"But, good God, Nan!" Raven broke in, "you and I don't want to preach war."
"No," said Nan, "but we can't let Aunt Anne preach peace: not her brand, as we've seen it. O Rookie! what's the use of taking the world as it isn't? Why don't we see if we can't make something of the old thing as it is and has been? and blest if I don't believe as it always will be?"
Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the knowledge of good and evil? She answered the look.
"No," she said, "I'm not a kid. Don't think it. I suppose it's because I've seen—life."
The pause before the last word, the drop on the word itself was not from bitterness, he knew. But it was sad.
"Well," he said irrepressibly, "you've seen life, and what do you think of it?"
She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl.
"I like—roses," she said whimsically.
She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of her reply that invited him.
"I don't believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don't care about the whole infernal scheme. That's what I sent for Dick for—to tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell Dick. And I haven't done it and now I'm telling you."