She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl. "I like--roses," she said whimsically. She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of her reply that invited him. "I don't believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don't care about the whole infernal scheme. That's what I sent for Dick for--to tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell Dick. And I haven't done it and now I'm telling you." III Nan sat looking at him with an air of patient alertness, ready, he saw, to meet what he had to say and do the best she could with it. He had an irritated apprehension that, as her work through the last few years had lain chiefly in meeting emergencies, so now he was an emergency. And as Dick, poet though the inner circle of journalism had listed him, might not understand in the least what he was driving at, so there was danger of Nan's understanding too quickly and too much, with the resultant embarrassment of thinking something could be done. And nothing could be done beyond the palliatives he meant to allow himself. He would try her. He might see how far she would insist on going with him along his dreary way. What if she had Anne's over-developed and thwarted maternity of helpfulness? What if she insisted on going all the way and never leaving him to the blessed seclusion of his own soul? "You see, Nan," he adventured, "I'm sick of the whole show." She nodded. "Yes," she said, "I know. Coming back. Finding we aren't any better than we were before we got frightened and said our prayers and promised God if He'd stop the War we'd be different forever and ever, amen. That's it, Rookie, isn't it?" "Why, yes," said Raven, staring at her, she seemed so accurate, according to his own mental gauging, and so unmoved in her flippancy, "that's pretty nearly it." She nodded at him again, whether to hearten him or to assure him of their perfect unison he could not tell. "It was an awful jolt, wasn't it?" she inquired frankly. "You know, I should think it might make some of them laugh, the ones they say observe us from--where is it from? Mars? up in the heavens somewhere. It's like reading a bitter sort of book. It is funny. Rookie, don't you think it's funny?" Raven remembered a character in Mr. Owen Wister's "Virginian," the hen crazed by her thwarted destiny. "Well," he said, quoting "The Virginian," "not so damned funny either. But how the dickens did you know what I was going to say?"