"You learn wonderfully; it doesn't matter much anyway," said Happie with a new perception of essentials of which she would not have been capable a year before. "But it does matter that you have hard times! Cheer up, pretty Gretta! I'm certain they won't last much longer."
"They're half over already since you came," said Gretta with her adoring look.
"You love this place," Happie resumed, acknowledging this remark with a squeeze, "and you'd like to live here all your days—you'd be perfectly happy if you owned a house like the Ark, for instance. Yet here am I wondering if I can stand living in it, for unless mother gets decidedly better, Aunt Keren says we may stay on in the Ark all winter, and of course we should have to. Isn't life queer and mixy? By the way, what did your Cousin Eunice mean that day when she made me so hopping, by saying you ought to own that house?"
"Nothing; just nonsense; Eunice is always saying things," said Gretta hastily. Which was so true that Happie accepted the answer without further thought.
They drew up at the little store, which was at once a miniature department store and the post-office. A rail ran along the upper side of the store for the convenience of customers whose horses would not stand without tying; here the girls fastened the don, who stood out quite beautiful in contrast to a dingy white horse on his right, a horse all speckled with black, as if some one had been doing spatterwork on him with an unsteady hand and too coarse a comb. On the don's left, to enhance his line lines, drooped Joel Lange's café au lait mule, and Happie suddenly felt proud of her well-built steed.
Happie took her mail and followed Gretta to the other side of the store. There were two letters for her mother, one for Margery and three for herself, besides Miss Bradbury's daily budget of letters and papers, and Ralph's equally reliable letter which came every day from his mother and Snigs.
It proved how far Happie had traveled on the road to contentment and interest in her new home that she no longer tore open her New York missives with trembling fingers and brimming eyes as she had done during her first six weeks of exile from her friends.
Gretta was buying blue and white checked gingham for aprons, thread, outing flannel of a despondent shade of gray to match Eunice's sample, stove blacking and a bread pan, bartering for a small portion of the cost of these, twenty-seven eggs which her cousins had confided to her care for this end.
Happie bought only darning cotton, but she invested in fig paste and sour balls, the most attractive candy that she found in the boxes ranged side by side in the show-case. They had red-lettered labels on their ends of such misleading character that it was evident that they were boxes remaining from bygone days, whose original contents had long been purchased by youthful Crestvillians.
"I can't get the brown calico Reba wanted; it's all," said Gretta, and then blushed at her relapse into the vernacular and added hastily: "I'm ready if you are."