"Well, my days, children, I didn't know you'd have room enough in New York to grow like you have! I guess country air shown you how! You run in and see once what Rosie's fixed for dinner! Margery, you dear girl, leave me hug you!" Rosie's welcome forestalled Miss Keren's in these cases, but Miss Keren was welcoming Robert, whom she presented to Rosie, and to whom Rosie extended a hard and bony hand, with a keen glance that appraised the young man accurately.
"Glad you come," she said. "It hain't so cold where you live, but you wouldn't feel it if you stayed up to git use to it. My days, there's the team, and Bob, and Ralph—and Happie yet!"
Rosie's tone expressed her sense of Happie as a climax. The second Scollard girl had always been to her the perfection of girlhood.
In a moment they were all hugging and shaking hands with Rosie, while Robert Gaston looked on with amused and admiring eyes, fully appreciating the relations between this free-born American citizen and the family she looked after.
Miss Keren submitted to the arm Happie wound around her, as they all bundled into the small entry and into the library. On the hearth Rosie had built a generous fire of logs, odorous cherry logs, which filled the room with faint fragrance and emphatic warmth. Aunt Keren looked better, Happie thought. And how pretty this room was which they had found so forlorn on its first sight! The low ceiling, the wide planks in the flooring, the comfortable chairs, the table, book-strewn, the shelves lined with books of all sizes and colors, the soft short curtains, the good pictures, the firelight throwing shadows and high lights though it was noon, for the day was gray—how pretty and individual it all was.
"Now get your things off while I dish up, and then you kin all set up and eat a while," said Rosie, in the familiar phrase which had amused the family so much on their first acquaintance with it.
"Let us help you, Gretta and I!" cried Happie throwing off her hat and coat. "We always did."
Dinner was served quickly, generously, and though Rosie, who waited on the table, joined in the conversation and asked eager questions, it was obviously not from disrespect, but rather from a mutual respect that did away with inequalities. Margery—and for that matter the two Keren-happuchs—watched Robert to see how he took this Arcadian simplicity. They felt, justly enough, that it tested his intelligence and the genuineness of his breeding.
His eyes were full of humorous kindness, he was eating with boyish relish the country viands, and he smiled at Rosie's queer ways with a smile as friendly as it was amused.