The inn was to look artless and simple and small, while actually being the last word in roomy and sophisticated comfort.  It was to be as like an old English inn to look at as it could possibly be got to be going on his own and the twins’ recollections and the sensationally coloured Elizabethan pictures in the architect’s portfolio.  It didn’t disturb Mr. Twist’s unprejudiced American mind that an English inn embowered in heliotrope and arum lilies and eucalyptus trees would be odd and unnatural, and it wouldn’t disturb anybody else there either.  Were not Swiss mountain chalets to be found in the fertile plains along the Pacific, complete with fir trees specially imported and uprooted in their maturity and brought down with tons of their own earth attached to their roots and replanted among carefully disposed, apparently Swiss rocks, so that what one day had been a place smiling with orange-groves was the next a bit of frowning northern landscape?  And were there not Italian villas dotted about also?  But these looked happier and more at home than the chalets.  And there were buildings too, like small Gothic cathedrals, looking as uncomfortable and depressed as a woman who has come to a party in the wrong clothes.  But no matter.  Nobody minded.  So that an English inn added to this company, with a little German beer-garden—­only there wasn’t to be any beer—­wouldn’t cause the least surprise or discomfort to anybody.

In the end, the sole resemblance the cottage had to an English inn was the signboard out in the road.  With the best will in the world, and the liveliest financial encouragement from Mr. Twist, the architect couldn’t in three weeks turn a wooden Californian cottage into an ancient red-brick Elizabethan pothouse.  He got a thatched roof on to it by a miracle of hustle, but the wooden walls remained; he also found a real antique heavy oak front door studded with big rusty nailheads in a San Francisco curiosity shop, that would serve, he said, as a basis for any wished-for hark-back later on when there was more time to the old girl’s epoch—­thus did he refer to Great Eliza and her spacious days—­and meanwhile it gave the building, he alleged, a considerable air; but as this door in that fine climate was hooked open all day long it didn’t disturb the gay, the almost jocose appearance of the place when everything was finished.

Houses have their expressions, their distinctive faces, very much as people have, meditated Mr. Twist the morning of the opening, as he sat astride a green chair at the bottom of the little garden, where a hedge of sweetbriar beautifully separated the Twinkler domain from the rolling fields that lay between it and the Pacific, and stared at his handiwork; and the conclusion was forced upon him—­reluctantly, for it was the last thing he had wanted The Open Arms to do—­that the thing looked as if it were winking at him.