Germans -- Foreign countries -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Twins -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Anna-Felicitas, who considered that, if these things were short-cuts to
anywhere, seeing she knew them all by heart she must have long ago got
there, snoozed complacently. Sometimes for a few moments she would drop
off really to sleep, and then her mouth would fall open, which worried
Anna-Rose, who couldn't bear her to look even for a moment less
beautiful than she knew she was, so that she fidgeted more than ever,
unable, pinned down by politeness and the culture being administered, to
make her shut her mouth and look beautiful again by taking and shaking
her. Also Anna-Felicitas had a trick of waking up suddenly and
forgetting to be polite, as one does when first one wakes up and hasn't
had time to remember one is a lady. "To-morrow to fresh woods and
pastures noo," Mr. Twist would finish, for instance, with a sort of gulp
of satisfaction at having swallowed yet another solid slab of culture;
and Anna-Felicitas, returning suddenly to consciousness, would murmur,
with her eyes still shut and her head lolling limply, things like,
"After all, it _does_ rhyme with blue. I wonder why, then, one still
doesn't like it."
Then Mr. Twist would turn his spectacles towards her in mild inquiry,
and Anna-Rose, as always, would rush in and elaborately explain what
Anna-Felicitas meant, which was so remote from anything resembling what
she had said that Mr. Twist looked more mildly inquiring than ever.
Usually Anna-Felicitas didn't contradict Anna-Rose, being too sleepy or
too lazy, but sometimes she did, and then Anna-Rose got angry, and would
get what the Germans call a red head and look at Anna-Felicitas very
severely and say things, and Mr. Twist would close his book and watch
with that alert, cocked-up-ear look of a sympathetic and highly
interested terrier; but sooner or later the ship would always give a
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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