“She is a nice girl—a lady, in fact, but I can’t believe she is exactly what she says she is—I mean a girl with a job selling bone buttons and things. Not that there aren’t a great many ladies in shops—I don’t mean that there aren’t—and elegant gentlemen, too, but there is something about her and her clothes—”
“Ah! Her clothes! She seems to me to be simply dressed, more so than most of her fellow employees.”
“Exactly, but have you felt of them?”
“Not exactly!” answered the detective with dignity.
“I mean the material is so good, it would take almost a month’s salary to pay for one of her dresses, unless she makes a great deal more than girls just beginning usually make. And she has all of her dresses duplicated.”
“Was it only her clothes that made you think she was different?”
“Oh no, it was the way she talks. I hadn’t really had a positive suspicion of her being something she said she wasn’t, or rather not being what she said she was, until last night when we were sitting around the table reading and sewing. Josie got to talking about noted criminals and what they did and how detectives caught them—”
“Just stuff she had read in cheap magazines, I presume.”
“No, not fiction but facts.”
The Major became as eager as a hound on trail. Here were facts—excellent things for a detective to know—and in the possession of a woman. How easy it would be for him, with his years of experience, to wheedle this artless soul into telling all she knew.