He was leaving, but she called after him:

"No, don't you come. You send Jerry."

"I can do it as well as Jerry," he answered impatiently, and again she called:

"No, don't you come. I don't think best."

Immediately Raven knew, if she put it in that tone (the mother tone it was) he himself didn't "think best." He joined Nan and they walked on, not speaking. Suddenly he stopped for an instant, without warning, and she too stopped and looked at him. He took off his hat and was glad of the cold air on his forehead.

"Mystery of mysteries!" he said. There was bitterness in his tone, exasperation, revolt. Evidently he saw himself in a situation he neither invited nor understood. "Who'd think of finding a woman like that on a New England doorstep talking about foddering the cows?"

Nan considered the wisely circ.u.mspect thing to say and managed tamely:

"She's a good woman."

They went on.

"Yes," said Raven, after a while, "she's a good woman. But does she want to be? Or isn't there anything inside her to make her want to be anything else?"

"I have an idea," said Nan, going carefully, "most of the men she's known have wanted her to be something else."

"Now what do you mean by that?" said Raven irritably. "And what do you know about it anyway? You're nothing but a little girl."

"You keep saying that," said Nan, with composure, "because it gives you less responsibility."

He stared at her, forgetting Tira.

"Responsibility?" he repeated. "What responsibility is there I don't want to take--about you?"

"You don't want me to be a woman," said Nan. "You want me to be a little girl, always adoring you, just enough, not too much. You've been adored enough by women, Rookie."

They both knew she was talking in a hidden language. It was not women she meant; it was Aunt Anne.

"But," said she, persisting, "I'm quite grown up. I've been in the War, just as deep as you have, as deep as d.i.c.k. I've taken it all at a gulp--the whole business, I mean, life, things as they are. I couldn't any more go back to the Victorian striped candy state of mind I was taught to pattern by than you could yourself."

"You let the Victorians alone," growled Raven. "Much you know about 'em."

"They were darlings," said Nan. "They had more brains, any ten of 'em, than a million of us put together. But it does happen to be true they didn't see what human nature is, under the skin. We do. We've scratched it and we know. It's a horrible sight, Rookie."

"What is it?" said Raven. "What is under the skin?"

Nan considered.

"Well," she said finally, "there's something savage. Not strong, splendid savage, you know, but pretending to be big Injun and not fetching it. Wearing red blankets, and whooping, and tearing raw meat. O Rookie, how do folks talk? I can't, even to you. But the world isn't--well, it isn't as nice as I thought it: not so clean. You ought to know. You don't like it either."

"So," said Raven, meditatively, "you don't like it."

"It's no matter whether I like it or not," said Nan, in a chilly way he interpreted as pride. "I'm in it. And I'm going to play the game."

They went on for a while without speaking, and then Raven looked round at her, a whimsical look.

"So you give notice," he said, "you're grown up."

"I give notice," said Nan tersely. "I'm a very old lady really, older than you are, Rookie." Then she judged the moment had come for setting him right on a point that might be debatable. "If you think I was a little girl when I sat there and loved you the other night, you might as well know I wasn't. And I wasn't a woman either: not then. I was just a person, a creatur', Charlotte would say, that wanted you to get under your tough lonesome old hide there's somebody that loves you to death and believes in you and knows everything you feel."

"Am I lonesome, Nan?" he asked quickly, picking out the word that struck him deepest. "I don't know."

"I do," said Nan. "You haven't had any of the things men ought to have to keep them from growing into those queer he-birds stuck all over with ridiculous little habits like pin feathers that make you want to laugh--and cry, too. Old bachelors. Lord!"

"Look out," said Raven. "You'll get me interested in myself. I've gone too far that way already. The end of that road is Milly and psycho-a.n.a.lysis and my breaking everybody's head because they won't let me alone."

"Break 'em then," said Nan concisely. "And run away. Take this Tira with you and run off to the Malay Peninsula or somewhere. That sounds further away than most places. Or an island: there must be an island left somewhere, for a homesick old dear like you."

"Now, in G.o.d's name," said Raven, "what do you say that for?"

"Tira?" Nan inquired recklessly. "What do I tell you to take her for?

Because I want to see you mad, Rookie, humanly mad. And she's got the look that makes us mad, men and women, too."

"What is it?" Raven asked thickly. "What is the look?"

"Mystery. It's beauty first, and then mystery spread over that. She's like--why, Rookie, she's like life itself--mystery."

"No," said Raven, surprising her, "you're not a little girl any more: that's true enough. I don't know you."

"Likely not," said Nan, undisturbed. "You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have a little Nan begging for stories and a Nan that's on her job of seeing you get something out of life, if she can manage it, before it's too late."

There she stopped, on the verge, she suddenly realized, of blundering.

He was not to guess she had too controlling an interest in that comprehensive mystery which was his life. How horrible beyond measure if she took over Aunt Anne's frantic task of beneficent guidance! Rookie should be free. He began to laugh, and, without waiting for the reason, she joined him.

"Maybe I will," he said, "the Malay prescription, half of it. But I should want you with me. You may not be little, but you're a great Nan to play with. We won't drag Tira's name into it," he added gravely.

"Poor Tira's name! We'll take good care of it."

"Oh, I'll go," said Nan recklessly. "But we'll take Tira. And we'll build her a temple in a jungle and put her up on a pedestal and feed her with tropical fruits and sit cross-legged before her so many hours a day and meditate on her mystery."

"What would she say?" Raven wondered, and then laughed out in a quick conviction. "No, she wouldn't say anything. She'd accept it, as she does foddering the cows."

"Certainly," said Nan. "That's Tira."

"You've forgotten the baby."

"Yes," said Nan, soberly. "Poor little boy!"

They were serious and could play no more, and presently turned into the back road and so home. At supper they had a beautiful time, the lights soft, the fire purring, and the shades up so that the cold austerities of night could look in without getting them. Nan had done a foolish thing, one of those for which women can give no reason, for usually they do not know which one it is out of the braided strands of all the reasons that make emotion. She had unearthed a short pink crepe frock she used to wear in her childish days, and let her heavy hair hang in two braids tied with pink ribbons. Did she want to lull Rookie's new-born suspicion of her as a too mature female thing, by stressing the little girl note, or did she slip into the masquerading gown because it was restful to go back the long road that lay between the present and the days when there was no war? Actually she did not know. She did know she had flown wildly "up attic," the minute Rookie announced the daring plan of the visit, and flung open chest after chest, packed by Aunt Anne's exact hands, with this and that period of her clothes. Why had Aunt Anne kept them, she straightened herself to wonder, at one point, throwing them out in a disorderly pile, ginghams, muslins, a favorite China silk. Could it be Aunt Anne had loved her, not so much as she loved Rookie, but in the same hidden, inflexible way, and wanted to preserve the image of her as she grew to girlhood, in the clothes she had worn? It was not likely, she concluded, and was relieved to dismiss even the possibility. It would have made too much to live up to, a present loyalty of obedience which, if Aunt Anne in the heavenly courts had anything like her earthly disposition, would be the only thing to satisfy her. Nan didn't mean to do anything definitely displeasing, especially to Aunt Anne. She simply meant to enjoy to the full the ecstasy of living, just as if it were going on for a lifetime, under the same roof with Rookie and having him all to herself. Then she came on the pink crepe, with its black bows, and gave a tiny nod of satisfaction there in the attic dusk, and was all in a glow, though it was so cold.

When she came down to supper that night, Raven was reading his paper by the fire. He glanced up as if she came in so every night, Nan thought.

She liked that. But she was a little awkward, conscious of her masquerade and so really adding to the illusion of girlhood, ill used to its own charm. Raven threw down his paper and got up.

"Lord!" said he. "Come here, you witch. Let me look at you."