"Well, when it comes to 'love', I do love Nan. There you have it, good old-fashioned direct address. She is as immediate to me as my own skin and veins. She always has been. She began to grow into me when she was little, and she kept on growing. There are fibers and rootlets of Nan all through me, and the funny part of it is I love to feel them there. I can't remember being dominated by anybody without resenting it, wanting to get away—escape! escape!—but I never for an instant have felt that about Nan. She's the better part of me. Good Lord! she's the only part of me I take any particular pleasure in or that I can conceive of as existing after I join Old Crow. (Not that I'm allowed to take much pleasure in her now. She sees me when I call, answers when I consult her about the Fund—and she's been tremendously sympathetic and valuable there—but she seems to feel and, I've no doubt, for very good reasons, that we're better apart. She has, I believe, a theory about it; but we needn't go into that. And I don't quarrel with it.)
"The queer part of it is that I feel Nan herself couldn't break the bond between us, couldn't if she tried. It's as deep as nature, as actual as Old Crow. I can give you a curious proof of it. I might be almost swamped by somebody—yes, I mean Tira. I might as well say so as hear you saying it over this letter—somebody that is beauty and mystery and a thousand potencies that take hold on nature itself. But that doesn't push Nan away by an inch. If I'm swamped, Nan's swamped with me. If I mourn the beauty and the piteousness withdrawn, Nan mourns, too. It's Nan and I against the world. But it isn't Nan and I with the world. The world is against us. Do you see? For I'm a year older than when I saw you last. And though many of the things you felt about the years weren't true, a lot of 'em were, and they're a little truer now. And one of them is that I've got to give Nan a fighting chance to mate with youth and—oh, exactly what you've got. I wish you had her—no, I'm damned if I do. I may not be young enough for jealousy, but I am unregenerate enough. I probably mean I wish I wished it. For in spite of my revolt against the earth, I'd like to give Nan the cup, not of earth sorceries but earth loveliness, and let her swig it to the bottom. And then, if Old Crow's right and this is only a symbol and we've got to live by symbols till we get the real thing, why, then I'm sentimental enough—Victorian! yes, say it, and be hanged!—to want to believe Nan and I shall some time—some time——Anyhow, I'm not going to ask her to spend her middle years—just think! 'figure to yourself!'—when Nan's forty, what will your revered uncle be?
"Now I've told you. This is the whole story, the outline of it. And why do I tell you instead of merely inviting you to shut up as Nan did me? Because if you retain in your dear meddlesome head any idea that Nan, as you say, 'loves' me, you're to remember also that Nan is not in any sense an Ariadne on a French clock, her arm over her head, deserted and forlorn. You are to remember I adore her and, if I thought we could both in a dozen years or so perish by shipwreck or Tenney's axe (poor Tenney!) I should get down on my knees to her and beg her (can't you hear our Nan laugh?) to let me marry her. (Probably she wouldn't, old man—marry me, I mean. We're seldom as clever as we think, even you. So there's that.) But, in spite of my erratic leanings toward Old Crow-ism and sundry alarming dissatisfactions with the universe, I still retain the common sense to see Nan, at forty, worrying over my advancing arteriosclerosis and the general damned breaking up of my corporeal frame. Not on your life. Now—shut up!
"Yes, your mother continues to be dissatisfied over your being there. She thinks it's all too desultory, but is consoled at your being mentioned in the same breath with 'two such distinguished Frenchmen.' I tell her you can't stop for a degree, and maybe if you follow out your destiny you'll get one anyway, and that, if you still want to write books, this will give you something to write about. But she doesn't mind so much since she's gone into politics, hammer and tongs."
Now this letter reached Richard Powell in the dingy office in Paris, where he happened to be in consultation with his two advisers who were, with an untiring genius of patience and foresight, interpreting to him daily the soul of France. He went over the first part of the letter with them, article by article, point by point, very proud, under his composure, of their uniform agreement with the admirable Monsieur Raven. And after their business session was concluded and the two Frenchmen had gone, Dick addressed himself to the last part of the letter, given in these pages. He bent himself to it with the concentration that turns a young face, even though but for the moment, into a prophetic hint of its far-off middle age. If he had kept enough of his shy self-consciousness to glance at himself in the glass, he would have been able to smile at the old fear of what the years might do to him. No heaviness there, such as he remembered in his father's face: only trouble, pain, and their mysteriously refining tracery. But the heaviness was in his heart. He had to understand the letter absolutely, not only what it said but all it implied. If it actually meant what he believed it to mean at first reading, it drew a heavy line across his own life. Nan had drawn the line before, but this broadened it, reënforced it with a band of black absolutely impossible to cross. And it did mean it, and, having seen that, without a possibility of doubt, he enclosed the letter in an envelope, addressed it to Nan, and leaned back in his chair, never, he believed, to think it over again, never so long as he and Nan lived. There was no residuum of sentiment in his mind as there was in Raven's that, after Nan had finished with this life, according to her own ideas, there might be hope of another Nan bloomed out of this one somewhere else and another Dick, risen out of his ashes, to try his luck again. No, the line across the page was the line across their lives, and, said Dick: "That's that." But he caught his breath, as he said it, and was glad there was no one by to hear. Anybody who heard would have said it was a sob. He was, he concluded, rather fagged with the day. These confounded Frenchmen, with their wits you couldn't keep up with, they took it out of you.
This was why Raven, in Wake Hill, on the morning the letter came to Nan in Boston, got a telegram from her, saying: "Come back." He had gone there to stay over a night, after a few hours' visit with Tenney, who was eagerly glad to see him, and again begging to be confirmed in his condition of spiritual whiteness. Raven had just got to his house when the message was telephoned up from the station, and its urgency made him horribly anxious. He had been especially aware of Nan all day. Little threads of feeling between them had been thrilling to messages he couldn't quite get, as if they were whispers purposely mysterious, to scare a man. He was on edge with them. They quickened the apprehension the message brought upon him overwhelmingly. She never would have summoned him like that if she hadn't needed him, not a word by telephone, but his actual presence. He had Jerry take him back again to the station, and in the late afternoon he walked in on Nan waiting for him in one of the rooms Anne Hamilton had kept faithful to the traditions of bygone Hamiltons, but that now knew her no more. It was Nan the room knew, Nan in her dull blue dress against the background of pink roses she made for herself and the room, Nan white with the pallor of extreme emotion, bright anxiety in her eyes and a tremor about her mouth. She went to him at once, not as the schoolgirl had run, the last time she offered her child lips to him, but as if the moment were a strange moment, a dazzling peak of a moment to be approached—how should she know the way to her heart's desire?
"What is it, dear?" asked Raven, not putting her off, as he had the schoolgirl, but only unspeakably thankful for the bare fact of having found her safe. "What's happened?"
"I had to tell you straight off," said Nan, "or I couldn't do it at all. He sent me your letter—Dick. The one about me."
Raven was conscious of thinking clearly of two things at once. He was, in the first place, aware of the live atoms which were the letter, arranging themselves in his mind, telling him what they had told Nan. He was also absently aware that Nan's face was so near his eyes it was nothing but a blur of white, and that when he bent to it, the white ran, in a rush, into a blur of pink.
"So Dick sent it to you," he said. "Well, God bless him for it. Kiss me, my Nan."