"No," said Nan, bending on him a limpid gaze. "Of course not, consciously. Only there was something——" But even she, with all her recklessness, could not follow this out. To her own consciousness was the certainty that deep in Aunt Anne, deep as the principle of life itself, was an intuition which led her will to the evidence it needed for its own victories. "And the queer thing about it was," she ended, "I didn't refuse to be confirmed because I doubted things. I refused because I believed. I believed in God; I believed so hard I was afraid."
"What of?"
"Afraid of standing in with what I didn't like. Afraid I couldn't carry it through, and if I didn't, there'd be ginger for me somewhere. So queer, Rookie, like all the things that keep happening to us. Little ironies, you know, that sort of thing. For she thought I was behaving shockingly toward God. And really, Rookie, it was because I was so afraid of Him. I believed in Him so much I couldn't say I believed in a way I didn't."
"Like Old Crow," said Raven. "Only you didn't go far enough. You didn't say it's only a symbol."
"I tried not to think much about it, anyway," she owned. "I couldn't believe what she did. But I couldn't go into it. I can't now. Don't you know, Rookie, there are things you can't talk about? It's bad manners."
"I wish the learned divines thought so," said Raven. "Dear Nan!" he added, his mind returning to her. "I didn't know you so very well, after all. I must have seen you were having a beast of a time, or I mightn't have butted in with the peach, but I didn't know how deep it went."
"Oh, it always goes deep with children," said Nan, carelessly, as if the child he was pitying being snowed under by the years, it made no great difference about her, anyway. "You get gashed to the bone and the scars are like welts. But so far as I see, it has to be, coming into a world you don't even know the rules of till they're banged into you."
"You wouldn't be willing," said Raven, spurred on by a mounting curiosity over her, the inner mind of her he seemed never to have touched before, "you wouldn't be willing to tell me what it was in the church you didn't like?"
"Yes," said Nan decisively, "I should mind. Oh, I'd tell you, Rookie, if I could anybody. But I can't. Maybe I could if I hadn't seen it working: over there, you know—seen boys clinging to it so at the end—confession—the crucifix. (The vestments, do you remember? over that faded horizon blue!) I couldn't do it, Rookie, what they did, not if I died this minute. Only," she added, struck by a thought, "I might want it to remind me. I might touch the crucifix, you know, or look at something or feel the holy water on my forehead. I might be too far gone to think up to God but—yes, it might remind me."
"Symbols," said Raven, profoundly moved by the vision of the bright spirit in her mortal beauty flickering out. "Old Crow."