A sensible girl would rather know the truth and be
done with it. What a man has done with his life before a
girl--the right girl--comes into it isn't a personal injury to
her, since she wasn't a part of his life then. You know what I
mean. But she has a right to know it before she chooses."
"How many would choose under those circumstances?" he jibed.
Peter smiled. "Quite a few," he said cheerfully. "It's a wrong
system, of course; but we can get a little truth out of it."
"You can't get away with it" stuck in Stewart's mind for several
days. It was the one thing Peter said that did stick. And before
Stewart had recovered enough to be up and about he had made up
his mind to tell Anita. In his mind he made quite a case for
himself; he argued the affair against his conscience and came out
victorious.
Anita's party had broken up. The winter sports did not compare,
they complained, with St. Moritz. They disliked German cooking.
Into the bargain the weather was not good; the night's snows
turned soft by midday; and the crowds that began to throng the
hotels were solid citizens, not the fashionables of the Riviera.
Anita's arm forbade her traveling. In the reassembling of the
party she went to the Kurhaus in the valley below the pension
with one of the women who wished to take the baths.
It was to the Kurhaus, then, that Stewart made his first
excursion after the accident. He went to dinner. Part of the
chaperon's treatment called for an early retiring hour, which was
highly as he had wished it and rather unnerving after all.
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