Mr. Twist sat endeavouring to shake it off.  He also tried to bolster himself up by thinking he might perhaps be able to assist his mother to come out from her narrowness, and discover too how warm and glorious the sun shone outside, where people loved and helped each other.  Then he rejected that as priggish.

“You see, mother,” he started again, “I came across them—­across these two girls—­they’re both called Anna, by the way, which seems confusing but isn’t really—­I came across them on the boat——­”

He again stopped dead.

Mrs. Twist had turned her dark eyes to him.  They had been fixed on Anna-Felicitas, and on what she was doing with the dish of oyster patties in front of her.  What she was doing was not what Mrs. Twist was accustomed to see done at her table.  Anna-Felicitas was behaving badly with the patties, and not even attempting to conceal, as the decent do, how terribly they interested her.

“You came across them on the boat,” repeated Mrs. Twist, her eyes on her son, moved in spite of her resolution to speech.  And he had told her that very afternoon that he had spoken to nobody except men.  Another lie.  Well, let that pass too ...

Mr. Twist sat staring back at her through his big gleaming spectacles.  He well knew the weakness of his position from his mother’s point of view; but why should she have such a point of view, such a niggling, narrow one, determined to stay angry and offended because he had been stupid enough to continue, under the influence of her presence, the old system of not being candid with her, of being slavishly anxious to avoid offending?  Let her try for once to understand and forgive.  Let her for once take the chance offered her of doing a big, kind thing.  But as he stared at her it entered his mind that he couldn’t very well start moving her heart on behalf of the twins in their presence.  He couldn’t tell her they were orphans, alone in the world, helpless, poor, and so unfortunately German, with them sitting there.  If he did, there would be trouble.  The twins seemed absorbed for the moment in getting fed, but he had no doubt their ears were attentive, and at the first suggestion of sympathy being invoked for them they would begin to say a few of those things he was so much afraid his mother mightn’t be able to understand.  Or, if she understood, appreciate.

He decided that he would be quiet until Edith came back, and then ask his mother to go to the drawing-room with him, and while Edith was looking after the Annas he would, well out of earshot, explain them to his mother, describe their situation, commend them to her patience and her love.  He sat silent therefore, wishing extraordinarily hard that Edith would be quick.

But Anna-Felicitas’s eyes were upon him now, as well as his mother’s.  “Is it possible,” she asked with her own peculiar gentleness, balancing a piece of patty on her fork, “that you haven’t yet mentioned us to your mother?”