emands.

"It's a fact," he reflected, "I've really never seen you since you grew
up. First you were a child, then you went over there. You had to take
life whole, as Old Crow took his religion."

"Yes," said Nan, "I guess we're all queer, we young ones, that have been
in service. You see we've had to take things as they are. You can't veil
them from us. We've seen 'em. We know." She laughed out. "Rookie, it's
queer, but I'm a good deal more like the old-fashioned girl we read
about than the rest of the crowd I run with."

"Why?" Raven ventured.

If Nan was in a mood to unveil her dear mind, he wanted her voice to
rush on and on in that sweet staccato. And her answer was in itself
surprising:

"Aunt Anne."

Raven sat looking at her, a slow smile dawning. There she was, "prim as
a dish," Charlotte would say, her two braids down her back, her hands
clasped about her knees. He had never, the undercurrent in his mind
still reminded him, been so alone with her since the days when they had,
with an unspoken sense of lawlessness, slipped away together for a day's
fishing or a breathless orchid hunt in the woods. The adventures had
been less and less frequent as time ran on and it had begun to dawn on
Raven that they were entirely contrary to Aunt Anne's sense of New
England decencies. After each occasion Nan would be mysteriously absent
for a half day, at least, and when she reappeared she was a little shyer
of him, more silent toward Aunt Anne. Had she been put to bed, or shut
up with tasks, to pay the tax on her stolen pleasures? He never knew. He
did know, however, that when he proposed taking her off to wild delights
that made her eyes glow with anticipation she always refused, unless he
acceded to her plea to slip away: always to slip away, not to tell.
Could it be she had known by a child's hard road to knowledge--of
observation, silence, unaided conclusion--that Aunt Anne would never
allow them to run away to play? Curious, pathetic, abnormal even, to
have been jealous of a child! Then he pulled himself up with the shocked
sense, now become recurrent, that he had never allowed himself to attack
Anne's fair dignity with the weapon of unsuppressed guesswork about her
inner motives. He had assumed, he had felt obliged to assume, they were
as fine as her white hands. All the more reason for not assailing them
now when she was withdrawn into her strange distance. Yet one source of
wonder might be allowed him to explore