The children thus had no opportunity to say whether they would “hear to it” or not.  But Arthur privately suggested to Adelaide that she ought to try to persuade her mother.  “It will make her ill, all this extra work,” said he.

“Not so quickly as having some one about interfering with her,” replied Adelaide.

“Then, too, it looks so bad—­so stingy and—­and—­old-fashioned,” he persisted.

“Not from mother’s point of view,” said Adelaide quietly.

Arthur flushed.  “Always putting me in the wrong,” he sneered.  Then, instantly ashamed of this injustice, he went on in a different tone, “I suppose this sort of thing appeals to the romantic strain in you.”

“And in mother,” said Del.

Whereupon they both smiled.  Romantic was about the last word anyone would think of in connection with frankly practical Ellen Ranger.  She would have died without hesitation, or lived in torment, for those she loved; but she would have done it in the finest, most matter-of-fact way in the world, and without a gleam of self-conscious heroics, whether of boasting or of martyr-meekness or of any other device for signaling attention to oneself.  Indeed, it would not have occurred to her that she was doing anything out of the ordinary.  Nor, for that matter, would she have been; for, in this world the unheroic are, more often than not, heroes, and the heroic usually most unheroic.  We pass heroism by to toss our silly caps at heroics.

“There are some things, Artie, our education has been taking out of us,” continued Del, “that I don’t believe we’re the better for losing.  I’ve been thinking of those things a good deal lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is a rotten streak in what we’ve been getting there in the East—­you at Harvard, I at Mrs. Spenser’s Select School for Young Ladies.  There are ways in which mother and father are better educated than we.”

“It does irritate me,” admitted Arthur, “to find myself caring so much about the looks of things.”

“Especially,” said Adelaide, “when the people whose opinion we are afraid of are so contemptibly selfish and snobbish.”

“Still mother and father are narrow-minded,” insisted her brother.

“Isn’t everybody, about people who don’t think as they do?”

“I’ve not the remotest objection to their having their own views,” said Arthur loftily, “so long as they don’t try to enforce those views on me.”

“But do they?  Haven’t we been let do about as we please?”

Arthur shrugged his shoulders.  The discussion had led up to property again—­to whether or not his father had the right to do as he pleased with his own.  And upon that discussion he did not wish to reenter.  He had not a doubt of the justice of his own views; but, somehow, to state them made him seem sordid and mercenary, even to himself.  Being really concerned for his mother’s health, as well as about “looks,” he strongly urged the doctor to issue orders on the subject of a nurse.  “If you demand it, mother’ll yield,” he said.