"I'm afraid I'm going to have trouble with her," said Anna-Rose, not heeding his consolations. "It isn't a sinecure, I assure you, being left sole guardian and protector of somebody as pretty as all that. And the worst of it is she's going on getting prettier. She hasn't nearly come to the end of what she can do in that direction. I see it growing on her. Every Sunday she's inches prettier than she was the Sunday before. And wherever I take her to live, and however out of the way it is, I'm sure the path to our front door is going to be black with suitors."
This dreadful picture so much perturbed her, and she looked up at Mr. Twist with such worried eyes, that he couldn't refrain from patting her on her shoulder.
"There, there," said Mr. Twist, and he begged her to be sure to let him know directly she was in the least difficulty, or even perplexity,—"about the suitors, for instance, or anything else. You must let me be of some use in the world, you know," he said.
"But we shouldn't like it at all if we thought you were practising being useful on us," said Anna-Rose "It's wholly foreign to our natures to enjoy being the objects of anybody's philanthropy."
"Now I just wonder where you get all your long words from," said Mr. Twist soothingly; and Anna-Rose laughed, and there was only one dimple in the Twinkler family and Anna-Rose had got it.
"What do you want to get looking at that for?" she asked Anna-Felicitas, when she had edged through the crowd staring at the Vaterland, and got to where Anna-Felicitas stood listening abstractedly to the fireworks of American slang the young man was treating her to,—that terse, surprising, swift hitting-of-the-nail-on-the-head form of speech which she was hearing in such abundance for the first time.
The American passengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the impotence of the great ship. Every one of them seemed to be violently pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the Vaterland as every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and presently arrived again,—the same ships she had seen depart coming back unharmed, unhindered by her country's submarines. Only the two German ladies, once more ignoring their American allegiance, looked angry. It was incredible to them, simply unfassbar as they said in their thoughts, that any nation should dare inconvenience Germans, should dare lay a finger, even the merest friendliest detaining one, on anything belonging to the mighty, the inviolable Empire. Well, these Americans, these dollar-grubbing Yankees, would soon get taught a sharp, deserved lesson—but at this point they suddenly remembered they were Americans themselves, and pulled up their thoughts violently, as it were, on their haunches.
They turned, however, bitterly to the Twinkler girl as she pushed her way through to her sister,—those renegade Junkers, those contemptible little apostates—and asked her, after hearing her question to Anna-Felicitas, with an extraordinary breaking out of pent-up emotion where she, then, supposed she would have been at that moment if it hadn't been for Germany.
"Not here I think," said Anna-Rose, instantly and fatally ready as she always was to answer back and attempt what she called reasoned conversation. "There wouldn't have been a war, so of course I wouldn't have been here."
"Why, you wouldn't so much as have been born without Germany," said the lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English lie as to who began the war. "You owe your very existence to Germany. You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of life, instead of jeering at this representative—" she flung a finger out toward the Vaterland—"this patient and dignified-in -temporary-misfortune representative, of her power."