It puzzled and—of course—worried the community in which they lived to know "how the Greys got on." Mrs. Grey could have enlightened it had she chosen, but she did not choose. She hardly realized, however, how much of the explanation lay in her own personality, her mere existence. For she—great-hearted, large-souled woman—had "faculty" enough for two; which was fortunate, as she had to contrive for five.
There was a little income—very slender—of her own, and for the rest she "managed." She had been a Winslow, of Mayflower descent, and Aunt Azraella Winslow, Mrs. Grey's brother's widow—herself a Brown—said, with mingled approval and commiseration, that "when one of us, of the old stock, sets a hand to the plough the corn grows."
Sylvester Grey was a dreamer, handsome, frail, sensitive, and clever. Sometimes his teeming brain brought practical results to his family, but these crystallizations of genius were rarer than was comfortable.
Mr. Grey was perfecting a machine for making bricquettes. There was not a very clear notion in his town—Fayre—what this meant, but it was understood vaguely to be a machine which transformed the coal-dust and waste of the mines into solid little bricks for fuel. Aunt Azraella said "it was exactly like Sylvester to moon over coal-dust while Mary needed kindling-wood."
Oswyth, the oldest girl, whom he had named out of his delight in old Saxon sounds, loved her father tenderly, without understanding him; Prue, petted, pretty little Prue, young for her years, loved him a trifle impatiently, but Roberta, daring, ambitious, active Roberta, loved the dreaming father passionately, and understood that he could not feel the present pinch when visions of a greater good lured him on, understood further that no personal pinch appealed to him very strongly when science led him into her fairyland, and he felt himself her servant. And Roberta alone, of all who loved him, understood the invention to which he was giving his days and many nights, and she believed enthusiastically that some time the bricquette machine would make the family fortune and her father's glory. Yet sometimes her high courage failed, and when the makeshifts and deprivations to which the Greys were condemned bore most heavily upon her she could not help acknowledging—though only to herself—that the happy time was sadly long in coming.
But it was not one of these disheartening days when she set out to cut the grass, and Rob's heart was as gay within her as a sixteen-year-old heart should be, as she looked out on the field which she meant to make a field of victory.
Her bright, dark eyes, which were always flashing with as many changing expressions as there were minutes in the day, danced with mischief; her rippling mouth and chin—Rob's face was all ripples—looked as though the July breeze were playing with them as it played with the lush grass. With both hands she pushed back her dark hair—full of gleams of red and gold in the sunshine—as she ran down the steps and around the corner to fetch the borrowed lawn-mower, for Rob's hair was forever breaking its orderly braided bounds and turning into rakish odds and ends of curls about her brow and ears. She came back triumphantly, pushing the lawn-mower around the corner, and it rattled on the old flagged walk as she tipped it up on its rear wheels and dodged the box bordering the paths.
"Who's first?" she cried. "Age and muscle, or beauty and babyhood?"
"B. and B.," said Prue, unblushingly owning up to both facts as one well acquainted with the value of her big dark eyes and contrasting veil of golden hair, and one made thoroughly to realize that she was the youngest. "Give it to me, Rob; I want the first cut."
"'Give me the dagger!' Here you are, then, Lady Macbeth. You'll find the first cut anything but tender—you speak as if it were turkey." And Rob gave the mower-handle into Prue's eager fingers.