the nervous tenseness of her body. She renewed the red on her upper lip where she had been biting it. She returned to the living room, lighted a cigarette, and picked up a novel which she did not read.
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.”