When Mr. Twist, as he did whenever he could, came and looked on for a moment in his shirt sleeves, with his hat on the back of his head and his big, benevolent spectacles so kind, Anna-Rose’s cup seemed full.  Her dimple never disappeared for a moment.  It was there all day long now; and even when she was asleep it still lurked in the corner of her mouth. Arbeit und Liebe.

Immense was the reaction of self-respect that took hold of the twins.  They couldn’t believe they were the people who had been so crude and ill-conditioned as to hide Mrs. Bilton’s belongings, and actually finally to hide themselves.  How absurd.  How like children.  How unpardonably undignified.  Anna-Rose held forth volubly to this effect while she arranged the china, and Anna-Felicitas listened assentingly, with a kind of grave, ashamed sheepishness.

The result of this reaction was that Mrs. Bilton, whose pressure on them was relieved by the necessity of her too being in several places at once, and who was displaying her customary grit, now became the definite object of their courtesy.  They were the mistresses of a house, they began to realize, and as such owed her every consideration.  This bland attitude was greatly helped by their not having to sleep with her any more, and they found that the mere coming fresh to her each morning made them feel polite and well-disposed.  Besides, they were thoroughly and finally grown-up now, Anna-Rose declared—­never, never to lapse again.  They had had their lesson, she said, gone through a crisis, and done that which Aunt Alice used to say people did after severe trials, aged considerably.

Anna-Felicitas wasn’t quite so sure.  Her own recent behaviour had shaken and shocked her too much.  Who would have thought she would have gone like that?  Gone all to pieces, back to sheer naughtiness, on the first provocation?  It was quite easy, she reflected while she worked, and cups kept on detaching themselves mysteriously from her fingers, and tables tumbling over at her approach, to be polite and considerate to somebody you saw very little of, and even, as she found herself doing, to get fond of the person; but suppose circumstances threw one again into the person’s continual society, made one again have to sleep in the same room?  Anna-Felicitas doubted whether it would be possible for her to stand such a test, in spite of her earnest desire to behave; she doubted, indeed, whether anybody ever did stand that test successfully.  Look at husbands.

Meanwhile there seemed no likelihood of its being applied again.  Each of them had now a separate bedroom, and Mrs. Bilton had, in the lavish American fashion, her own bathroom, so that even at that point there was no collision.  The twins’ rooms were connected by a bathroom all to themselves, with no other door into it except the doors from their bedrooms, and Mr. Twist, who dwelt discreetly at the other end of the house, also had a bathroom of his