Old Crow

								

about reasonably.
How is it possible to delineate Dick, even with all profuse generosity
of comment, without suggesting that he was not of the type to please
himself, or tagging him with a priggishness afar from him? He certainly
was not the sort of hero his dramatic poems described with a choppy
vigor of detail, and whom there is no doubt he would have chosen to
resemble. But nature had given him a slimness and an actual grace he
found, in his private self-scrutiny, almost girlish, nor could he wholly
outwit and supplement her by the athletic training he never intermitted.
Dick's face, too, he found much against him, being of a round solidity
with a nose too thick and a mouth a thought too small. How could such
despite have happened to him, he asked himself in moments of depression
when, confronting the mirror, he recognized the wrongs inheritance had
done him. But he knew. It was father's people, that was it. They were
all round and owlish, and they thickened up in middle life. If he could
have shared Uncle Jack's lean aquilinity, people would have looked at
him twice, as they did at Uncle Jack, which in itself would be a bore,
except that Nan also might look. Aware of these things and hiding them
in his soul, he held himself tight, shut his mouth close, and challenged
you with a spectacled eye, pinning you down as if to say: "I am born in
every particular as I didn't want to be, but take notice that I'll have
no light recognition of the hateful trick they did me. I am in training
for a husky fellow. I haven't let up on myself one instant since I found
out how horrible it was to be a good deal more of a fellow than I shall
ever look. I never shall let up. And don't you let me catch you letting
up either, in the way you treat me."
Nan, to go back to the minute of their entrance, made a swift assault
upon Raven. In the old days when he was a youngish man and she a little
girl, a growing thing, elongating like Alice, she used to hurl herself
into his arms and insist on staying there. Her aunt, Miss Anne Hamilton,
who had brought her up from babyhood, was always detaching her from
Raven; but Nan clung as persistently. Raven would look at Miss Anne,
over the girl's rumpled silk poll, with whimsically imploring eyes. Why
couldn't Nan be allowed to break upon him like a salty, fragrant wave of
the sea, he seemed to ask Miss Anne, bringing all sorts of floating
richness, the outcrop of her fancies and affections? Aunt Anne would
return the glance with her sweet, immovable deprecation and go on
detaching, while Nan, with an equal obstinacy--though hers was
protesting, vocable, sometimes shrill to the point of anguish--stuck to
her self-assumed rights. It was Raven himself who involuntarily stepped
over to Aunt Anne's side and finished the detaching process. When Nan
came back after her first term at the seminary Aunt Anne preferred to
college, and was running to him with her challenge of welcome, he was