"Quite possibly. Vanity has its uses. It keeps us in contact with
bathtubs and nice clothes. I imagine that you would make both husband
and comrade; or you would have, twenty years ago"--without intentional
cruelty. Wasn't Cutty fifty-two?
"Kitty, you've touched a vital point. It took those twenty years to make
me companionable. Experience is something we must buy; it isn't left in
somebody's will. Let us say that I possess all the necessary attributes
save one."
"And what is that?"
"Youth, Kitty. And take the word of a senile old dotard, your young man,
when you find him, will lack many of the attributes you require. On the
other hand, there is always the possibility that these will develop as
you jog along. The terrible pity of youth is that it has the habit of
conferring these attributes rather than finding them. You put garlands
on the heads of snow images, and the first glare of sunshine--pouf!"
"Cutty, I'm beginning to like you immensely"--smiling. "Perhaps women
ought to have two husbands--one young and handsome and the other old and
wise like yourself."
Cutty wished he were alone in order to analyze the stab. Old! When
he knew that mentally and physically he could take and break a dozen
Two-Hawks. Old! He had never thought himself that. Fifty-two years;
they had piled up on him without his appreciation of the fullness of the
score. And yet he was more than a match for any ordinary man of thirty
in sinew and brain; and no man met the new morning with more zest than
he himself met it. But to Kitty he was old! Lavender and oak leaves were
being draped on his door knob. He laughed.
"Why do you laugh?"
"Oh, because--Hark!"
The two of them ran to the bedroom door.
"Olga! Olga!" And then a guttural level jumble of sounds.
Kitty's quick brain reached out for a similitude--water rushing over
ragged boulders.
"Olga!" she whispered. "He is a Russian!"
"There are Serbian Olgas and Bulgarian Olgas and Rumanian Olgas.
Probably his sweetheart."
"The poor thing!"
"Sounds like Russian," added Cutty, his conscience pricking him. But
he welcomed that "Olga." It would naturally put a damper on Kitty's
interest. "There's Harrison with the nurse."
Quarter of an hour later the patient was taken down to the ambulance
and conveyed to the private hospital. Cutty had no way of ascertaining
whether they were followed; but he hoped they would be. The knowledge
that their victim was in a near-by hospital would naturally serve to
relax the enemy vigilance temporarily; and this would permit safely and
secretly the second leg of the journey--that to his own apartment.