"Yes. I can't refuse it. That means throwing it back on you. If I won't decide, I'm simply making you do it for me. I don't see anything for it but our talking the thing out and making up our minds together."
"No," said Nan. "I sha'n't help you."
"You won't?"
"I suppose it amounts to that."
"Now why the dickens not?"
Nan kept up her stare at the fire. She seemed to be debating deeply, even painfully.
"Rookie," she said, at last, in a tumultuous rush, "I never meant to say this. I don't know what'll come of saying it. But you've had a terrible sort of life. It's almost worse than any life I know. You've been smothered—by women." This last she said with difficulty, and Raven reddened, in a reflecting shame. "You've done what they expected you to. And it's all been because you're too kind. And too humble. You think it doesn't matter very much what happens to you."
"You've hit it there," said Raven, with a sudden distaste for himself. "It doesn't."
"And if I could clear your way of every sort of bugbear just by deciding things for you, I wouldn't do it."
"Don't try to change my destiny," said Raven, plucking up spirit to laugh at her and lead her away from this unexpected clarity of analysis that could only mean pain for both of them. "I'm old, dear. I'm not very malleable, very plastic. We're not, at forty-odd."