“Oh Lord, it don’t matter,” said Mr. Twist, who for the first time in their friendship seemed ruffled.

“Indeed it does,” said Anna-Rose anxiously.

“You forget we’ve got to husband our resources,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“You mustn’t run away with the idea that because we’ve got L200 we’re the same as millionaires,” said Anna-Rose.

“Uncle Arthur,” said Anna-Felicitas, “frequently told us that L200 is a very vast sum; but he equally frequently told us that it isn’t.”

“It was when he was talking about having given to us that he said it was such a lot,” said Anna-Rose.

“He said that as long as we had it we would be rich,” said Anna-Felicitas, “but directly we hadn’t it we would be poor.”

“So we’d rather not go to the Ritz, please,” said Anna-Rose, “if you don’t mind.”

The taxi was stopped, and Mr. Twist got out and consulted the driver.  The thought of his Uncle Charles as a temporary refuge for the twins floated across his brain, but was rejected because Uncle Charles would speak to no woman under fifty except from his pulpit, and approached those he did speak to with caution till they were sixty.  He regarded them as one of the chief causes of modern unrest.  He liked them so much that he hated them.  He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.  Uncle Charles was no good as a refuge.

“Well now, see here,” said the driver at last, after Mr. Twist had rejected such varied suggestions of something small and quiet as the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Biltmore, “you tell me where you want to go to and I’ll take you there.”

“I want to go to the place your mother would stay in if she came up for a day or two from the country,” said Mr. Twist helplessly.

“Get right in then, and I’ll take you back to the Ritz,” said the driver.

But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity he was unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy pleasantries with him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in a street off the less desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of him.

It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are both noisy and expensive.  It was full of foreigners,—­real foreigners, the twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like themselves, but people with yellow faces and black eyes.  They looked very seedy and shabby, and smoked very much, and talked volubly in unknown tongues.  The entrance hall, a place of mottled marble, with clerks behind a counter all of whose faces looked as if they were masks, was thick with them; and it was when they turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas passed and Anna-Rose was thinking proudly, “Yes, you don’t see anything like that every day, do you,” and herself looked fondly at her Columbus, that she saw that it wasn’t Columbus’s beauty at all but the sulphur on the back of her skirt.

This spoilt Anna-Rose’s arrival in New York.  All the way up in the lift to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was trying to brush it off, for the dress was Anna-F.’s very best one.