"Of course you won't be comfortable, luxurious, as you are here," he warned them, with a nod toward the great paneled hall. Mrs. Baldwin passed the drawing-room door below with the stately tread of a reviewing officer.
"Oh, we don't care!" they exclaimed eagerly.
The next day their mother treated the twins as if they were not. She spoke no word to them and did not seem to hear their husky little efforts at reconciliation. They found it hard to remember persistently that they were revolutionists rather than children in disgrace. She was unapproachable in her own room when Mr. White and Mr. Morton came for them.
"Well, we can't help it," they said sadly as they locked their two trunks and went down the stairs.
Three hours later the twins had entered a new world and were rapturously making an omelet in a kitchen that had begun life as a closet, while Mr. Morton put up shelves and hooks and Mr. White tacked green burlap over gloomy wall-paper. Groceries and kitchen utensils and amusing make-shift furniture kept arriving in exciting profusion. They had not dreamed that there was such happiness in the world.
"If only mother will forgive us, it will be simply perfect!" they told each other when they settled down for the night in their hard little cots. They said that many times in the days that followed. The utter joy of work and freedom and simplicity had no other blemish.
For five weeks Mrs. Baldwin remained obdurate. Then, one Sunday afternoon, she appeared, cold, critical, resentful still; lifted her eyebrows at the devices of their light housekeeping; looked disgusted when they pointed out from the window the little cafe where they sometimes dined; and offered to consent to their social retirement if they would give up the teaching and come home. The twins were troubled and apologetic, but inflexible. They had found the life they were meant for; they could not give it up. If she knew how happy they were!
"How, with your bringing up, you can enjoy this!" she marveled. "It isn't respectable—eating in nasty little holes alone at night!"
"But it is a nice, clean place, and Mr. White and Mr. Morton are nearly always with us," Dora began, then broke off at an expression of pleased enlightenment that flashed across her mother's face. "They are just very good friends," she explained gravely; "they don't take us as girls at all—that is why we have such nice times with them. We are simply comrades, and interested in the same books and problems."
"And they bother about us chiefly because we are a sort of sociological demonstration to them," Cora added. "They like experiments of every kind."