He had an American eye for advertisement.  Respect for it was in his blood.  He instantly saw the possibilities contained in the name.  He saw what could be done with it, properly worked.  He saw it on hoarding-on signposts, in a thousand contrivances for catching the public attention and sticking there.

The idea, of course, was fantastic, unconventional, definitely outside what his mother and that man Uncle Arthur would consider proper, but it was outside the standards of such people that life and fruitfulness and interest and joy began.  He had escaped from the death-like grip of his mother, and Uncle Arthur had himself forcibly expulsed the Annas from his, and now that they were all so far away, instead of still timorously trying to go on living up to those distant sterile ideas why shouldn’t they boldly go out into the light and colour that was waiting everywhere for the free of spirit?

Mr. Twist had often observed how perplexingly much there is to be said for the opposite sides of a question.  He was now, but with no perplexity, for Anna-Felicitas had roused his enthusiasm, himself taking the very opposite view as to the proper thing for the twins to do from the one he had taken in the night and on the rocks that morning.  School?  Nonsense.  Absurd to bury these bright shoots of everlastingness—­this is what they looked like to him, afire with enthusiasm and the setting sun—­in such a place of ink.  If the plan, owing to the extreme youth of the Annas, were unconventional, conventionality could be secured by giving a big enough salary to a middle-aged lady to come and preside.  He himself would hover beneficently in the background over the undertaking.

Anna-Felicitas’s idea was to use Uncle Arthur’s L200 in renting one of the little wooden cottages that seemed to be plentiful, preferably one about five miles out in the country, make it look inside like an English cottage, all pewter and chintz and valances, make it look outside like the more innocent type of German wayside inn, with green tables and spreading trees, get a cook who would concentrate on cakes, real lovely ones, various, poetic, wonderful cakes, and start an inn for tea alone that should become the fashion.  It ought to be so arranged that it became the fashion.  She and Anna-Rose would do the waiting.  The prices would be very high, indeed exorbitant—­this Mr. Twist regarded as another inspiration,—­so that it should be a distinction, give people a cachet, to have had tea at their cottage; and in a prominent position in the road in front of it, where every motor-car would be bound to see it, there would be a real wayside inn signboard, such as inns in England always have, with its name on it.

“If people here were really neutral you might have the Imperial arms of Germany and England emblazoned on it,” interrupted Mr. Twist, “just to show your own extreme and peculiar neutrality.”

“We might call it The Christopher and Columbus,” interrupted Anna-Rose, who had been sitting open-mouthed hanging on Anna-Felicitas’s words.