"Charlotte wants us to have a cup of tea," said Dick. "She said supper's put off till they come."
"They?" inquired Raven. "Who's they?"
"It's no use, Jack," Dick broke forth. "I might as well tell you. I s'pose if I didn't you'd kick up some kind of a row later. I telephoned Mum."
"You don't mean," said Raven, in a voice of what used to be called "ominous calm," before we shook off the old catch-words and got indirections of our own, "you don't mean you've sent for her!"
"It's no use," said Dick again, though with a changed implication, "you might as well take things as they are. Nan can't come up here slumming without an older woman. It isn't the thing. It simply isn't done."
Raven, through the window, saw Charlotte hovering in the library with the tea tray. He watched her absently, as if his mind were entirely with her. Yet really it was on the queerness of things as they are in the uniform jacket of propriety and the same things when circumstance thrusts the human creature out of his enveloping customs and sends him into battle. He thought of Dick's philosophy of the printed word. He thought of Nan's desperate life of daily emergency in France. Yet they were all, he whimsically concluded, being squared to Aunt Anne's rigidity of line. But why hers? Why not Old Crow's? Old Crow would have had him rescue Tira, even through difficult ways. He opened the door.
"Come on in," he said. "Charlotte's buttered the toast."
Dick followed him, and they sat down to their abundant tea, Charlotte pausing a moment to regard them with her all-enveloping lavishment of kindliness. Were they satisfied? Could she bring something more?
"The trouble with you, Dick," said Raven, after his third slice of toast, buttered, he approvingly noted, to the last degree of drippiness, "is poverty of invention. You repeat your climax. Now, this sending for Milly: it's precisely what you did before. That's a mistake the actors make: repeated farewells."
Dick made no answer. He, too, ate toast prodigiously.