the building in which Mrs. Bilton wasn’t.  There was his bedroom, for instance.  Thank God for bedrooms, thought Mr. Twist.  He grew to love his.  What a haven that poky and silent place was; what a blessing the conventions were, and the proprieties.  Supposing civilization were so far advanced that people could no longer see the harm there is in a bedroom, what would have become of him?  Mr. Twist could perfectly account for Bruce D. Bilton’s death.  It wasn’t diabetes, as Mrs. Bilton said; it was just bedroom.

Still, Mrs. Bilton was an undoubted find, and did immediately in those rushed days take the Annas off his mind.  He could leave them with her in the comfortable certitude that whatever else they did to Mrs. Bilton they couldn’t talk to her.  Never would she know the peculiar ease of the Twinkler attitude toward subjects Americans approach with care.  Never would they be able to tell her things about Uncle Arthur, the kind of things that had caused the Cosmopolitan to grow so suddenly cool.  There was, most happily for this particular case, no arguing with Mrs. Bilton.  The twins couldn’t draw her out because she was already, as it were, so completely out.  This was a great thing, Mr. Twist felt, and made up for any personal suffocation he had to bear; and when on the afternoon of Mrs. Bilton’s first day the twins appeared without her in the main building in search of him, having obviously given her the slip, and said they were sorry to disturb him but they wanted his advice, for though they had been trying hard all day, remembering they were ladies and practically hostesses, they hadn’t yet succeeded in saying anything at all to Mrs. Bilton and doubted whether they ever would, he merely smiled happily at them and said to Anna-Rose, “See how good comes out of evil”—­a remark that they didn’t like when they had had time to think over it.

But they went on struggling.  It seemed so unnatural to be all alone all day long with someone and only listen.  Mrs. Bilton never left their side, regarding it as proper and merely fulfilling her part of the bargain, in these first confused days when there was nothing for ladies to do but look on while perspiring workmen laboured at apparently producing more and more chaos, to become thoroughly acquainted with her young charges.  This she did by imparting to them intimate and meticulous information about her own life, with the whole of the various uplifts, as she put it, her psyche had during its unfolding experienced.  There was so much to tell about herself that she never got to inquiring about the twins.  She knew they were orphans, and that this was a good work, and for the moment had no time for more.

The twins were profoundly bored by her psyche, chiefly because they didn’t know what part of her it was, and it was no use asking for she didn’t answer; but they listened with real interest to her concrete experiences, and especially to the experiences connected with Mr. Bilton.  They particularly wished to ask questions about Mr. Bilton, and find out what he had thought of things.  Mrs. Bilton was lavish in her details of what she had thought herself, but Mr. Bilton’s thoughts remained impenetrable.  It seemed to the twins that he must have thought a lot, and have come to the conclusion that there was much to be said for death.