Mistress Mary sighed in her heart. She learned more of Mrs. Grubb with every interview, and she knew that her enthusiasms were as discouraging as her apathies. ‘How unlucky that I mentioned Napoleon, Cæsar, and Mohammed!’ she thought. ‘I shall be haunted now by the fear that she will go on a lecturing-tour through the country, and exhibit poor Lisa as an interesting example. Mrs. Grubb’s mind is like nothing so much as a crazy-quilt.’ VIII THE YOUNG MINISTER’S PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS MRS. GRUBB’S interest in the education of the defective classes was as short-lived as it was ardent. One interview with the president of the society convinced her that he was not a person to be ‘helped’ according to her understanding of the term. She thought him a self-sufficient gentleman, inflexible in demeanour, and inhospitable to anybody’s ideas or anybody’s hobbies but his own. She resented his praise of Mistress Mary and Rhoda, and regarded it fulsome flattery when he alluded to their experiment with Marm Lisa as one of the most interesting and valuable in his whole experience; saying that he hardly knew which to admire and venerate the more—the genius of the teachers, or the devotion, courage, and docility of the pupil. In the summer months Lisa had gone to the country with Mistress Mary and Edith, who were determined never to lose sight of her until the end they sought was actually attained. There, in the verdant freshness of that new world, Lisa experienced a strange exaltation of the senses. Every wooded path unfolded treasures of leafy bud, blossom, and brier, and of beautiful winged things that crept and rustled among the grasses. There was the ever new surprise of the first wild-flowers, the abounding mystery of the bird’s note and the brook’s song, the daily greeting of bees and butterflies, frogs and fishes, field-mice and squirrels; so that the universe, which in the dead past had been dreary and without meaning, suddenly became warm and friendly, and she, the alien, felt a sense of kinship with all created things. Helen had crossed the continent to imbibe the wisdom of the East, and had brought back stores of knowledge to spend in Lisa’s service; but Rhoda’s sacrifice was perhaps the most complete, for Mrs. Grubb having at first absolutely refused to part with Lisa, Rhoda had flung herself into the breach and taken the twins to her mother’s cottage in the mountains. She came up the broad steps, on a certain appointed day in August, leading her charges into Mistress Mary’s presence. They were clean, well dressed, and somewhat calm in demeanour. ‘You may go into the playground,’ she said, after the greetings were over; ‘and remember that there are sharp spikes on the high fence by the pepper-tree.’