"He writes," said Raven obstinately, aware of having really no argument.
"What kinds of books? Conventional rot. Verse. Anybody could do it by the yard. No, you needn't look like that. 'Course I couldn't! But anybody that could write at all. You could, Rookie, only you wouldn't have the face. You'd feel such a fool."
"Of course it's conventional," said Raven, "his poetry is. But that's natural enough. He belongs to the new school. You don't find him conventional himself, do you? Too conventional?"
"He's precisely like his mother," said Nan. She had the air of wanting to account for him, once for all, and sweep him out of the way. "Only she's conventional about waving her hair and uplift and belonging to societies, and he's conventional about brotherhood and a new world and being too broad-minded to be healthy. Don't you know there are crude things in a man that have got to stay there, if he is a man? War, now! if some beast goes out on a prowl (like Germany) the normal man doesn't call it a herd madness and quote the New Testament. He gets his gun. So did Dick get his gun, but now he thinks it's all over, he's too broad-minded to live. Oh, you can laugh, Rookie, but there is such a thing as being too superior to be decent, and that's Dick. The only time I come anywhere near liking him is when he forgets to call the world a fraternal sewing circle and comes out with a healthy damn. That's the streak of you in him. Don't you know the nicest thing about him is the streak of you?"
Raven was not aware of knowing that, but he had to own, though silently, that there was an exasperating three-quarters of Dick he himself could not, of late years, get along with. Was it youth? he wondered. Yet Nan was young. Who so sweetly sympathetic as Nan?
"Let's not talk about him," said she. "Yes, a minute more, though. I've sent off a letter to him. Charlotte was to give it to Jerry to mail on the train. It told him I shouldn't tell where I was, and I certainly shouldn't come back till he got his mother away from here. He'd simply got to do it. I told him plainly."
"And then you're going back? You promised him?"
"I didn't promise him anything. Because, how could I? I don't know how things are coming out. There's the woman."
"What woman?"
He asked this in a perfect good faith.