Free Christopher and Columbus by Elizabeth von Arnim Page B

roll, and Anna-Felicitas would shut her
eyes and fade to paleness and become the helpless bundle of
sickness that nobody could possibly go on being severe with.
    The passengers in the second class were more generally friendly
than those in the first class. The first class sorted itself out
into little groups, and whispered about each other, as Anna-Rose
observed, watching their movements across the rope that separated
her from them. The second class remained to the end one big group,
frayed out just a little at the edge in one or two places.
    The chief fraying out was where the Twinkler kids, as the
second-class young men, who knew no better, dared to call them,
interrupted the circle by talking apart with Mr. Twist. Mr. Twist
had no business there. He was a plutocrat of the first class; but
in spite of the regulations which cut off the classes from
communicating, with a view apparently to the continued sanitariness
of the first class, the implication being that the second class was
easily infectious and probably overrun, there he was every day and
several times in every day. He must have heavily squared the
officials, the second-class young men thought until the day when
Mr. Twist let it somehow be understood that he had known the
Twinkler young ladies for years, dandled them in their not very
remote infancy on his already full-grown knee, and had been
specially appointed to look after them on this journey.
    Mr. Twist did not specify who had appointed him, except to the
Twinkler young ladies themselves, and to them he announced that it
was no less a thing, being, or creature, than Providence. The
second-class young men, therefore, in spite of their rising spirits
as danger lay further behind, and their increasing tendency,
peculiar to those who go on ships, to become affectionate, found
themselves no further on in acquaintance with the Misses Twinkler
the last day of the voyage than they had been the first. Not that,
under any other conditions, they would have so much as noticed the
existence of the Twinkler kids. In their blue caps, pulled down
tight to their eyebrows and hiding every trace of hair, they looked
like bald babies. They never came to meals; their assiduous
guardian, or whatever he was, feeding them on deck with the care of
a mother-bird for its fledglings, so that nobody except the two
German ladies in their cabin had seen them without the caps. The
young men put them down as half-grown only, somewhere about
fourteen they thought, and nothing but what, if they were boys
instead of girls, would have been called louts.
    Still, a ship is a ship, and it is wonderful what can be managed
in the way of dalliance if one is shut up on one long enough; and
the Misses Twinkler, in spite of their loutishness, their apparent
baldness, and their constant round-eyed solemnity, would no doubt
have been the objects of advances before New York was reached if it
hadn't been for Mr. Twist. There wasn't a girl under forty
in the second class on that voyage, the young men resentfully
pointed out to each other, except these two kids who were too much
under it, and a young lady of thirty who sat manicuring her nails
most of the day with her back supported by a life-boat, and
polishing them with red stuff till they flashed rosily in the sun.
This young lady was avoided for the first two days, while the young
men still remembered their mothers, because of what she looked
like; but was greatly loved for the rest of the voyage precisely
for that reason.
    Still, every one couldn't get near her. She was only one;
and there were at least a dozen active, cooped-up young men taking
lithe, imprisoned exercise in long, swift steps up and down the
deck, ready for any sort of enterprise, bursting with energy and
sea-air and spirits. So that at last the left-overs, those of the
young men the lady of the rosy nails was less kind to, actually in
their despair attempted ghastly flirtations with the two German
ladies. They approached them with a kind