s such a lot of things, Nan," he answered, "that can't be said."

"Yes," she agreed, "that's true. Want me to go home?"

He didn't want her to go home. He caught at her dear presence. Almost he
wished he might tell her how horrible it was, not only to repudiate
Anne's last request of him, but to feel he was repudiating it on the
heels of that other refusal years ago.

"No, dear," he said, "not yet. I'll go with you when you must."

"I don't believe," Nan ventured, "it's as bad as you think. She did do
some foolish things," she meditated, "these last years."

"She did some hideous things," said Raven, "because they weren't normal.
They weren't decent. And so they weren't right."

"Maybe I don't know so much as you do about them," said Nan. "You see
she was so furious with me for going to France----"

"Oh, don't say she was furious," urged Raven, still out of that sense of
her being in the room. "It would hurt her so confoundedly."

"Well, she was, you see," said Nan. "I thought you knew about it. But I
remember, you'd gone. And when I told her I was going over, she was
furious. Oh, she was, Rookie! You can't say anything else. I know Aunt
Anne."

"But just cut out some of the adjectives," said Raven, still with that
sense of Anne's being in the room and the unsportsmanlike business of
putting her in her place when she could not, even from her place, defend
herself. "She never was furious. She simply didn't believe in war and
she wouldn't join any relief work and didn't want you to."

"She wouldn't join any relief work," said Nan, relentlessly rehearsing.
"She said the most frightful things and said them publicly. She ought to
have been arrested, only they didn't take the trouble. She wasn't a
Quaker. There was nothing inbred to excuse her. We're decent folks,
Rookie, we Hamiltons. But she stood for non-resistance. She said Belgium
shouldn't have resisted, and England shouldn't have gone in, and France
shouldn't have lifted a finger or thrown a bomb, and when you told
her--that is, I told her--she was crazy, she said something awful."

Raven was startled out of his determination to show no curiosity.

"What did she say?" he asked. "What was it that was awful?"

Nan seemed to have paled a little under the rose-leaf texture of her
cheek.

"Why, you know," she said, "what they all come back to. Whatever they
believe, they come back to that. I don't see how they can. I couldn't,
it scares me so. They tell you w