?" asked Nan. "You can't run away from the earth."

"No," said Raven, "I can't jump off. So I'm going to do the next
convenient thing. I'm going up to Wake Hill and shovel snow with Jerry,
and maybe get into the woods and do some thinning out and, if I remember
anything about the millennium we've just shaved the edge of, just say to
myself there ain't a-going to be no millenium, so I can shut up."

"You've taken advice, haven't you?" she concluded. "That's what they've
prescribed. I suppose it's all right."

"Good God, no!" said Raven. "Do you think I've been to a doctor and
turned myself inside out? I'm going because Wake Hill is as far out of
the world as I can manage. If the whole earth hadn't gone crazy, I'd cut
stick for Tartary or some confounded place that isn't on the map. But
they're all on the map. There isn't an inch of ground that isn't under
some sort of moral searchlight. No, I'll be hanged if it's moral. It's
only the mites in the cheese getting busy and stirring up fermentation."

Nan laughed out and then looked up at him in her rueful apology.

"I couldn't help it," she said. "I thought of Dick, your telling him.
Dick's just got his book ready for the printer: Democracy, you know, in
three-legged verse. And they'll say it's full of insight and prophecy.
That's what they said about the other one: insight, prophecy! But Dick
won't have the least idea what you're driving at."

"You see," said Raven, "he's thinking of doing some stiff work and
getting a degree: a sort of sop to his mother. She's as wild as a hawk,
you know, to get him to distinguish himself, doesn't much care how. I'd
meant to ask him to camp here with me this winter. I believe I did
actually ask him, now I think of it."

"Yes, you did," said Nan. "It'll make a lot of difference to him, your
being away."

"I don't think so," said Raven. "Anyhow, he'll have to get used to it,
especially as I'm not merely going away. I'm getting out, out of the
business and all."

He was really surprising her now. She had grown up in the atmosphere of
belief in that particular business. When a Hamilton said his earthly
creed, he would have begun, if he had been honest, "I believe in wool."

"You're not retiring?" she hesitated.

"Yes."

"Made your pile, Rookie?"

At once they thought of Anne and the new complication she had saddled
him with.

"That isn't the question," he evaded. "The amount of it is, I couldn't
go to the office every morning