"That Robert Gaston will be turning up in New York this winter, mark my words!" she darkly prophesied. "I don't believe in friends!"
Gretta laughed. "How about Ralph and Snigs?" she suggested.
"Boys, just boys!" said Happie. "But I don't believe in elegant young men friends who read aloud to you, the way Margery says this Baltimore creature did at Bar Harbor last summer, and are six years older than you! Of course you know as well as I do how such things always turn out, and Margery is so perfectly lovely that a blind-deaf-feeble-minded man would fall in love with her! It's no joke to see your dearest sister in danger, Gretta."
Happie's voice was so tremulous at the end of this speech that it took away from Gretta the desire to laugh, with which she had struggled as she listened. "We'll just have to hope he isn't blind, deaf and feeble-minded, then maybe he won't fall in love with her, and maybe if he is all these things she won't care about him," Gretta said comfortingly, with considerable show of probability. "And if worst comes to worst, why we'll know it won't be as bad a worst as it looks coming. Don't worry, Happie, it's not your way."
"No," Happie agreed dismally. "But I'm certain he is horrid, wears serious, too-well-fitting clothes, quotes poetry, talks elegantly, and only smiles as if he were trying to be kind. Ug-gh, but I do de-spise that sort of man!"
"I never saw one," said Gretta.
Happie stared at her thoughtfully for an instant, then she burst out laughing, her face all wrinkling into fun-lines, and dimpling with one of those sudden changes of mood that made Happie so lovable.
"Why, neither did I, Gretta, now you speak of it!" she cried. "I think I got him out of stories. I guess I'm a goose."
Margery reappeared, unchanged by this letter at least, so Happie put menacing Robert Gaston out of her mind, and the Scollards talked tea room until their mother and Bob came home, when they talked it more than ever, and after dinner Ralph and Snigs came in, which multiplied the tea-room talk by two.