resulted
in such a superfine product of youth, they'd better not blame her too
radically. It was her tyranny, but it was a tyranny lineally sprung from
a stately past.

"I don't believe it was Aunt Anne alone," he said. "It was your
remembering a rather fine inheritance. Your crowd think they're very
much emancipated, but they've lost the sense of form, beauty, tradition.
You couldn't go all the way with them. You couldn't be rough-haired."

"At any rate," said Nan, "I can't be young: in the sense they're young.
I'm a 'strayed reveler,' that's all. But I don't know why I'm painting a
Sargent portrait of me. Yes, I do. I want to squeeze everything I can
out of this darling minute together, so when we don't have any more
minutes I can go back to this. And you can remember, in case you ever
need me, just what sort of an old Nan I am."

"And you suggest," said Raven, "my kidnaping a nice New England woman
and her baby and carting them off to the Malay Peninsula."

Nan turned upon him delightedly. He could not know what he did for her
by juggling the Tira myth into raillery.

"But think, Rookie," she said, "a woman so beautiful she's more than
that. She's mystery. Now, isn't she beautiful?"

"Beautiful," Raven agreed, and the picture of her, madonna-like, in the
woods, suddenly smote the eyes of his mind and blinded them to all but
Tira.

She saw him wince, and went on more falteringly, but still determined to
go all the way.

"Into a new world, Rookie, all ferns and palms."

"And snakes!"

"Perfectly honest, perfectly free, and no jungle except the kind that
grows up in a night."

"And you," said Raven, "with your New England traditions and your
inherited panic over a cigarette!"

They looked at each other across the length of the hearth, and it all
seemed delightfully funny to them--their solitude, their oneness of
mind--and they began to laugh. And at the combined shout of their
merriment (almost competitive it was, in the eagerness of each to
justify the particular preciousness of the moment) the door opened and
Dick came in, halted, stared, in a surprise that elicited one last hoot
at the unexpectedness of things, and indulged himself in a satirical
comment of greeting, far from what he had intended. Poor Dick! he was
always making sage resolutions on the chance of finding Raven and Nan
together, but the actuality as inevitably overthrew him.

"Oh," said he, "that's it, is it? So I thought."

If he th