She smoked three cigarettes.
Her sense of aloneness became stifling. The conceit grew upon her nervous condition that she had changed places with the furniture. She had become inanimate and the furniture endowed with attributes of life, as if her being were under the influence of some dispassionate regard by something that had no eyes with which to see. It was nonsense—nonsense. She never should have listened—at least not attentively—to that wretched old woman. She could very well just have given the appearance … one had to be polite …
Mrs. Endicott moved restlessly to one of the draped windows and stared down on the silent street. About her stretched the city of New York, and yet her environment could not have been quieter in some cabin in the woods. Not as quiet. Her memory swerved to that hellish week with Herbert in the forests outside of Copenhagen … what on earth was the name of that little watering place … Trollhättan? … No, that was in Sweden. Names never mattered. She looked up for a while at a slender slice of night sky horizoned by cornices across the street. It was heavy with stars that held her as if they were so many magic mediums arranged in heaven for the express purpose of granting her earthbound wishes. Wishes? She shrugged. She released the drapes, and they settled into place.
A maid opened the living-room door and came in.
“A lieutenant from the precinct station, madam.”
“All right, Jane. Ask him to come up here. Did he give his name?”
“Lieutenant Valcour, madam, I think he said.”
“Try and be more careful in the future about getting names.”
“Yes, madam.”
Mrs. Endicott lighted another cigarette. Her sense of having done the proper thing began to desert her in a rush. The police had a habit of finding things out—unexpected things, irrelevant to any matter on hand. She was sure of it, and wondered on what she based the knowledge: books, hearsay. She would have to be careful, but after all, a person with intelligence—He was standing in the doorway.
“My maid,” she said, “wasn’t sure of your name. Is it Valcour?” She noticed with a sense of relief that he was not in uniform and that he had left his hat and overcoat downstairs. Mrs. Endicott had an aversion to discussing things which fringed on possible intimacies with people who were hatted and coated. He was a mild elderly man with features that were homely but not undistinguished, well dressed in tweed, and not smoking a cigar. He affected her with a quieting sense of reassurance.
“Valcour is correct, Mrs. Endicott. I happened to be leaving for home when your call was put in, so I stopped in personally instead of sending a detective as you suggested.”
The faint trace of cultured precision in his speech made her suspect foreign origin. She was sensitive to voices, and while not exactly collecting them, they almost amounted with her to a hobby. They were an essential part in the attraction she felt toward certain people, and it would have been within the bounds of possibility for her to have fallen in love with a voice.
“You are of French origin, Lieutenant?”
“French-Canadian, Mrs. Endicott. I became naturalized twenty years ago.”
She offered her hand. They sat down. Now that he was here she felt that the necessity for hurry had vanished; his air of official protection had erased it. She wondered how it would be best to begin: just where to plunge into the foggy mass that composed her worry.
Lieutenant Valcour accepted a cigarette and lighted it. He was agreeably impressed with Mrs. Endicott and with the room. Both were unusual, and the competent foundation in culture he had acquired at McGill University in his youth enabled him to place them at a proper evaluation. The furniture was low set in design and severely simple, the general effect one of spaciousness and repose oddly marred by a muted undernote of harshness. It was not bizarre. He suspected it, correctly, of being modernistic. Mrs. Endicott herself had the startlingly clear perfection of features one occasionally finds in blondes. He decided that her age centred on twenty-five. Beneath her authentic beauty—her face seemed planed in pale tones of pink ice—there would be a definite substrata of metal. He noted that the six cigarette butts crushed in the vermilion lacquered tray on a small table beside her chair had not been smoked beyond a few puffs each. A clock standing on the broad-shelved mantel of the fireplace struck nine.
“My husband,” Mrs. Endicott said abruptly, “has been gone now exactly two hours.”
Lieutenant Valcour smiled amiably and settled himself a little less formally in his chair. His manner presented itself to her as a freshly sponged slate upon which she could trace any markings that she might choose.
“He left here at seven o’clock this evening,” Mrs. Endicott said, “to go to the apartment of a woman with whom he thinks he is in love. Her name is Marge Myles, and her apartment is on the Drive.”
Lieutenant Valcour’s smile seemed to offer both consolation and an apology.
“I’m afraid there isn’t very much we can do for you,” he said. “It’s always private inquiry agents who handle work of that—well, of that rather delicate character.”
“No—I haven’t made myself plain.” Mrs. Endicott’s indeterminate thoughts began to crystallize. “I’m not looking for evidence to secure a divorce. This woman is nothing of any permanence, but I’m afraid of her—of what she might do to Herbert.” Then she added, as if the simple statement in itself would insure his comprehension, “You see, I’ve seen her.”
“With him?”
“Yes. They were lunching at the St. Regis. Herbert always was a fool about those things.
