"First visit to the States?" he inquired, when with some reluctance, for presently it appeared to the twins that the clam broth and the toffee didn't seem to be liking each other now they had got together inside them, and also for fear of hurting his feelings if they refused, they took some more.
They nodded and smiled stickily.
"English, I guess."
They hesitated, covering their hesitation with the earnest working of their toffee-filled jaws.
Then Anna-Felicitas, her cheek distorted, gave him the answer she had given the captain of the St. Luke, and said, "Practically."
"Ah," said the young man, turning this over in his mind, the r in "practically" having rolled as no English or American r ever did; but the conductor appearing in the doorway he continued on his way.
"It's evident," said Anna-Rose, speaking with difficulty, for her jaws clave together because of the toffee, "that we're going to be asked that the first thing every time a fresh person speaks to us. We'd better decide what we're going to say, and practise saying it without hesitation."
Anna-Felicitas made a sound of assent.
"That answer of yours about practically," continued Anna-Rose, swallowing her bit of toffee by accident and for one moment afraid it would stick somewhere and make her die, "causes first surprise, then reflection, and then suspicion."
"But," said Anna-Felicitas after a pause during which she had disentangled her jaws, "it's going to be difficult to say one is German when America seems to be so very neutral and doesn't like Germans. Besides, it's only in the eye of the law that we are. In God's eye we're not, and that's the principal eye after all."