"Dear old Milly, no," said Raven, with the utmost gentleness. "I wouldn't have you for the world. It's Nan that's going to stay."
"Why," said Amelia, "it isn't decent. You're not an old man, John. Sometimes you don't even look middle-aged."
"You said I was," he reminded her. "You said I was so old I went and got cafard."
"Besides," said Amelia, clutching at her vanishing argument, "age has nothing to do with it. The older you are the more ridiculous they get over you, these romantic girls. And you'd cut in and take her away from Dick, right under his nose."
Raven suddenly tired of it.
"Amelia," he said, "don't be a fool. And don't say that sort of odious thing about Nan. I won't have it. Nan's a child."
"Oh, no," said Amelia, shaking her waved head with an air of doom. "Nan's no child. Don't make any mistake about that. She's no child."
At this, Raven found he was so unreasonably tired of her that he had to call himself to order and wonder if he really could be disgusted with Amelia, old Milly who was such a sophisticated fool and yet meant so well by everybody that you had to keep reproving yourself when you were tempted to consign her—elsewhere.
"Milly," he said, in the tone he always had toward her at her worst, a tone of recalling her, bidding her remember she was a nice ordinary woman, not an arbiter of social destinies, "Milly, sometimes you're an awful idiot. Don't you know you are? Don't you see it won't do to keep hitting me on the raw? I sha'n't stand it, you know. I shall have to take Nan under my arm and get out and leave you the house to yourself. It's all very well for you to call down alienists on me, and get me to put myself under restraint, but Nan's rather sacred to me. You can't meddle with Nan, and if you weren't so wrapped up in your own conceit, you'd see you couldn't."
Amelia seemed to be reflecting on something which resulted in shocking her into a further uneasiness.