"I don't believe," Nan ventured, "it's as bad as you think. She did do some foolish things," she meditated, "these last years."
"She did some hideous things," said Raven, "because they weren't normal. They weren't decent. And so they weren't right."
"Maybe I don't know so much as you do about them," said Nan. "You see she was so furious with me for going to France——"
"Oh, don't say she was furious," urged Raven, still out of that sense of her being in the room. "It would hurt her so confoundedly."
"Well, she was, you see," said Nan. "I thought you knew about it. But I remember, you'd gone. And when I told her I was going over, she was furious. Oh, she was, Rookie! You can't say anything else. I know Aunt Anne."
"But just cut out some of the adjectives," said Raven, still with that sense of Anne's being in the room and the unsportsmanlike business of putting her in her place when she could not, even from her place, defend herself. "She never was furious. She simply didn't believe in war and she wouldn't join any relief work and didn't want you to."
"She wouldn't join any relief work," said Nan, relentlessly rehearsing. "She said the most frightful things and said them publicly. She ought to have been arrested, only they didn't take the trouble. She wasn't a Quaker. There was nothing inbred to excuse her. We're decent folks, Rookie, we Hamiltons. But she stood for non-resistance. She said Belgium shouldn't have resisted, and England shouldn't have gone in, and France shouldn't have lifted a finger or thrown a bomb, and when you told her—that is, I told her—she was crazy, she said something awful."
Raven was startled out of his determination to show no curiosity.
"What did she say?" he asked. "What was it that was awful?"
Nan seemed to have paled a little under the rose-leaf texture of her cheek.