"Well," he found himself saying to Nan, because there might be a propriety in curbing her impetuous conclusions, "she had a way of being right--conventionally, you might say." "Was she right about the War?" Nan threw back at him. "No," he felt obliged to own. "Is she right about this, trying to fetter you, hand and foot, against what she knew you believed, and banking on your doing it because she's crowded you and rushed you so many times and you've never failed her?" "Oh, yes," said Raven miserably, "I've failed her often enough." "But answer me that: was she right when she left you her money to do this fool thing and give the world another kick down hill where the sentimentalists are sending it? Now I ask you, Rookie, was she right?" "No," he owned again. "Then," said Nan triumphantly, "you mean she's right about teas and dinners and women's clubs and old portraits and genealogy and believing our family tree was the tree of life. That's what you mean, isn't it, Rookie?" Raven looked at her, an unhappy smile dawning. He was moderately sure, in his unspoken certainties, that this was what he did mean. She had been the perfect product of a certain form of civilization, her proprieties, her cruelties even--though, so civilized were they, they seemed to rank only as spiritual necessities. "I'd rather see a monkey climbing our family tree," said Nan, with a rash irrelevance she hoped might shock him into the reaction of a wholesome disapproval, "than all those stiffs she used to hold up for me to imitate." "Don't!" said Raven involuntarily. "It would hurt her like the mischief to hear you say a thing like that." "Why, Rookie," said Nan, with a tenderness for him alone, he saw, not for Aunt Anne, "you act as if she might be--in the room." She kept a merciful restraint on herself there. She had almost said: "You act as if you were afraid she might be in the room."