"And if," said Nan deliberately, "I loved you better, yes, even better than I do (if I could!) I wouldn't tell you. It would be putting bonds on you. It would be setting up the old slavery. The more I loved you, the more I should be taking over the old tyranny: direct succession, Rookie, don't you see?"
Here she laughed, though with some slight bitterness, and he did see. Aunt Anne had ruled his life, to the drying up of normal springs in it. Nan didn't mean to accept the inheritance. He was profoundly touched, by her giving so much grave thought to it, at least.
"But, dearest child," he said, "what does it matter now? I'm rather a meager person. You couldn't dress me up with attributes, out of your dear mind. I shouldn't know how to wear 'em. I'm no end grateful to you for wanting to. But if you gave me the earth for a football now I'm too stiff to kick it. It's a curve, life is. Don't you know that? You're on the up-grade, you and Dick. I may not have got very far, but I'm on the down."
"And yet," said Nan, turning and laying a finger on the book at her side, "you can read a thing like that, a man's life turned inside out for you to see, and understand what he meant by it, and then say the game's up. You make me tired."
If he made her tired, she made him unaffectedly surprised.
"But, Nan," he said, "I didn't know you caught on so tremendously to the old chap. I didn't know it meant so very much to you."
"Of course it means things to me," she said. "Anyway because it does to you. You came up here sick, sick at heart, sick in your mind, because you've been through the War and you've seen what's underneath our proprieties and our hypocrisies. You see we're still in the jungle. And it's nearly killed you out, Rookie, the dear you inside you that's not at home in the jungle. You wouldn't believe me if I told you what kind of a Rookie you are. Things hurt you like blazes. And then here comes Old Crow, just as if he rose out of his grave and pointed a finger at you. And he says, 'Don't be afraid, even of the jungle.' And suddenly you weren't afraid. And now you're afraid again, and talk about downward curves, and all that. Why, Rookie, I'm older than you are, years and years."
Raven's mouth and eyes were wide open in amazement at her.
"I'm damned!" said he conversationally. "The way you young things go on. You put us in our places. Dick does, too. You've heard him. But, as I remember, then you had a tendency to choke him off."
"We won't discuss Dick," said she, again prim as a dish. "And I'm not putting you in your place because I belong to my own generation. It's only because you fill up the foreground. I have to look at you. I can't see anything else. I never could. And as a matter of fact, I don't belong to this generation. I haven't got their conceit and their swagger. Sometimes I wish I had. I can't even talk their slang. I can't smoke a cigarette."