have said thank you," she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas,
giving a final desperate brushing to the sulphur.

"I expect he'll come to a bad end," said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a
thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables laid for
dinner. It wasn't the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to
have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort.
The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing
their detachment from it by sitting in a corner of the room playing
dominoes. It was a big room, all looking-glasses and windows, and the
street outside was badly paved and a great noise of passing motor-vans
came in and drowned most of what Mr. Twist was saying. It was an
unlovely place, a place in which one might easily feel homesick and that
the world was empty of affection, if one let oneself go that way. The
twins wouldn't. They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be
daunted by these externals. For there was Mr. Twist, their friend and
stand-by, still with them, and hadn't they got each other? But they felt
uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied them with buttered
toast and macaroons and was as attentive as usual, had a somnambulatory
quality in his attention. He looked like a man who is doing things in a
dream. He looked like one who is absorbed in something else. His
forehead still was puckered, and what could it be puckered about, seeing
t