He had not been definitely aware that he was inventive till he came into daily contact with Uncle Charles’s teapot.  In his boyhood he had often fixed up little things for Edith,—­she was three years older than he, and was even then canning and preserving and ironing,—­little simplifications and alleviations of her labour; but they had been just toys, things that had amused him to put together and that he forgot as soon as they were done.  But the teapot revealed to him clearly what his forehead was there for.  He would not and could not continue, being the soul of considerateness, to spill tea on Uncle Charles’s table-cloth at every meal—­they had tea at breakfast, and at luncheon, and at supper—­and if he were thirsty he spilled it several times at every meal.  For a long time he coaxed the teapot.  He was thoughtful with it.  He handled it with the most delicate precision.  He gave it time.  He never hurried it.  He never filled it more than half full.  And yet at the end of every pouring, out came the same devastating dribble on to the cloth.

Then he went out and bought another teapot, one of a different pattern, with a curved spout instead of a straight one.

The same thing happened.

Then he went to Wanamaker’s, and spent an hour in the teapot section trying one pattern after the other, patiently pouring water, provided by a tipped but languid and supercilious assistant, out of each different make of teapot into cups.

They all dribbled.

Then Mr. Twist went home and sat down and thought.  He thought and thought, with his dome-like forehead resting on his long thin hand; and what came out of his forehead at last, sprang out of it as complete in every detail as Pallas Athene when she very similarly sprang, was that now well-known object on every breakfast table, Twist’s Non-Trickler Teapot.

In five years Mr. Twist made a fortune out of the teapot.  His mother passed from her straitened circumstances to what she still would only call a modest competence, but what in England would have been regarded as wallowing in money.  She left off being middle-class, and was received into the lower upper-class, the upper part of this upper-class being reserved for great names like Astor, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.  With these Mrs. Twist could not compete.  She would no doubt some day, for Edward was only thirty and there were still coffee-pots; but what he was able to add to the family income helped her for a time to bear the loss of the elder Twist with less of bleakness in her resignation.  It was as though an east wind veered round for a brief space a little to the south.

Being naturally, however, inclined to deprecation, when every other reason for it was finally removed by her assiduous son she once more sought out and firmly laid hold of the departed Twist, and hung her cherished unhappiness up on him again as if he were a peg.  When the novelty of having a great many bedrooms instead of six, and a great deal of food not to eat but to throw away, and ten times of everything else instead of only once, began to wear off, Mrs. Twist drooped again, and pulled the departed Twist out of the decent forgetfulness of the past, and he once more came to dinner in the form of his favourite dishes, and assisted in the family conversations by means of copious quotations from his alleged utterances.