Impossible to imagine anything cooler, sweeter, prettier and more angelically good than those two Annas looked as they came out on to the great verandah of the hotel to join Mr. Twist at breakfast.  They instantly sank into the hotel consciousness.  Mr. Twist had thought this wouldn’t happen for a day or two, but he now perceived his mistake.  Not a head that wasn’t turned to look at them, not a newspaper that wasn’t lowered.  They were immediate objects of interest and curiosity, entirely benevolent interest and curiosity because nobody yet knew anything about them, and the wives of the rich husbands—­those halves of the virtuous-rich unions which provided the virtuousness—­smiled as they passed, and murmured nice words to each other like cute and cunning.

Mr. Twist, being a good American, stood up and held the twins’ chairs for them when they appeared.  They loved this; it seemed so respectful, and made them feel so old and looked-up to.  He had done it that night in New York at supper, and at all the meals in the train in spite of the train being so wobbly and each time they had loved it.  “It makes one have such self-respect,” they agreed, commenting on this agreeable practice in private.

They sat down in the chairs with the gracious face of the properly treated, and inquired, with an amiability and a solicitous politeness on a par with their treatment how Mr. Twist had slept.  They themselves had obviously slept well, for their faces were cherubic in their bland placidity, and already after one night wore what Mr. Twist later came to recognize as the Californian look, a look of complete unworriedness.

Yet they ought to have been worried.  Mr. Twist had been terribly worried up to the moment in the night when he got his great idea, and he was worried again, now that he saw the twins, by doubts.  They didn’t look as though they would easily be put to school.  His idea still seemed to him magnificent, a great solution, but would the Annas be able to see it?  They might turn out impervious to it; not rejecting it, but simply non-absorbent.  As they slowly and contentedly ate their grape-fruit, gazing out between the spoonfuls at the sea shining across the road through palm trees, and looking unruffled itself, he felt it was going to be rather like suggesting to two cherubs to leave their serene occupation of adoring eternal beauty and learn lessons instead.  Still, it was the one way out, as far as Mr. Twist could see, of the situation produced by the death of the man Dellogg.  “When you’ve done breakfast,” he said, pulling himself together on their reaching the waffle stage, “we must have a talk.”

“When we’ve done breakfast,” said Anna-Rose, “we must have a walk.”

“Down there,” said Anna-Felicitas, pointing with her spoon.  “On the sands.  Round the curve to where the pink hills begin.”

“Mr. Dellogg’s death,” said Mr. Twist, deciding it was necessary at once to wake them up out of the kind of happy somnolescence they seemed to be falling into, “has of course completely changed—­”