Germans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Twins -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Yes. Looking as if in another moment he'd be sorry for us," said
Anna-Rose.
"Sorry for us!" repeated Anna-Felicitas, roused to indignation.
"Yes. Did you ever?"
Anna-Felicitas said, with a great deal of energy while she put her
handkerchief finally and sternly away, that she didn't ever; and after a
pause Anna-Rose, remembering one of her many new responsibilities and
anxieties--she had so many that sometimes for a time she didn't remember
some of them--turned her head to Anna-Felicitas, and fixing a worried
eye on her said, "You won't go forgetting your Bible, will you, Anna
F.?"
"My Bible?" repeated Anna-Felicitas, looking blank.
"Your German Bible. The bit about _wenn die bösen Buben locken, so folge
sie nicht_."
Anna-Felicitas continued to look blank, but Anna-Rose with a troubled
brow said again, "You won't go and forget that, will you, Anna F.?"
For Anna-Felicitas was very pretty. In most people's eyes she was very
pretty, but in Anna-Rose's she was the most exquisite creature God had
yet succeeded in turning out. Anna-Rose concealed this conviction from
her. She wouldn't have told her for worlds. She considered it wouldn't
have been at all good for her; and she had, up to this, and ever since
they could both remember, jeered in a thoroughly sisterly fashion at her
defects, concentrating particularly on her nose, on her leanness, and
on the way, unless constantly reminded not to, she drooped.
But Anna-Rose secretly considered that the same nose that on her own
face made no sort of a show at all, directly it got on to
Anna-Felicitas's somehow was the dearest nose; and that her leanness was
lovely,--the same sort of slender grace her mother had had in the days
before the heart-breaking emaciation that was its last phase; and that
her head was set so charmingly on her neck that when she drooped and
forgot her father's constant injunction to sit up,--"For," had said her
father at monotonously regular intervals, "a maiden should be as
straight as a fir-tree,"--she only seemed to fall into even more
attractive lines than when she didn't. And now that Anna-Rose alone had
the charge of looking after this abstracted and so charming younger
sister, she felt it her duty somehow to convey to her while tactfully
avoiding putting ideas into the poor child's head which might make her
conceited, that it behoved her to conduct herself with discretion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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