f what he meant to do. He had made
all his arrangements for getting out of the business. They could be
concluded in short order. As to the business itself, he had no complaint
to make. The old man--he permitted himself this indulgence as he never
could have in Anne's lifetime, as touching her father--the old man had
been square all through. He was as good as they make 'em. But there was
nothing for him, Raven, in the concern except its cumulative capacity
for making money. He'd no traditional pride in it, as the old man had.
He'd worked for all he was worth, to squeeze every drop he could out of
it so that his mother--"your grandmother, you know, Dick"--might have
every last luxury she wanted. Well, she'd had 'em, though one of the
ironical things about it was that she didn't want so very many, and he
needn't have worked so hard or so long. However, that's neither here nor
there. What's done is done. The War's done--they say--and the thing that
would please Raven best would be----Here he brought up with a full stop.
He was running into dangerous revelations, going back to a previous
state of mind, one he had begun cherishing as soon as his mother died,
and even caressed, with a sort of denied passion, when Anne also died,
and he felt so shamefacedly free. All his life he had wanted to wander,
to explore, to bruise himself against the earth and pick himself up and
go on and get bruised again. He loved the earth, he wanted her, in her
magnificence and cruelty, wanted to write about her, and make the
portrait of her for stay-at-homes who weren't adventurous and were
content with reading about her in the blank moments after the office
grind. Yet he was a stay-at-home himself. Why? in God's name why?

He asked himself the question, as he sat with lifted pen, almost the
words dropping off it, to tell Dick the things it would be simply
disconcerting to know. Raven saw, with a sad clearness, why he hadn't
written the books he wanted to about the earth. They would have been
rough books, full of rock and clay and the tumbling of rivers and
thunder grumbling in the clouds. If he had been really afraid of Anne
and her ordered ambitions for him, he could have printed them under an
assumed name. She need never have known at all. They wouldn't have been
the books he could have written if he had been foot-loose and gone
blundering along in strange trails over the earth, but they might have
held something of the sort his inner man wanted