id the
driver.
But finally, when his contempt for Mr. Twist, of whose identity he was
unaware, had grown too great even for him to bandy pleasantries with
him, he did land his party at an obscure hotel in a street off the less
desirable end of Fifth Avenue, and got rid of him.
It was one of those quiet and cheap New York hotels that yet are both
noisy and expensive. It was full of foreigners,--real foreigners, the
twins perceived, not the merely technical sort like themselves, but
people with yellow faces and black eyes. They looked very seedy and
shabby, and smoked very much, and talked volubly in unknown tongues. The
entrance hall, a place of mottled marble, with clerks behind a counter
all of whose faces looked as if they were masks, was thick with them;
and it was when they turned to stare and whisper as Anna-Felicitas
passed and Anna-Rose was thinking proudly, "Yes, you don't see anything
like that every day, do you," and herself looked fondly at her Columbus,
that she saw that it wasn't Columbus's beauty at all but the sulphur on
the back of her skirt.
This spoilt Anna-Rose's arrival in New York. All the way up in the lift
to the remote floor on which their bedroom was she was trying to brush
it off, for the dress was Anna-F.'s very best one.
"That's all your grips, ain't it?" said the youth in buttons who had
come up with them, dumping their bags down on the bedroom floor.
"Our what?" said Anna-Rose, to whom the expression was new. "Do you mean
our bags?"
"No. Grips. These here," said the youth.
"Is that what they're called in America?" asked Anna-Felicitas, with the
intelligent interest of a traveller determined to understand and
appreciate everything, while Anna-Rose, still greatly upset by the
condition of the best skirt but unwilling to expatiate upon it before
the youth, continued to brush her down as best she could with her
handkerchief.
"I don't call them. It's what they are," said the youth. "What I want to
know is, are they all here?"
"How interesting that you don't drop your h's," said Anna-Felicitas,
gazing at him. "The rest of you is so _like_ no h's."
The youth said nothing to that, the line of thought being one he didn't
follow.
"Those _are_ all our--grips, I think," said Anna-Rose counting them
round the corner of Anna-Felicitas's skirt. "Thank you very much," she
added after a pause, as he still lingered.
But this didn't cause him to disappear as it would have in Englan
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