or the Twists only
had what would in English money be five thousand pounds a year, and
belonged therefore, taking dollars as the measure of standing instead of
birth, to the middle classes. Aunt Alice would have described such an
income as ample means; Mrs. Twist called it straitened circumstances,
and lived accordingly in a condition of perpetual self-sacrifice and
doings without. She had a car, but it was only a car, not a
Pierce-Arrow; and there was a bathroom to every bedroom, but there were
only six bedrooms; and the house stood on a hill and looked over the
most beautiful woods, but they were somebody else's woods. She felt, as
she beheld the lives of those of her neighbours she let her eyes rest
on, who were the millionaires dotted round about the charming environs
of Clark, that she was indeed a typical widow,--remote, unfriended,
melancholy, poor.

Mrs. Twist might feel poor, but she was certainly comfortable. It was
her daughter Edith's aim in life to secure for her the comfort and
leisure necessary for any grief that wishes to be thorough. The house
was run beautifully by Edith. There were three servants, of whom Edith
was one. She was the lady's maid, the head cook, and the family butler.
And Mr. Twist, till he went to Harvard, might be described as the
page-boy, and afterwards in his vacations as the odd man about the
house. Everything centred round their mother. She made a good deal of
work, because of being so anxious not to give trouble. She wouldn't get
out of the way of evil, but bleakly accepted it. She wouldn't get out of
a draught, but sat in it till one or other of her children remembered
they hadn't shut the door. When the inevitable cold was upon her and she
was lamentably coughing, she would mention the door for the first time,
and quietly say she hadn't liked to trouble them to shut it, they had
seemed so busy with their own affairs.

But after he had been in the engineering firm a little while, a further
change came over Mr. Twist. He was there to make money, more money, for
his mother. The first duty of an American male had descended on him. He
wished earnestly to fulfil it creditably, in spite of his own tastes
being so simple that his income of L5000--it was his, not his mother's,
but it didn't feel as if it were--would have been more than sufficient
for him. Out of engineering, then, was he to wrest all the things that
might comfort his mother. He embarked on his career with as determined