And Raven: Lord! Lord! what was the use of having traveled his own quarter century along the everlasting road if it didn't make him at least silent in sheer pity of it: youth singing along to the Dark Tower, jingling spurs and caracoling nag, something it didn't quite know the feeling of shut in its nervous hand? What was it shut there? The key, that was it: the key to the Dark Tower. Youth made no doubt it was the key, easy to hold, quick to turn, and the gate would fly open and, if youth judged best, even the walls would fall. And yet, and yet, hasn't all youth held the key for that borrowed interval and do the walls ever really fall? But if age doesn't know enough to include youth in its understanding, as youth (except the poets) couldn't possibly include age, why then! "I am," thought Raven, returning to the Charlottian vernacular, "very small potatoes and few in a hill." And what was the Dick, the permanent Dick who would remain after a few more years had stripped him of the merely imitative coloring he caught from his fellows? Dick talked about "herd madness," and here was he, at one with his own herd. He piped in verse because a few could sing, he--but what was the use hammering along on the old dissonance: youth, age, age, youth. And yet they needn't be dissonant. They weren't always. There was Nan! But as to Dick, he was simply Dick, a good substratum of his father, Anthony Powell, in him, a man who had had long views on trade and commerce and could manage men. And a streak of Raven, not too much but enough to imagine the great things the Powell streak would show him how to put his hand to. Dick had been staring at him, finding him a long way off, and now he spoke, shyly if still curiously: "Would you say you'd found God?" Raven came back; he considered. "No," he said, at last, "I couldn't say anything of the sort: it sounds like such awful swank. But I rather stand in with Old Crow. The fact is, Dick"--it was almost impossible to get this clarified in his own mind to the point of passing it on--"Old Crow's made me feel somehow--warm. As if there's a continuity, you know. As if they keep a hand on us, the generations that have passed. If that's so, we needn't be so infernally lonesome, now need we?" "Well," said Dick, "we are pretty much alone." "But we needn't be," said Raven, painfully sticking to his text, "because there are the generations. The being loyal to what the generations tried to build up, what they demand of us. And behind the whole caboodle of 'em, there's something else, something bigger, something warmer still. Really, you know, if only as a matter of convenience, we might call it--God."