“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.”