u said I was," he reminded her. "You said I was so old I went and got
_cafard_."

"Besides," said Amelia, clutching at her vanishing argument, "age has
nothing to do with it. The older you are the more ridiculous they get
over you, these romantic girls. And you'd cut in and take her away from
Dick, right under his nose."

Raven suddenly tired of it.

"Amelia," he said, "don't be a fool. And don't say that sort of odious
thing about Nan. I won't have it. Nan's a child."

"Oh, no," said Amelia, shaking her waved head with an air of doom.
"Nan's no child. Don't make any mistake about that. She's no child."

At this, Raven found he was so unreasonably tired of her that he had to
call himself to order and wonder if he really could be disgusted with
Amelia, old Milly who was such a sophisticated fool and yet meant so
well by everybody that you had to keep reproving yourself when you were
tempted to consign her--elsewhere.

"Milly," he said, in the tone he always had toward her at her worst, a
tone of recalling her, bidding her remember she was a nice ordinary
woman, not an arbiter of social destinies, "Milly, sometimes you're an
awful idiot. Don't you know you are? Don't you see it won't do to keep
hitting me on the raw? I sha'n't stand it, you know. I shall have to
take Nan under my arm and get out and leave you the house to yourself.
It's all very well for you to call down alienists on me, and get me to
put myself under restraint, but Nan's rather sacred to me. You can't
meddle with Nan, and if you weren't so wrapped up in your own conceit,
you'd see you couldn't."

Amelia seemed to be reflecting on something which resulted in shocking
her into a further uneasiness.

"And the thing she said! I heard it with my own ears. She adored you!
That's what she said, adored you. To Dick, too, of all people, Dick
she's virtually engaged to."

Raven remembered a scene in a play where a drunken man lifts a chair and
then, aware of his own possibilities, gently sets it down again. He
wanted to lift a chair. Only he wanted to complete the act and smash it.

"Milly," he said gently, "I tell you Nan is a child. Doesn't that show
she's a child--the pretty extravagance of it! Why, I'm 'old Rookie' to
Nan. What else do you think I could possibly be?"

"Heaven knows," said Amelia, tightening her lips. "I can't imagine what
her Aunt Anne would have said. John, wasn't it wonderful her leaving you
practically all her money? And just w