"Tira?" Nan inquired recklessly. "What do I tell you to take her for? Because I want to see you mad, Rookie, humanly mad. And she's got the look that makes us mad, men and women, too."
"What is it?" Raven asked thickly. "What is the look?"
"Mystery. It's beauty first, and then mystery spread over that. She's like—why, Rookie, she's like life itself—mystery."
"No," said Raven, surprising her, "you're not a little girl any more: that's true enough. I don't know you."
"Likely not," said Nan, undisturbed. "You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have a little Nan begging for stories and a Nan that's on her job of seeing you get something out of life, if she can manage it, before it's too late."
There she stopped, on the verge, she suddenly realized, of blundering. He was not to guess she had too controlling an interest in that comprehensive mystery which was his life. How horrible beyond measure if she took over Aunt Anne's frantic task of beneficent guidance! Rookie should be free. He began to laugh, and, without waiting for the reason, she joined him.
"Maybe I will," he said, "the Malay prescription, half of it. But I should want you with me. You may not be little, but you're a great Nan to play with. We won't drag Tira's name into it," he added gravely. "Poor Tira's name! We'll take good care of it."
"Oh, I'll go," said Nan recklessly. "But we'll take Tira. And we'll build her a temple in a jungle and put her up on a pedestal and feed her with tropical fruits and sit cross-legged before her so many hours a day and meditate on her mystery."
"What would she say?" Raven wondered, and then laughed out in a quick conviction. "No, she wouldn't say anything. She'd accept it, as she does foddering the cows."
"Certainly," said Nan. "That's Tira."