Aunt Keren-happuch struck them all as looking pale and tired. They had not seen her in two weeks and Mrs. Scollard was troubled by the weary look which, to her eyes, energetic Miss Keren wore. She indignantly denied feeling less well than usual, and told Gretta that if her looks were changed it must be by her descent from the mountains to the soiled damp air of the seaboard city.
Miss Keren found the Scollards, or at least the mother and her two eldest daughters, urging Gretta to let Mrs. Barker send her to school. Mrs. Scollard was disturbed by Gretta's firmness; it frightened her lest the girl should blight her entire life when she was too young to realize the full effect of her refusal. Most of all she was troubled because Happie believed that Gretta was refusing in order to help her friends through that busy winter.
"Oh, Miss Keren, help me convert Gretta!" cried Mrs. Scollard. "I have said everything that I can think of, but she won't listen to reason."
"That means she won't see things as you do; 'reason' is always my opinion, and 'unreason' the other person's, just as 'orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other man's doxy,'" commented Miss Keren. "What am I to convert Gretta to? Has she been turning heathen?"
"You know the Dutch are always obstinate," said Gretta quietly.
"Heathen? No," said Bob quickly. "They are worrying for fear Gretta is turning too Christian, and loving her neighbor better than herself; they want you to convert her to paganism."
"I'm fresh from church," remarked Miss Keren. "Suppose you tell me the case."
They told it to her in a trio of Mrs. Scollard, Margery and Happie, while Gretta sat by listening and smiling in a most detached, impersonal way.
The Scollards felt quite sure of an ally in Miss Keren, who was always anxious to help people on in the world and who would fully realize what six years in a good school would mean to Gretta. To their unbounded surprise, when they were through with their story Miss Keren said decidedly: "Gretta is perfectly right. She is getting all the training—mental training—here that she needs, and a great deal else that no school could give her. Then I think you need her this winter. Wait! I wouldn't advise letting that stand in the way of larger interests. If Gretta were losing by staying I couldn't say that it would be just, but she isn't. And she is very essential to you, dividing forces as you are between here and the tea room. And last, but not least, of reasons: I don't care for your Barker acquaintances, Charlotte, and I think an education received from Mrs. Barker would be a burden, a sort of mortgage on Gretta. You'd see that Mrs. Barker would forget about the gratitude which prompted her gift, and remember only Gretta's debt to her. It has been my experience that it required the nicest sort of people at whose hands to receive a favor that should not be most burdensome. The Barkers are shoddy. On all accounts I think Gretta is in the right to refuse. And I think the future may hold something quite as good for her, which need not be refused."
Gretta fairly beamed. "You dear Miss Bradbury," she said. "I felt so dreadfully sure you would be on the other side! I couldn't express my own meaning as you have done it for me, but you think just as I do. I'm ever so much obliged to you."