e no
make lady-beds," he said briefly.

Li Koo's salary was enormous, but Mr. Twist, with a sound instinct,
cared nothing what he paid so long as he got the right man. He was,
indeed, much satisfied with his two employees, and congratulated himself
on his luck. It is true in regard to Mrs. Bilton his satisfaction was
rather of the sorrowful sort that a fresh ache in a different part of
one's body from the first ache gives: it relieved him from one by
substituting another. Mrs. Bilton overwhelmed him; but so had the Annas
begun to. Her overwhelming, however, was different, and freed him from
that other worse one. He felt safe now about the Annas, and after all
there were parts of the building in which Mrs. Bilton wasn't. There was
his bedroom, for instance. Thank God for bedrooms, thought Mr. Twist. He
grew to love his. What a haven that poky and silent place was; what a
blessing the conventions were, and the proprieties. Supposing
civilization were so far advanced that people could no longer see the
harm there is in a bedroom, what would have become of him? Mr. Twist
could perfectly account for Bruce D. Bilton's death. It wasn't diabetes,
as Mrs. Bilton said; it was just bedroom.

Still, Mrs. Bilton was an undoubted find, and did immediately in those
rushed days take the Annas off his mind. He could leave them with her in
the comfortable certitude that whatever else they did to Mrs. Bilton
they couldn't talk to her. Never would she know the peculiar ease of the
Twinkler attitude toward subjects Americans approach with care. Never
would they be able to tell her things about Uncle Arthur, the kind of
things that had caused the Cosmopolitan to grow so suddenly cool. There
was, most happily for this particular case, no arguing with Mrs. Bilton.
The twins couldn't draw her out because she was already, as it were, so
completely out. This was a great thing, Mr. Twist felt, and made up for
any personal suffocation he had to bear; and when on the afternoon of
Mrs. Bilton's first day the twins appeared without her in the main
building in search of him, having obviously given her the slip, and said
they were sorry to disturb him but they wanted his advice, for though
they had been trying hard all day, remembering they were ladies and
practically hostesses, they hadn't yet succeeded in saying anything at
all to Mrs. Bilton and doubted whether they ever would, he merely smiled
happily at them and said to Anna-Rose, "See how good co