clichés of what any universal acceptance of her implied philosophy would do to society. He imagined rather accurately the treatment she would hand out to them. And like most people who had got what they wanted, he didn’t know even faintly what to do with it. He couldn’t come out flatly and ask her if she was planning to marry Hollander, and apart from the insight it gave him into her character there hadn’t been any special advancement toward a definite solution of the problem of who did kill her husband, and for what motive. Lieutenant Valcour began to feel that it was he who had landed in the quicksands rather than herself.
“You have been very patient with me, Mrs. Endicott, and very kind. To an extent I am beginning to understand you. We have arrived again, but perhaps with a surer footing this time, at our stumbling block. Before we attack it, I wonder if you cannot think of any reason why your husband should have joined you up here in the attic when he found you here yesterday afternoon.”
Mrs. Endicott was still too drugged with abstracts to attend very kindly to the mechanics of detailed fact.
“Well,” she said, “it wasn’t to commit suicide. That leaves your other nine tenths, doesn’t it?”
“You mean that he must have been just looking for something?”
“There’s hardly any other plausible explanation.”
“But does he keep things up here?”
“He may have. This is his trunk.”
She moved off toward the window, disinterested in anything further that he might care to do. A complete lassitude drenched her, and she sunned it negligently in the light sifting down through dusty panes.