"It's a pretty serious letter, Rookie. I suppose it's a love-letter." "Don't you know?" "Yes, I suppose I know. But it's so childish. He's furious, then he's almost on his knees begging, and then he goes back to being mad again. Rookie, he's so young." "When it comes to that," said Raven, "you're young, too. I've told you that before." "Young! Oh! but not that way. I couldn't beg for anything. I couldn't cry if I didn't get it. I don't know what girls used to do, but we're different, Rookie, we that have been over there." "Yes," said Raven, "but you mustn't let it do too much to you. You mustn't let it take away your youth." Nan shook her head. "Youth isn't so very valuable," she said, "not that part of it. There's lots of misery in it, Rookie. Don't you know there is?" "Yes," said Raven, "I know." Suddenly he remembered Anne and the bonds she had laid on him. Had he not suffered them, in a dumb way, finding no force within himself to strike them off? Had he been a coward, a dull fellow tied to women's restraining wills? And he had by no means escaped yet. Wasn't Anne inexorably by his side now, when he turned for an instant from the problem of Tira, saying noiselessly, this invisible force that was Anne: "What are you going to do about my last wish, my last command? You are thinking about Nan, about that strange woman, about yourself. Think about me." But he deliberately summoned his mind from the accusing vision of her, and turned it to Nan. "Then," he said, "there doesn't seem to be much hope for Dick, poor chap!" "Doesn't there?" she inquired, a certain indignant passion in her voice. "Anyway, there's no hope for me. I'd like to marry Dick. I'd like to feel perfectly crazy to marry him. He won't write his poetry always. That's to the good, anyhow. If I don't marry him I shall be a miserable old thing, more and more positive, more and more like all the women of the family, the ones that didn't marry"--and they both knew Aunt Anne was in her mind--"drying rose leaves and hunting up genealogical trash." "But, my own child," said Raven in a surge of pity for her, as if some clearest lens had suddenly brought her nearer him, "you don't have to marry Dick to get away from that. You'll simply marry somebody else." "No," said Nan, "you know I sha'n't." "Then," said Raven, "there is somebody else." She shook her head. "I'm an odd number, Rookie," she said, with a bitterness he found foreign to her. "All those old stories of kindred souls may be true, but they're not true for me." "You have probably," said Raven, a sharp light now on her, bringing out the curves and angles of her positive mind, "you have done some perverse thing to send him off, and you won't move a finger to bring him back." Nan laughed. She was no longer bitter. This was the child he knew.