Dick tossed the paper aside and turned upon Raven who, taking his chair at the hearth, had bent to throw on a handful of light wood: the sticks that wake and change a room so completely that they might almost lighten the mood of the man their burning plays upon.
"Look here," said Dick, "you put the devil into Nan. What do you do it for?"
Raven looked up at him in a complete surprise.
"No, I don't. The devil? Nan's got less to do with the devil than anybody you and I ever saw. She's kept herself unspotted. She's a child."
This last he said of sudden intent for, having noted its effect on Milly, he wondered how it would strike Dick.
"Oh, no, she isn't," said Dick, with bitterness. "Unspotted—yes, of course she is. But Nan knows her way about. She can play fast and loose with the rest of 'em."
He stopped, conscious of talking too much, and ashamed of it. Raven remembered that quick interchange of ownership and repudiation between the two as they flashed back at each other in his library, those weeks ago, but he could not tell the boy Nan had kissed him out of her impetuous bounty only because the terrors of the time had lifted her beyond habit and because Dick's need was so great. She had put the draught of life to his lips, that was all. He remembered Monna Vanna going to the sacrificial tent, and his heart melted at the thought of woman's wholesale giving even when the act is bound to recoil upon herself alone.
"You'd better not remind her of anything she said to you over there," he allowed himself to advise. "Things were pretty strenuous then, Dick, don't you remember? We've come back to a"—his voice failed him as he thought how base a time they had returned to—"a different sort of thing altogether. I'm an old fellow, according to you, but there's one thing I know. You won't get a girl by 'flying off the handle,' as Charlotte would say. Honest, old boy, when you have these fits of yours, you don't seem, according to the prophet of your generation, as impressive as usual."
"Who is the prophet of my generation?" put in Dick sourly, as if that were the issue between them.
"G. B. S., I've understood," said Raven mildly. "Don't I recall your telling me he was the greatest ever, at least since Aristophanes?"