“Then if you know why don’t you do it?”

“Do it?” she repeated, endeavouring to chill him into respectfulness by haughtily throwing back her head.  “Of course we shall do it.  At the proper time and place.”

“Which is, as you must have noticed,” added Anna-Felicitas gently, “departure and the front door.”

“That’s all right,” said the youth, “but that’s only one of the times and places.  That’s the last one.  Where we’ve got to now is the first one.”

“Do I understand,” said Anna-Rose, trying to be very dignified, while her heart shrank within her, for what sort of sum did one offer people like this?—­“that to America one tips at the beginning as well?”

“Yep,” said the youth.  “And in the middle too.  Right along through.  Never miss an opportunity, is as good a slogan as you’ll get when it comes to tipping.”

“I believe you’d have liked Kipps,” said Anna-Felicitas meditatively, shaking some dust off her hat and remembering the orgy of tipping that immortal young man went in for at the seaside hotel.

“What I like now,” said the youth, growing more easy before their manifest youth and ignorance, “is tips.  Guess you can call it Kipps if it pleases you.”

Anna-Rose began to fumble nervously in her purse “It’s horrid, I think, to ask for presents,” she said to the youth in deep humiliation, more on his account than hers.

“Presents?  I’m not asking for presents.  I’m telling you what’s done,” said the youth.  And he had spots on his face.  And he was repugnant to her.

Anna-Rose gave him what looked like a shilling.  He took it, and remarking that he had had a lot of trouble over it, went away; and Anna-Rose was still flushed by this encounter when Mr. Twist knocked and asked if they were ready to be taken down to tea.

“He might have said thank you,” she said indignantly to Anna-Felicitas, giving a final desperate brushing to the sulphur.

“I expect he’ll come to a bad end,” said Anna-Felicitas soothingly.

They had tea in the restaurant and were the only people doing such a thing, a solitary cluster in a wilderness of empty tables laid for dinner.  It wasn’t the custom much in America, explained Mr. Twist, to have tea, and no preparations were made for it in hotels of that sort.  The very waiters, feeling it was a meal to be discouraged, were showing their detachment from it by sitting in a corner of the room playing dominoes.  It was a big room, all looking-glasses and windows, and the street outside was badly paved and a great noise of passing motor-vans came in and drowned most of what Mr. Twist was saying.  It was an unlovely place, a place in which one might easily feel homesick and that the world was empty of affection, if one let oneself go that way.  The twins wouldn’t.  They stoutly refused, in their inward recesses, to be daunted by these externals.  For there was Mr. Twist, their friend and stand-by,