n't
have butted in with the peach, but I didn't know how deep it went."

"Oh, it always goes deep with children," said Nan, carelessly, as if the
child he was pitying being snowed under by the years, it made no great
difference about her, anyway. "You get gashed to the bone and the scars
are like welts. But so far as I see, it has to be, coming into a world
you don't even know the rules of till they're banged into you."

"You wouldn't be willing," said Raven, spurred on by a mounting
curiosity over her, the inner mind of her he seemed never to have
touched before, "you wouldn't be willing to tell me what it was in the
church you didn't like?"

"Yes," said Nan decisively, "I should mind. Oh, I'd tell you, Rookie, if
I could anybody. But I can't. Maybe I could if I hadn't seen it working:
over there, you know--seen boys clinging to it so at the
end--confession--the crucifix. (The vestments, do you remember? over
that faded horizon blue!) I couldn't do it, Rookie, what they did, not
if I died this minute. Only," she added, struck by a thought, "I might
want it to remind me. I might touch the crucifix, you know, or look at
something or feel the holy water on my forehead. I might be too far gone
to think up to God but--yes, it might remind me."

"Symbols," said Raven, profoundly moved by the vision of the bright
spirit in her mortal beauty flickering out. "Old Crow."

"And when I said," she hesitated, anxious to give him everything he
asked of her, "the things I didn't like, I meant the things they tell
us, Rookie. You know: facts, details. And then you think of God and--no
use, Rookie, no use!"

"Yes," said Raven, "that's where Old Crow was up against it. But picture
writing, because it's the only kind of writing we can read--picture
writing, Nan, because we're savages--he could take that and not wince."

"Anyway," said Nan, "I'm happiest not thinking of it. I say my prayers:
God bless Rookie. God bless me. That's all."

"I don't believe it."

"Don't believe what? That I say 'God bless Rookie'? Course I do. Why
not?"

"Well, I'm blessed!" said Raven, at a loss. Then, recovering himself,
"Nan, I never've known you in the least. How am I getting at you now?"

"Because we're shut up here with the quiet and the snow," said Nan.

She looked at the fire, not at him. He thought, with a startled delight
in her, he had never seen a more contented figure and, the beauty of it
was, entirely oblivious of him. It made no d