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."