ged to produce pretty serious
havoc in America considering they had only been in it five days. He and
his mother permanently estranged; Edith left alone at Clark sitting
there in the ruins of her loving preparations for his return, with
nothing at all that he could see to look forward to and live for except
the hourly fulfilment of what she regarded as duty; every plan upset;
the lives, indeed, of his mother and of his sister and of himself
completely altered,--it was a pretty big bag in the time, he thought,
flinging the match back towards Chicago.

Mr. Twist felt sore. He felt like somebody who had had a bad tumble, and
is sore and a little dizzy; but he recognized that these great ruptures
cannot take place without aches and doubts. He ached, and he doubted and
he also knew through his aches and doubts that he was free at last from
what of late years he had so grievously writhed under--the shame of
pretence. And the immediate cause of his being set free was, precisely,
the Annas.

It had been a violent, a painful setting free, but it had happened; and
who knew if, without their sudden appearance at Clark and the immediate
effect they produced on his mother, he wouldn't have lapsed after all,
in spite of the feelings and determinations he had brought back with
him from Europe, into the old ways again under the old influence, and
gone on ignobly pretending to agree, to approve, to enjoy, to love, when
he was never for an instant doing anything of the sort? He might have
trailed on like that for years--Mr. Twist didn't like the picture of his
own weakness, but he was determined to look at himself as he
was--trailed along languidly when he was at home, living another life
when he was away, getting what he absolutely must have, the irreducible
minimum of personal freedom necessary to sanity, by means of small and
shabby deceits. My goodness, how he hated deceits, how tired he was of
the littleness of them!

He turned his head and looked at the profiles of the Annas sitting
alongside him. His heart suddenly grew warm within him. They had on the
blue caps again which made them look so bald and cherubic, and their
eyes were fixed on the straight narrowing lines of rails that went back
and back to a point in the distance. The dear little things; the dear,
dear little things,--so straightforward, so blessedly straight and
simple, thought Mr. Twist. Fancy his mother losing a chance like this.
Fancy _anybody_, thought the aff