“You wouldn’t, by any chance, be letting anyone kid you, would you, Chief?”
He shook his head and lowered his voice as though imparting a deep and mysterious secret. “Of course,” he said, “I’m no gossip, and I wouldn’t say this to anyone but you, and I don’t want you to repeat it. Of course, I can’t be certain myself because I got it from that snooty old Mrs. Blank, and she’s the worst gossip on earth, but her brother-in-law works for a Broadway columnist and his secretary told...”
She laughed and said, “Come on, Chief, back to normal, and give me the low-down. My heart’s going pit-a-pat.”
Mason said, “Virginia Trent has a boyfriend.”
“Oh-oh,” Della Street exclaimed, clapping her right hand over her heart and fanning herself with her left hand. “Air! Give me air!... My poor heart!... You wouldn’t kid a working girl, would you, Chief?”
Mason said, “She went for a walk with him Saturday afternoon, Della — a walk out into the secluded canyons and glades of the hill country back of the city.”
“Accompanied, I suppose, by two chaperons and a book on the psychology of courtship,” Della Street said.
“No,” Mason told her. “But evidently he isn’t the ordinary sort of boyfriend. He’s an earnest, sober, industrious individual who studies psychology in night school.”
“Well,” Della Street said, contemplating the problem with an elaborately puckered forehead, “he has possibilities anyway. He didn’t take her to the public library, and that’s something.”
“No,” Mason said. “They went out into the wooded pathways — but they do the quaintest things.”