“Not from Church Leap,” he replied. “I’ve got too much respect for my bones. It’s awfully tricky; I’ve gone down from below it. You don’t get such a speed on then.”
“Oh, Major Staines, you won’t toboggan?” Claire cried out. “You know you mustn’t toboggan! Dr. Gurnet said you mustn’t. You won’t, will you? Captain Drummond, aren’t you going with him to stop him?”
Lionel laughed.
“He isn’t a very easy person to stop,” he answered her. “I’ll join him later on, of course; but I want to see a little more of Davos before I go.”
“There isn’t the slightest danger,” Winn remarked, without meeting Claire’s eyes. “The Cresta’s as safe as a church hassock. There isn’t half the skill in tobogganing that there is in skating. Good-by, Miss Rivers. I never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed our skating competition. I’m most grateful to you for putting up with me.”
Claire gave him her hand then, but Winn remembered afterward that she never said good-by. She looked at him as if he had done something which was not fair.
CHAPTER XXI
Winn’s chief objection to St. Moritz was the shabby way in which it imitated Davos. It had all the same materials — endless snows, forests of fir-trees, soaring peaks and the serene blueness of the skies — and yet as Davos it didn’t in the least come off. It was more beautiful and less definite; the peaks were nearer and higher; they streamed out around the valley like an army with banners. The long, low lake and the small, perched villages, grossly overtopped by vulgar hotel palaces, had a far more fugitive air.
It was a place without a life of its own. Whatever character St. Moritz might once have had was as lost as that of the most catholic of evening ladies in Piccadilly.
Davos had had the dignity of its purpose; it had set out to heal. St. Moritz, on the contrary, set out to avoid healing. It was haunted by crown princes and millionaire Jews, ladies with incredible ear-rings and priceless furs; sharp, little, baffling trans-atlantic children thronged its narrow streets, and passed away from it as casually as a company of tramps.