Dick finished, with a deeper quiet:
"Seeing her look at you."
Raven, too, stared at the tree where the robin kept up the bright beauty of his lay. He was conscious, not of any need to combat this finality of Dick's, but of a sense, more poignant than he could support without calling on his practiced endurance, of the pity of it, the "tears of things." Here was youth, its first bitter draught in hand, not recoiling from it, but taking it with the calmness of the older man who has fewer years to taste it in. He could not ask the boy to consider, to make no hasty judgment. Whatever lay behind the words, it was something of a grave consequence. And Dick himself led the way out of the slough where they were both caught.
"Curious things come to you," he said, "when you're laid by the heels and can't do anything but think: I mean, as soon as you get the nerve to think."
"Such as?"
"Well, poetry, for one thing. When I began to think—and I didn't want it to be about Nan any more than I could help—I used to have a temperature, you know—puzzled them, doctor, nurse, all of you. Nan, that was! I knew it, though the rest of you hadn't the sense. Well, I made my mind run away from it. I said I'd think about poetry, my long poem. I'd lie there and say it over to myself, and see if the rest of it wouldn't come." He laughed a little, though not bitterly. He was frankly amused. "What do you think? I couldn't even remember the confounded thing. But I could other things: the verse I despised. Wasn't that the limit? Omar Khayyám! I lay there and remembered it by the yard."
"That's easy," said Raven. "Nothing like the first impressions. They stick."
"Evidently," said Dick. "They did stick. And my stuff didn't."
"Is this," Raven ventured, not seeing whether the boy was quivering under his calm, "a case against the moderns?"
Dick answered promptly, though Raven could only wonder, after all, just what he meant: