10:17 p.m. —Living or Dead?
Lieutenant Valcour’s eyes narrowed slightly. He had a habit of dividing suicides into two classes—those who talked about killing themselves, and those who did so. He knew that the two rarely overlapped. He felt a shocking conviction that in Mrs. Endicott’s case she might well have been the exception which proved the rule. “I suppose an attic is the conventional place for suicide,” he said. “Or at least to think about it.”
Mrs. Endicott’s laugh was without humour. “One doesn’t need an attic in order to think about it.”
“That’s true. And so you went downstairs with him, then?”
“He followed me in here. That is,” she corrected herself with noticeable carelessness, “we went into the living room and he wondered, while he kissed me, whether I’d mind very much being alone for dinner. I doubt whether you’ve ever experienced, Lieutenant, the rather perfect torture of a, well, an abstract kiss. Men don’t.”
“We’re too self-centred, I’m afraid, or conceited or something, or else our sensibilities aren’t refined enough to be hurt by it.”
“But you could understand—if you could vision the background?”
“Everybody knows what love is, Mrs. Endicott.”
“That’s just it—it’s the comparison of what is with what has been. It’s an indescribably vulgar subject—kissing—but it’s either very wonderful or very painful. People who claim it can be a combination talk nonsense. We can eliminate, of course—”