"Not on your life," said Dick, when he was halfheartedly offered the chance of battening on wool, "not while Mum's got the dough. There's only one of me, and she's bound to keep me going."
For that also Dick was cheerfully prepared.
"By the time Nan's ready," he said, having at that point asked her intermittently for several years, "I shall be getting barrelfuls out of my plays."
"'If,'" quoted Raven, "'Medina Sidonia had waited for the skin of the bear that was not yet killed, he might have catched a great cold.'"
"That's all right," said Dick. "You needn't worry, not till it begins to worry me. The only thing that gets me is not pinning Nan down."
"Yes," said Raven, "she's a difficult person to pin."
And saying it, he had a vision of a bright butterfly with "dye-dusty wings" in stiff, glass-covered brittleness. He wondered if marrying might pin Nan down like that.
Another thought troubled him a little: whether Dick had built even obscurely in his own mind on the money Nan would have from Aunt Anne, and the more modest sum she had now from her dead father and mother. He concluded not. He hadn't got to worry about that. Dick had lived in the atmosphere of money and he took its permanence for granted.
But we are keeping Nan looking at the fire and trying to get her news out adequately, waiting a long time for these explanatory excursions into past history. Raven also was waiting, a good deal excited and conscious of his apprehensive heart. And when she spoke, in a studied quietude, he found the words were the very last he expected to hear:
"I wanted to be the one to tell you. We've found her will."
They sat there silent for several minutes. Raven was keeping desperate clutch on the inner self lashed by his hurrying heart, and telling it there was no danger of his saying any of the things it was hounding him on to say. He wanted to break out with an untempered violence:
"Of course you've found it. And of course she's left a lot of it to me."
He did not really believe that: only it so linked up with the chain of her unceasing benevolences toward him that it seemed the only thing to complete them adequately. And Nan, as if his premonition had prompted her, too, was saying, after the minute she had left him to get his pace even with hers, as if to assure him that, although she knew so much more than he, she wouldn't hurry ahead: