“Would you mind telling me what I am to bring you?” she asked.  “Because I’m afraid—­”

Mr. Wangelbecker turned his head in the direction she was looking.

“Ah—­” he said getting up, “but this is magnificent Guestchen, here are Mrs. Kleinbart and her sister—­why, and there come the Diederichs—­but splendid, splendid—­”

“Say,” said Mr. Ridding, turning to Mr. Twist with a congested face, “ever been to Berlin?”

“No,” said Mr. Twist, annoyed by a question of such wanton irrelevance flung into the middle of his sentence.

“Well, it’s just like this.”

“Like this?” repeated Mr. Twist.

“Those there,” said Mr. Ridding, jerking his head.  “That lot there—­see ’em any day in Berlin, or Frankfurt, or any other of their confounded towns.”

“I don’t follow,” said Mr. Twist, very shortly indeed.

“Germans,” said Mr. Ridding.

“Germans?”

“All Germans,” said Ridding.

“All Germans?”

“Wangelbeckers are Germans,” said Mr. Ridding.  “Didn’t you know?”

“No,” said Mr. Twist.

“So are the ones who’ve just come in.”

“Germans?”

“All Germans.  So are those behind, just coming in.”

“Germans?”

“All Germans.”

There was a pause, during which Mr. Twist stared round the room.  It was presenting quite a populous appearance.  Then he said slowly, “Well I’m damned.”

And Mr. Ridding for the first time looked pleased with Mr. Twist.  He considered that at last he was talking sense.

“Mr. Twist,” he said heartily, “I’m exceedingly glad you’re damned.  It was what I was sure at the bottom of my heart you would be.  Shake hands, sir.”

CHAPTER XXXII

That evening depression reigned in The Open Arms.

Mr. Twist paced up and down the tea-room deep in thought that was obviously unpleasant and perplexed; Mrs. Bilton went to bed abruptly, after a short outpour of words to the effect that she had never seen so many Germans at once before, that her psyche was disharmonious to Germans, that they made her go goose-fleshy just as cats in a room made Mr. Bilton go goose-fleshy in the days when he had flesh to go it with, that she hadn’t been aware the inn was to be a popular resort and rendezvous for Germans, and that she wished to speak alone with Mr. Twist in the morning; while the twins, feeling the ominousness of this last sentence,—­as did Mr. Twist, who started when he heard it,—­and overcome by the lassitude that had succeeded the shocks of the afternoon, a lassitude much increased by their having tried to finish up the pailsful of left-over ices and the huge piles of cakes slowly soddening in their own souring cream, went out together on to the moonlit verandah and stood looking up in silence at the stars.  There they stood in silence, and thought things about the immense distance and indifference of those bright, cold specks, and how infinitely insignificant after all they, the Twinklers were, and how they would both in any case be dead in a hundred years.  And this last reflection afforded them somehow a kind of bleak and draughty comfort.