him at the foot of the stairs. As I turned and started to go back into Mrs. Whitney’s room, I stopped. I was looking directly into the mirrored panel at the right of the shell-ceilinged recess. The long mirror inside in her door was reflected in it. I could see her lying back on her cushions, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling. I could not only see her, I could see a series of other reflections from other mirrors, and in them the lower hall—the hall I was in—and a part of the upper hall too. Those mirrors weren’t just decorative detail in a modern interior architecture at all. They were placed, like the ones outside her window, with method and purpose. She could sit in her Empire swan-sleigh bed and see all approaches to her room. More than that, she could have seen Laurel Frazier go up to Myron’s room, and seen that Myron hadn’t either come in or gone up. Her sending Monk up, knowing Laurel was there, must have been a conscious and deliberate act.
The rattle and clack and ring of Myron’s typewriter starting up at full speed came abruptly down the stair well. I saw Mrs. Whitney move, and I went on into her room.
“Did you find Myron’s letter?” she asked, more to be polite than anything else, from her manner.
“No. What happened to it?” I asked, meeting her blue gaze directly.
“It’s so difficult to be Sure about things, isn’t it?” she said vaguely.
“Didn’t you see who took it?”
“I’ve got awfully blind with Advancing Years,” she said. “But you’ve got eyes, Dear Child. You should train yourself to use them.”
It could have meant a lot of things. At the moment, I would have bet anything she had it stowed away somewhere under her cushions.
“And there’s something else,” she said. “I heard you tell my Nephew I was a scheming, Worldly Old Woman.”
I was so taken aback that I wasn’t sure whether she said, “I heard you tell” or “I hear you told.” If it was the first, she must have had very keen ears, because I couldn’t now hear the sound of Myron’s typewriter. If the other, it meant, of course, that Monk had repeated it to her. I’d have thought better of him, but, after all, I had no way of knowing what he would do.
She was looking at me with a faintly amused gleam in her old blue eyes.
“Well,” I began, by way of apology.
“Not at all, Dear Child, not At All,” she said promptly. “I thought it was very Intelligent in you, and not Unworldly in itself. My nephew would never have thought of it. But you will understand I won’t need your Policeman now. Their methods are tedious and long-drawn-out; I’m sure my Own are better.” She looked past me at the mirror beside the door. “Myron is going out. I thought he was Most Disturbed, didn’t you?”
I was finding it rapidly more difficult to think at all. I was appalled. I just stood there staring at her, blankly.
“Don’t be Naïve, Dear Child,” she said. “What I have suggested is the Best Possible Solution for everybody.”
“For everybody except Laurel Frazier,” I said, with some warmth.
“For Everybody,” she repeated. “If Laurel marries Travis, she’ll be buried alive out on the Main Line. She’ll take him to the eight-thirty train every morning, and meet him again at five-thirty. She’ll take the children to school, and she’ll pick them up. She’ll play tennis and bridge and go to Meetings, and in five years she’ll be just like Elsie Phelps, a typical suburban matron. It is a Living Death. If she marries Myron Kane, she’ll live in New York and Washington and abroad. Laurel is perfectly aware the only thing wrong with Myron Kane is a sense of Social Inferiority. Her background is excellent Philadelphia, all Myron Kane needs to make a Powerful Person of him. He needs her, Travis does not. Any nice girl, preferably one not so bright as Laurel is, is all dear Travis needs.”
“It doesn’t matter whether she’s in love with Myron or not, I take it,” I said, as calmly as I could.
Her hands moved slightly on the green cover. “Love has very little to do with marriage, in my opinion, and I’ve had sufficient Experience to speak with Authority. Actually, the nearest to love Laurel has ever come is her Blind Hero Worship for my Brother. She was attracted to Myron in London. Money, I think, has more to do with marriage than Love has, and I’m prepared to underwrite that aspect of Myron and Laurel’s life, even though he has a handsome income of his own from his Writings.”
“Why,” I asked, “don’t you just buy him off, and leave Laurel out of the picture?”
She looked at me placidly for an instant, and when she spoke, Colonel Primrose himself couldn’t have been more suave. “The Dear Boy can’t be bought with money. I would have failed if I had attempted anything as unpolitic as that. I have a very simple Code of Ethics, Dear Child. I believe a single Mistake, however Serious, should not be held against a man who has Repented it and become a Respected Citizen. I think the Dead Past should be allowed to stay Buried.”
Her voice was firm and clear, and the only sign of agitation was her hand fiddling with the dial of the small radio on the table beside her.
“I am sure Elsie is right in saying that if it had not been that Laurel and Myron Kane were attracted to each other in London last summer, he would never have come here to write a Profile of my Brother. He would not have had the opportunity to dig up the Past. If by marrying him, Laurel can undo the Harm she has done—however much my Brother would pretend to be opposed to it—I feel she should do it. But I would be the Last to attempt to Force her to do it or even allow her to know I thought it her Duty.”
What she called everything she’d been saying up to that point, I had no idea.
“You ask me very legitimately, I think, what there can be in my Brother’s life that cannot be published in The Saturday Evening Post,” she went on. “You have never met my Brother?”
I shook my head.
“They complain that dear Monk Whitney is wild and untractable, and had to have a War to Come of Age,” she said. “My brother didn’t have a War, and his son is a pale and docile Lamb compared with him. Women adored him. He married, because it was expected of him, the way his son will no doubt do—before he met the woman he adored. He paid for that, and so did she. That is what Elsie wants kept out of The Saturday Evening Post.”
She stopped for a moment, looking very steadily at me. “It is not what I want kept out. My Brother killed a man. That is what I want kept out. That is why I don’t see my Brother. He doesn’t know I know it. That man is dead. I loved him, but I want him to stay dead. I don’t want another Useful Life destroyed because of one Mistake.”
Her voice was vibrating, her eyes a burning vivid blue under the preposterous fuzz of henna hair. I’d hardly noticed that she had dropped all but the emphasis of her usual roundabout speech, and all her vagueness.
“That, Dear Child, is why I would be happy to see Laurel marry Myron Kane,” she said. “And now, I’m Very Tired. Will you close the door as you go out? One can’t always be sure, my dear. We may still need your Policeman.”
I was too torn by conflicting ideas and emotions and too bewildered by the whole thing to think very clearly or even think at all. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood there for a moment, my hand still on the knob. Then I sort of came to, and blinked my eyes without quite believing I was seeing properly.
The
