still with them, and hadn’t they got each other?  But they felt uneasy all the same; for Mr. Twist, though he plied them with buttered toast and macaroons and was as attentive as usual, had a somnambulatory quality in his attention.  He looked like a man who is doing things in a dream.  He looked like one who is absorbed in something else.  His forehead still was puckered, and what could it be puckered about, seeing that he had got home, and was going back to his mother, and had a clear and uncomplicated future ahead of him, and anyhow was a man?

“Have you got something on your mind?” asked Anna-Rose at last, when he hadn’t even heard a question she asked,—­he, the polite, the interested, the sympathetic friend of the journey across.

Mr. Twist, sitting tilted back in his chair, his hands deep in his pockets, looked up from the macaroons he had been staring at and said, “Yes.”

“Tell us what it is,” suggested Anna-Felicitas.

“You,” said Mr. Twist.

“Me?”

“Both of you.  You both of you go together.  You’re in one lump in my mind.  And on it too,” finished Mr. Twist ruefully.

“That’s only because,” explained Anna-Felicitas, “you’ve got the idea we want such a lot of taking care of.  Get rid of that, and you’ll feel quite comfortable again.  Why not regard us merely as pleasant friends?”

Mr. Twist looked at her in silence.

“Not as objects to be protected,” continued Anna Felicitas, “but as co-equals.  Of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.”

Mr. Twist continued to look at her in silence.

“We didn’t come to America to be on anybody’s mind,” said Anna-Rose, supporting Anna-Felicitas.

“We had a good deal of that in England,” said Anna-Felicitas.  “For instance, we’re quite familiar with Uncle Arthur’s mind, we were on it so heavily and so long.”

“It’s our fixed determination,” said Anna-Rose, “now that we’re starting a new life, to get off any mind we find ourselves on instantly.”

“We wish to carve out our own destinies,” said Anna-Felicitas.

“We more than wish to,” corrected Anna-Rose, “we intend to.  What were we made in God’s image for if it wasn’t to stand upright on our own feet?”

“Anna-Rose and I had given this a good deal of thought,” said Anna-Felicitas, “first and last, and we’re prepared to be friends with everybody, but only as co-equals and of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.”

“I don’t know exactly,” said Mr. Twist, “what that means, but it seems to give you a lot of satisfaction.”

“It does.  It’s out of the Athanasian Creed, and suggests such perfect equality.  If you’ll regard us as co-equals instead of as objects to be looked after, you’ll see how happy we shall all be.”

“Not,” said Anna-Rose, growing tender, for indeed in her heart she loved and clung to Mr. Twist, “that we haven’t very much liked all you’ve done for us and the way you were so kind to us on the boat,—­we’ve been most obliged to you, and we shall miss you very much indeed, I know.”