“At neither, Lieutenant. I didn’t have a gun.”
“Then it was just curiosity?”
“What was?”
“Your going out on the balcony.”
“I didn’t go out on the balcony. I’ve never been on it in my life.”
“I am not stupid, Mrs. Endicott.”
“Nor very credulous, either.”
“No, nor credulous.”
“That’s the trouble with truth: it often sounds so silly.”
“Surely you realize how things look against you, Mrs. Endicott.”
“Black.”
“The worst of all is your not having taken the narcotic, and then having pretended to be in a state of unconsciousness.”
Her eyes became stupefyingly innocent. “Is it illegal to decide not to take medicine, Lieutenant?”
His respect for her as an adversary began to mount by leaps and bounds. “No, Mrs. Endicott. But in the present case it was purposefully deceptive.”
“Why, I simply disliked hurting Dr. Worth’s feelings; that was all.”
Lieutenant Valcour pictured her maintaining that attitude—smartly dressed in becomingly plain black, very innocent, very beautiful-looking—before the twelve impressionable and normally dumb people one finds on juries. He was grudgingly afraid she could get away with it.