Her throat grew tight, her eyes hot, at thought
of how badly she needed her guide.

Then, perhaps in self-defense, she saw her friend Captain Prescott, not
as a victim of the violation of canons, but as a violator of them
himself. She turned from Ann's past to his.

"Harry," she asked, in rather metallic voice, "how about that affair of
yours down in Cuba?"

He flushed with surprise and resentment. "I must say, Katie," he said
stiffly, "I don't see what it has to do with this."

"Why, I should think it might have something to do with it. Isn't there a
popular notion that our pasts have something to do with our futures?"

"It's all over," he said shortly.

"Then you would say, Harry, that when things are over they're over. That
they needn't tie up the future."

"Certainly not," said he, making it clear that he wanted that phase of
the conversation "over."

"It's my own theory," said Katie. "But I didn't know whether or not it
was yours. Now if I had had a past, and it was, as you say yours is,
all over, I shouldn't think it was any man's business to go poking
around in it."

"That," he said, "is a different matter."

"What's a different matter?" she asked aggressively.

"A woman's past. That would be a man's business."

"Though a man's past is not a woman's business?"

"Oh, we certainly needn't argue that old nonsense. You're too much the
girl of the world to take any such absurd position, Katie."

"Of course, being what you call a 'girl of the world' it's absurd I
should question the man's point of view, but I can't quite get the logic
of it. You wouldn't marry a woman with a past, and yet the woman who
marries you is marrying a man with one."

"I've lived a man's life," he said. And he said it with a certain pride.

"And perhaps she's lived a woman's life," Katie was thinking. Only the
woman was not entitled to the pride. For her it led toward
self-destruction rather than self-approval.

"It's this way, Katie," he explained to her. "This is the difference. A
woman's past doesn't stay in the past. It marks her. Why I can tell a
woman with a past every time," he concluded confidently.

Katie sat there smiling at him. The smile puzzled him.

"Now look here, Katie, surely you--a girl of the world--the good
sort--aren't going to be so melodramatic as to dig up a 'past' for
me, are you?"

"No," said Katie, "I don't want to be melodramatic. I'll try to dig up
no pasts."

His talk ran on, and her th