Mrs. Twist might feel poor, but she was certainly comfortable.  It was her daughter Edith’s aim in life to secure for her the comfort and leisure necessary for any grief that wishes to be thorough.  The house was run beautifully by Edith.  There were three servants, of whom Edith was one.  She was the lady’s maid, the head cook, and the family butler.  And Mr. Twist, till he went to Harvard, might be described as the page-boy, and afterwards in his vacations as the odd man about the house.  Everything centred round their mother.  She made a good deal of work, because of being so anxious not to give trouble.  She wouldn’t get out of the way of evil, but bleakly accepted it.  She wouldn’t get out of a draught, but sat in it till one or other of her children remembered they hadn’t shut the door.  When the inevitable cold was upon her and she was lamentably coughing, she would mention the door for the first time, and quietly say she hadn’t liked to trouble them to shut it, they had seemed so busy with their own affairs.

But after he had been in the engineering firm a little while, a further change came over Mr. Twist.  He was there to make money, more money, for his mother.  The first duty of an American male had descended on him.  He wished earnestly to fulfil it creditably, in spite of his own tastes being so simple that his income of L5000—­it was his, not his mother’s, but it didn’t feel as if it were—­would have been more than sufficient for him.  Out of engineering, then, was he to wrest all the things that might comfort his mother.  He embarked on his career with as determined an expression on his mouth as so soft and friendly a mouth could be made to take, and he hadn’t been in it long before he passed out altogether beyond the line of thinking his mother had laid down for him, and definitely grew up.

The office was in New York, far enough away from Clark for him to be at home only for the Sundays.  His mother put him to board with her brother Charles, a clergyman, the rector of the Church of Angelic Refreshment at the back of Tenth Street, and the teapot out of which Uncle Charles poured his tea at his hurried and uncomfortable meals—­for he practised the austerities and had no wife—­dribbled at its spout.  Hold it as carefully as one might it dribbled at its spout, and added to the confused appearance of the table by staining the cloth afresh every time it was used.

Mr. Twist, who below the nose was nothing but kindliness and generosity, his slightly weak chin, his lavishly-lipped mouth, being all amiability and affection, above the nose was quite different.  In the middle came his nose, a nose that led him to improve himself, to read and meditate the poets, to be tenacious in following after the noble; and above were eyes in which simplicity sat side by side with appreciation; and above these was the forehead like a dome; and behind this forehead were inventions.