Up to this point the harmony was complete, and Mr. Twist could only nod approval.  Beyond it all was confusion, for it appeared that the twins didn’t dream of entering a school in any capacity except as teachers.  Professors, they said; professors of languages and literatures.  They could speak German, as they pointed out, very much better than most people, and had, as Mr. Twist had sometimes himself remarked, an extensive vocabulary in English.  They would give lessons in English and German literature.  They would be able to teach quite a lot about Heine, for instance, the whole of whose poetry they knew by heart and whose sad life in Paris—­

“It’s no good running on like that,” interrupted Mr. Twist.  “You’re not old enough.”

Not old enough?  The Twinklers, from their separate rocks, looked at each other in surprised indignation.

“Not old enough?” repeated Anna-Rose.  “We’re grown up.  And I don’t see how one can be more than grown up.  One either is or isn’t grown up.  And there can be no doubt as to which we are.”

And this the very man who so respectfully had been holding their chairs for them only a few minutes before!  As if people did things like that for children.

“You’re not old enough I say,” said Mr. Twist again, bringing his hand down with a slap on the rock to emphasize his words.  “Nobody would take you.  Why, you’ve got perambulator faces, the pair of you—­”

“Perambulator—?”

“And what school is going to want two teachers both teaching the same thing, anyway?”

And he then quickly got out his plan, and the conversation became so heated that for a time it was molten.

The Twinklers were shocked by his plan.  More; they were outraged.  Go to school?  To a place they had never been to even in their suitable years?  They, two independent grown-ups with L200 in the bank and nobody with any right to stop their doing anything they wanted to?  Go to school now, like a couple of little suck-a-thumbs?

It was Anna-Rose, very flushed and bright of eye, who flung this expression at Mr. Twist from her rock.  He might think they had perambulator faces if he liked—­they didn’t care, but they did desire him to bear in mind that if it hadn’t been for the war they would be now taking their proper place in society, that they had already done a course of nursing in a hospital, an activity not open to any but adults, and that Uncle Arthur had certainly not given them all that money to fritter away on paying for belated schooling.

“We would be anachronisms,” said Anna-Felicitas, winding up the discussion with a firmness so unusual in her that it showed how completely she had been stirred.

“Are you aware that we are marriageable?” inquired Anna-Rose icily.

“And don’t you think it’s bad enough for us to be aliens and undesirables,” asked Anna-Felicitas, “without getting chronologically confused as well?”