Old Crow

								

he fitted his room as the room fitted him. The house was old; nothing
had been changed in it since the year when, in his first-won prosperity,
he persuaded his mother up from the country and let her furnish it with
her shyly modest taste, a sense of values that bade her keep within the
boundary of the atmosphere she brought with her in good old pieces
tenderly used. The room was dim, even by day, from these shadows of the
brooding past, and the dull blue draperies at the windows, while they
touched it to a more inspiriting tone, still spoke softly of the repose
a man wanted when he escaped from the outer world to the assuagement of
silence and his books.
To-night, when Raven had just about come to the conclusion that he could
not possibly enter upon certain things with Dick because, although Dick
elected to be a poet, there was no recognized form of words that would
make him understand, and he'd better telephone him to put the interview
off, he heard his voice in the hall, and, answering it, even breaking
over it, like bright bubbles of a vocal stream, the voice of the girl
they both loved, in ways becoming to their differences. Raven drew a
comfortable breath. The intimate conference with Dick would have to be
deferred, though he would quite as willingly have had Nan listen to it,
except for the chance of her carrying it away with her, in that
sympathetic tenderness of hers, to burden her young heart. Nan would
have made quick work of understanding. She translated you as you went,
and even ran ahead of you, in her haste, just as she sometimes cut in on
your speech, not rudely rebuking you for being too slow, but in her
eagerness to assure you she caught at the first toss. And then they came
in, she full of anticipatory delight at seeing Raven, and Dick so full
of her that he seemed not to know whether his uncle were there or not,
except as an habitual figure in the furnishing of the room.
We must pause a dull minute, while they were projecting themselves into
the scene, to find out how they looked and whether they also fitted the
room and Raven. Nan, known to her larger world as Annette Hamilton, was
a tall, slim, yet muscular girl, graced with as many physical
contradictions as you are likely to imagine. While she stood for an
instant before, puppy-like, precipitating herself upon Raven, her eyes
crinkled up like Mary Seraskier's, and she showed a line of milk-white
teeth. Altogether nature--for she had only the most inconsiderable help
from art--had done her exceedingly well. She had the hurling
impetuosities of the puppy when she found herself anywhere near persons
familiarly dear to her; but, unlike the puppy, she was a thing of grace.
Her hands and slim arms had a girl's loveliest contours, and yet, hidden
somewhere under that satin flesh with its rose and silver lustre, were
muscles serviceably strong. Her eyes were grey like Athena's, her hair
fine and thick and pale, and her face altogether too irregular to talk