“If you can imagine it,” added Anna-Rose politely, ready to explain and describe further if required.

But Mr. Twist could imagine it.  He readjusted his picture of Uncle Arthur, and this time got him right,—­the tall, not bad-looking man, clean-shaven and with more hair a great deal than he, Mr. Twist, had.  He had thought of him as an old ruffian; he now perceived that he could be hardly more than middle-aged and that Aunt Alice, a lady for whom he felt an almost painful sympathy, had a lot more of Uncle Arthur to get through before she was done.

“Yes,” said Anna-Rose, accepting the word middle-aged as correct.  “Neither of his ends looks much older than yours do.  He’s aged in the middle.  That’s the only place.  Where the bomb is.”

“I suppose that’s why it’s called middle-aged,” said Anna-Felicitas dreamily.  “One middle-ages first, and from there it just spreads.  It must be queer,” she added pensively, “to watch oneself gradually rotting.”

These were the sorts of observations, Mr. Twist felt, that might prejudice his mother against the twins If they could be induced not to say most of the things they did say when in her presence, he felt that his house, of all houses in America, should be offered them as a refuge whenever they were in need of one.  But his mother was not, he feared, very adaptable.  In her house—­it was legally his, but it never felt as if it were—­people adapted themselves to her.  He doubted whether the twins could or would.  Their leading characteristic, he had observed, was candour.  They had no savoir faire.  They seemed incapable of anything but naturalness, and their particular type of naturalness was not one, he was afraid, that his mother would understand.

She had not been out of her New England village, a place called briefly, with American economy of time, Clark, for many years, and her ideal of youthful femininity was still that which she had been herself.  She had, if unconsciously, tried to mould Mr. Twist also on these lines, in spite of his being a boy, and owing to his extreme considerateness had not yet discovered her want of success.  For years, indeed, she had been completely successful, and Mr. Twist arrived at and embarked on adolescence with the manners and ways of thinking of a perfect lady.

Till he was nineteen he was educated at home, as it were at his mother’s knee, at any rate within reach of that sacred limb, and she had taught him to reverence women; the reason given, or rather conveyed, being that he had had and still was having a mother.  Which he was never to forget.  In hours of temptation.  In hours of danger.  Mr. Twist, with his virginal white mind, used to wonder when the hours of temptation and of danger would begin, and rather wish, in the elegant leisure of his half-holidays, that they soon would so that he might show how determined he was to avoid them.