"You didn't think you could tear it up, did you, Rookie?" she inquired. "You can't, you know, except in stories."
"I don't know what I thought," he said. "Only I wish it hadn't been done, that's all. It's a"—he ended blankly—"a mistake."
She was looking at him now in a warm, sweet way, to tell him she understood and thanked him.
"You're afraid I sha'n't have enough," she said. "I shall. I'd ever so much rather you had it, Rookie."
"It isn't a question," said Raven curtly, in his disaffection, "of how much you're worth. It's simply yours, that's all, and you've got to have it. Well, I can refuse it, I suppose. Only that's so boorish. It drags everybody out into the open. What made her! Oh, what made her!"
"I think it's nice," said Nan comfortably. "It seems to make everything so right. As to other people—why, it's telling them, don't you know, you really were the one she cared most about, though she couldn't care quite in the way you wanted her to."
He sat staring at her. What did she mean? What had she made up, in her adequate mind, about his relation to Aunt Anne? She couldn't know how he had fought off the yearly increasing benefits Anne had showered him with, unless indeed Anne had told her. And it wasn't like her. Anne was dignity itself. She kept her own counsel. She took her stately course without the least recognition that there were peculiarities in the pace she kept or the road she chose. She had the unconscious arrogance of her class, a class perhaps, except as surviving in individuals, almost extinct. She never accounted for herself, because it could not have forced its way into her mind, from birth to death, that there was anything in her conduct save the inevitable best, as ordered as the stars. So, Raven knew, she had probably never talked over his nebulous relation with her to Nan; but he was suddenly alive with curiosity to know. He couldn't coax Nan into betraying that confidence, but he was nevertheless set on getting at it somehow. He wondered if it might be decent to do it by direct attack.
"Nan," said he, "just what was my relation to your Aunt Anne? What do you assume it to have been?"
She looked at him as if in reproach, a hurt pride flushing her cheek and giving a sort of wounded appeal to her glance.
"Why," she stumbled, "I know. Of course I know. Everybody did that heard how long you'd been devoted to her."