Germans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Twins -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
And while the countryside--an idle countryside, engaged almost wholly in
holiday-making and glad of any new distraction--began to be interested
and asked questions, Mr. Twist was working day and night at getting the
thing ready.
All day long he was in Acapulco or out at the cottage, urging, hurrying,
criticizing, encouraging, praising and admonishing. His heart and soul
and brain was in this, his business instincts and his soft domestic
side. His brain, after working at top speed during the day with the
architect, the painter and decorator, the furnisher, the garden expert,
the plumbing expert, the electric-light expert, the lawyer, the estate
agent, and numberless other persons, during the night meditated and
evolved advertisements. There was to be a continual stream week by week
after the inn was opened of ingenious advertisements. Altogether Mr.
Twist had his hands full.
The inn was to look artless and simple and small, while actually being
the last word in roomy and sophisticated comfort. It was to be as like
an old English inn to look at as it could possibly be got to be going on
his own and the twins' recollections and the sensationally coloured
Elizabethan pictures in the architect's portfolio. It didn't disturb Mr.
Twist's unprejudiced American mind that an English inn embowered in
heliotrope and arum lilies and eucalyptus trees would be odd and
unnatural, and it wouldn't disturb anybody else there either. Were not
Swiss mountain chalets to be found in the fertile plains along the
Pacific, complete with fir trees specially imported and uprooted in
their maturity and brought down with tons of their own earth attached to
their roots and replanted among carefully disposed, apparently Swiss
rocks, so that what one day had been a place smiling with orange-groves
was the next a bit of frowning northern landscape? And were there not
Italian villas dotted about also? But these looked happier and more at
home than the chalets. And there were buildings too, like small Gothic
cathedrals, looking as uncomfortable and depressed as a woman who has
come to a party in the wrong clothes. But no matter. Nobody minded. So
that an English inn added to this company, with a little German
beer-garden--only there wasn't to be any beer--wouldn't cause the least
surprise or discomfort to anybody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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