st take her the other way. Head her off, Rookie, that's what you do,
head her off."

"Do you know, Nan," said Raven, with a sudden resolution, "what Dick
feels about you: I mean, what makes him so sore and ugly? He told me."
(There was a slight disturbance on his shoulder. Nan seemed to be
shaking her head.) "He apparently can't get at you. There's something in
you that baffles him, puts him off. It makes him mad as thunder. You
won't let him in, Nan. You don't let him see you as you are."

"Why, Rookie!" said Nan. She sat up straight and looked him in the face.
Her eyes were beautifully calm. If her clinging to him was against the
rules of this present life, nothing in her expression showed it. She was
really like a child used to being loved and innocently demanding it.
"Why, Rookie, Dick's not more than half grown up."

"He writes," said Raven obstinately, aware of having really no argument.

"What kinds of books? Conventional rot. Verse. Anybody could do it by
the yard. No, you needn't look like that. 'Course I couldn't! But
anybody that could write at all. You could, Rookie, only you wouldn't
have the face. You'd feel such a fool."

"Of course it's conventional," said Raven, "his poetry is. But that's
natural enough. He belongs to the new school. You don't find him
conventional himself, do you? Too conventional?"

"He's precisely like his mother," said Nan. She had the air of wanting
to account for him, once for all, and sweep him out of the way. "Only
she's conventional about waving her hair and uplift and belonging to
societies, and he's conventional about brotherhood and a new world and
being too broad-minded to be healthy. Don't you know there are crude
things in a man that have got to stay there, if he is a man? War, now!
if some beast goes out on a prowl (like Germany) the normal man doesn't
call it a herd madness and quote the New Testament. He gets his gun. So
did Dick get his gun, but now he thinks it's all over, he's too
broad-minded to live. Oh, you can laugh, Rookie, but there is such a
thing as being too superior to be decent, and that's Dick. The only time
I come anywhere near liking him is when he forgets to call the world a
fraternal sewing circle and comes out with a healthy damn. That's the
streak of you in him. Don't you know the nicest thing about him is the
streak of you?"

Raven was not aware of knowing that, but he had to own, though silently,
that there was an exasperating three-quarte