I'm a fearfully
decent chap and can give you lots to eat, and that I've got a jolly
little sister here who's respectable and well-known besides, and I'm
going to produce references to back up these assertions, and proofs that
I'm perfectly sound in health except for my silly foot, which isn't
health but just foot and which you don't seem to mind anyhow, and how--I
ask you _how_, Anna-Felicitas my dear, am I to do any of this with you
standing there looking like--well, like that?"

"I don't know," said Anna-Felicitas again, still not moving.

"Anna-Felicitas, my dear," he said, "won't you go?"

"No, John," said Anna-Felicitas gently.

His eyes twinkled and danced more than ever. He took a step towards her,
then checked himself and looked round beseechingly at Mr. Twist.

"_Somebody's_ got to go," he said.

"Yes," said Mr. Twist. "And I guess it's me."

CHAPTER XXXVIII

He went straight in search of Anna-Rose.

He was going to propose to her. He couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear
the idea of his previous twins, his blessed little Twinklers, both going
out of his life at the same time, and he couldn't bear, after what he
had just seen in the office, the loneliness of being left outside love.

All his life he had stood on the door-mat outside the shut door of love.
He had had no love; neither at home, where they talked so much about it
and there wasn't any, nor, because of his home and its inhibitions got
so thoroughly into his blood, anywhere else. He had never tried to
marry,--again because of his home and his mother and the whole
only-son-of-a-widow business. He would try now. He would risk it. It was
awful to risk it, but it was more awful not to. He adored Anna-Rose. How
nearly the afternoon before, when she sat crying in his chair, had he
taken her in his arms! Why, he would have taken her into them then and
there, while she was in that state, while she was in the need of
comfort, and never let her go out of them again, if it hadn't been that
he had got the idea so firmly fixed in his head that she was a child.
Fool that he was. Elliott had dispelled that idea for him. It wasn't
children who looked as Anna-Felicitas had looked just now in the office.
Anna-Rose, it is true, seemed younger than Anna-Felicitas, but that was
because she was little and easily cried. He loved her for being little.
He loved her because she easily cried. He yearned and hungered to
comfort, to pet to take care of. He was, a