, a certain indignant passion in her voice.
"Anyway, there's no hope for me. I'd like to marry Dick. I'd like to
feel perfectly crazy to marry him. He won't write his poetry always.
That's to the good, anyhow. If I don't marry him I shall be a miserable
old thing, more and more positive, more and more like all the women of
the family, the ones that didn't marry"--and they both knew Aunt Anne
was in her mind--"drying rose leaves and hunting up genealogical trash."

"But, my own child," said Raven in a surge of pity for her, as if some
clearest lens had suddenly brought her nearer him, "you don't have to
marry Dick to get away from that. You'll simply marry somebody else."

"No," said Nan, "you know I sha'n't."

"Then," said Raven, "there is somebody else."

She shook her head.

"I'm an odd number, Rookie," she said, with a bitterness he found
foreign to her. "All those old stories of kindred souls may be true, but
they're not true for me."

"You have probably," said Raven, a sharp light now on her, bringing out
the curves and angles of her positive mind, "you have done some perverse
thing to send him off, and you won't move a finger to bring him back."

Nan laughed. She was no longer bitter. This was the child he knew.

"Rookie," she said, "you are nearer an absolute fool than any human
being I ever saw. If I wanted a man back, it's likely I could get him.
Most of us can. But do you think I would?"

"Then you're proud, sillykins."

"I'm not proud," said Nan--and yet proudly. "If I loved anybody, I'd let
him walk over me. That's what Charlotte would say. Can't you hear her?
It isn't for my sake. It's for his. Do you think I'd bamboozle him and
half beckon and half persuade, the way women do, and trap him into the
great enchantment? It is an enchantment. You know it is. But I'd rather
he'd keep his grip on things--on himself--and walk away from me, if
that's where it took him. I'd rather he'd walk straight off to somebody
else, and break his heart, if it came that way."

"Good Lord, Nan," said Raven, "where do you get such thoughts?"

"Get them?" she repeated. "I got them from you first. You've been a
slave all your life. Don't you know you have? Don't you know you had
cobwebs spun round you, round and round, till she had you tight, hand
and foot, not hers but so you couldn't walk off to anybody else? And
even now, after her death----"

"Stop," said Raven. "That's enough, Nan."

Again Anne Hamilton was besi