reground. I have to look at you. I can't
see anything else. I never could. And as a matter of fact, I don't
belong to this generation. I haven't got their conceit and their
swagger. Sometimes I wish I had. I can't even talk their slang. I can't
smoke a cigarette."

Then Raven remembered, as if she had invited a beam of light to throw up
what would appeal to him as her perfections, that she did seem to him an
alien among her youthful kind, and a shy alien at that, as if she hoped
they might not discover how different she was and put her through some
of those subtle tortures the young have in wait for a strange creature
in the herd.

"No," he said, "you're not like the rest of them. I should have said it
was because you're more beautiful. But it's something beyond that. What
is it?"

"Don't you know?" said Nan, turning to him, incredulous and even a
little accusatory, as if he should long ago have settled it for her
doubting mind whether it was a gain for her or irreparable loss. "No, I
see you don't. Well, it's Aunt Anne."

"Aunt Anne?"

"Yes. I never had the college life girls have now. When she sent me to
the seminary, it was the privatest one she could find. If she could have
exiled me to mid-Victorianism she would. I don't say I should have liked
college life. Maybe I shouldn't. Except the athletics. Anyhow, I can
hold my own there. I was enough of a tomboy to get into training and
keep fit. And Rookie--now don't tell--I never do--I see lots of girls,
perfectly nice girls, too, doing things Aunt Anne would have died before
she'd let me do. And what do you think? I don't envy them because
they're emancipated. I look at them, and I feel precisely what Aunt Anne
would feel, though I don't seem to get excited about it. The same word
comes into my mind, that word all the girls have run away from:
unladylike! Isn't that a joke, Rookie? Charlotte would say it's the
crowner."

"You're a sweet thing, Nan," said Raven, musing. He did wonder whether
she was really in revolt against Aunt Anne's immovable finger.

"Smoking!" said Nan, her eyebrows raised in humorous recollection. "I
used to be half dead over there, dog tired, keyed up to the last notch.
You know! I'd have given a year of life for a cigarette, when I saw what
the others got out of it. I was perfectly willing to smoke. I was eager
to. But I'd think of Aunt Anne, and I simply couldn't do it."

Then it seemed to him that, since Aunt Anne's steel finger had