It was interesting, perhaps important for the case, yet not precisely what I had started out to find. "What of Doctor Lathrop?" I asked. "What did he do?"
"He wasn't in the room at the time. He was down in the café. Wilford tried to brazen it out and Vina acted properly surprised. She can be quite an actress, too, when she wants to be. No, Doctor Lathrop didn't pay any attention to it—that is, not so any one saw it. But Vance Shattuck did. I remember him particularly that evening. Of course I know many of the stories back in his life—and a good deal of what they say about him now. He had been one of the partners Honora had persistently refused, but they did sit out a dance together and I'm sure it was she that ended the tête-à-tête, not he. He seemed to have very little interest in any one else there, and I saw him taking in the whole affair. Once he started forward, as if to offer to escort her home, then checked himself. I think he seemed to be rather pleased than otherwise at the turn of events in that little affair."
"Playing a deep game?" I suggested.
Belle Balcom shrugged. "I don't know—perhaps. Really, I thought at the time that this was not a triangle, but the making of a fine quadrangle—that is," she laughed breezily, "if you include Vance Shattuck, I guess you would call it a pentangle."
"At any rate, all grist for the society-news mill," I smiled. "Doctor Lathrop really knew of the incident, didn't he?—at least, learned of it afterward?"
"I imagine so."
"You know the talk about the Lathrops?" I hinted.
"I think I do—and I knew it long before this case started people's tongues wagging, too."
"I understand it wasn't Wilford, after all, that Vina was interested in—but Shattuck himself."
"So they say. Society gets its geometry pretty mixed in some of these angles," she laughed.