Cutty arrived at the apartment in time to share dinner with Hawksley.

He had wisely decided to say nothing about the escapade of Hawksley

and Kitty Conover, since it had terminated fortunately. Bernini had

telegraphed the gist of the adventure. He could readily understand

Hawksley's part; but Kitty's wasn't reducible to ordinary terms of

expression. The young chap had run wild because his head still wobbled

on his shoulders and because his isolation was beginning to scratch

his nerves. But for Kitty to run wild with him offered a blank wall to

speculation. (As if he could solve the riddle when Kitty herself could

not!) So he determined to shut himself up in his study and shuffle the

chrysoprase. Something might come of it. Looking backward, he recognized

the salient, at no time had he been quite sure of Kitty. She seemed to

be a combination of shallows and unfathomable deeps.

From the Pennsylvania Station he had called up the office. Kitty had

gone. Bernini informed him that Kitty was dining at a cafe on the way

home. Cutty was thorough. He telephoned the restaurant and was advised

that Miss Conover had reserved a table. He had forgotten to send down

the operative who guarded Kitty at that end. But the distance from the

office to the Subway was so insignificant!

"You are looking fit," he said across the table.

"Ought to be off your hands by Monday. But what about Stefani Gregor? I

can't stir, leaving him hanging on a peg."

"I am going into the study shortly to decide that. Head bother you?"

"Occasionally."

"Ryan easy to get along with?"

"Rather a good sort. I say, you know, you've seen a good deal of

life. Which do you consider the stronger, the inherited traits or

environment?"

"Environment. That is the true mould. There is good and bad in all of

us. It is brought into prominence by the way we live. An angel cannot

touch pitch without becoming defiled. On the other hand, the worst

gutter rats in the world saved France. Do you suppose that thought will

not always be tugging at and uplifting those who returned from the first

Marne?"

"There is hope, then, for me!"

"Hope?"

"Yes. You know that my father, my uncle, and my grandfather were fine

scoundrels."

"Under their influence you would have been one, too. But no man could

live with Stefani Gregor and not absorb his qualities. Your environment

has been Anglo-Saxon, where the first block in the picture is fair

play. You have been constantly under the tutelage of a fine and lofty

personality, Gregor's. Whatever evil traits you may have inherited, they

have become subject to the influences that have surrounded you. Take

me, for instance. I was born in a rather puritanical atmosphere. My

environments have always been good. Yet there lurks in me the taint of

Macaire. Given the wrong environment, I should now have my picture in

the Rogues' Gallery."




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