Raven felt that slight quickening of the blood, the nervous thrill along the spine a dog must feel when his hair rises in canine emergency. He smoked silently while he was getting himself in hand, and, in the space of it, he had time for a good deal of rapid thinking. The outrage and folly of it struck him first and then the irony. Here was Dick, who flaunted his right to leave nothing unsaid where realistic verse demanded it, and he was consigning Nan to the decorum Aunt Anne herself demanded. Was the young animal of the present day really unchanged from the first man who protected his own by a fettering seclusion, simply because it was his own? Was Dick's general revolt only the yeasty turmoil sure to take one form or another, being simply the swiftness of young blood? Was his general bravado only skin deep? Raven hardly knew how to take him. He wouldn't be angry, outwardly at least. The things Dick had said, the things he was prepared to say, he would be expected to resent, but he must deny himself. It was bad for the boy, and more, a subtle slur on Nan. They mustn't squabble over her, as if her sweet inviolateness could be in any way touched by either of them. Presently he took his pipe out, looked at it curiously as if it did not altogether please him and remarked: "Dick, you're a fool." "Oh, yes," said Dick, with a bitterness that curled his lip a little, "I'm a young fool, too, I suppose. Well, thank God for that. I am young, and I know it, and just what I'm getting out of it and what I've a right to get. You can't play that game with me, Uncle Jack. You simply can't do it. The old game's played out." "And what," said Raven mildly, "is the old game? And what's the new one going to be? You'll have to tell me. I don't know." "The old game," said Dick, "was precisely what it was in politics. The old men made the rules and the young were expected to conform. The old men made wars and the young fought 'em. The old men lied and skulked and the young had to pull them out of the holes they got into. I suppose you'd say the War was won at Chequers Court. Well, I shouldn't. I should say it was won by the young men who had their brains blown out, and lost their eyes and their legs." "No," said Raven quietly, "I shouldn't say the War was won at Chequers Court. We needn't fight over that. The thing that gets me is why we need to fight at all. There's been a general armistice and Eastern Europe doesn't seem to have heard of it. They go on scrapping. You don't seem to have heard of it either. You come home here and find me peaceably retired to Charlotte and Jerry and my Sabine Farm, and you proceed to declare war on me. What the devil possesses you?" "Yes," said Dick, the muscle twitching in his lip, "I do find you here. And Nan with you." "Dick," said Raven sharply, "we'll leave Nan out of this."