dn't particularly want them to play. She was fond of and
trusted Mr. Twist, and would never even have thought whether he had
features or not ii Anna-Rose hadn't taken lately to talking so much
about them. And she couldn't help remembering how this very Christopher,
so voluble now on the higher handsomeness, had said on board the _St.
Luke_ when first commenting on Mr. Twist that God must have got tired of
making him by the time his head was reached. Well, Christopher had
always been an idealist. When she was eleven she had violently loved the
coachman. Anna-Felicitas hadn't ever violently loved anybody yet, and
seeing Anna-Rose like this now about Mr. Twist made her wonder when she
too was going to begin. Surely it was time. She hoped her inability to
begin wasn't perhaps because she had no heart. Still, she couldn't begin
if she didn't see anybody to begin on.

She sat silent in the taxi, with Christopher equally silent beside her,
both of them observing Mr. Twist through lowered eyelashes. Anna-Rose
watched him with hurt and anxious eyes like a devoted dog who has been
kicked without cause. Anna-Felicitas watched him in a more detached
spirit. She had a real affection for him, but it was not, she was sure
and rather regretted, an affection that would ever be likely to get the
better of her reason. It wasn't because he was so old, of course, she
thought, for one could love the oldest people, beginning with that
standard example of age, the _liebe Gott_; it was because she liked him
so much.

How could one get sentimental over and love somebody one so thoroughly
liked? The two things on reflection didn't seem to combine well. She was
sure, for instance, that Aunt Alice had loved Uncle Arthur, amazing as
it seemed, but she was equally sure she hadn't liked him. And look at
the _liebe Gott_. One loves the _liebe Gott_, but it would be going too
far, she thought, to say that one likes him.

These were the reflections of Anna-Felicitas in the taxi, as she
observed through her eyelashes the object of Anna-Rose's idealization.
She envied Anna-Rose; for here she had been steadily expanding every day
more and more like a flower under the influence of her own power of
idealization. She used to sparkle and grow rosy like that for the
coachman. Perhaps after all it didn't much matter what you loved, so
long as you loved immensely. It was, perhaps, thought Anna-Felicitas
approaching this subject with some caution and diffidence,