ick 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
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