She didn’t go on. She sat looking at me with a frown in her eyes but her brow smooth and white. She got up and went to a table, took a cigarette from a box and lit it, and picked up an ash tray. She came back to the couch and sat down and took a couple of whiffs. Then she looked at the cigarette as if wondering where it had come from, and crushed it dead on the tray, and set the tray down. She straightened up and seemed to remember I was looking at her. She spoke suddenly:
“What did you say your name is?”
“Archie Goodwin.”
“Thank you. I should know your name. Strange things can happen, can’t they? Why did you tell me not to talk to Mr. Cabot?”
“No special reason. Right now I don’t want you to be talking to anybody but me.”
She nodded. “And I’m doing it. Mr. Goodwin, you’re not much over half my age and I never saw you before. You seem to be clever. You realized, I suppose, what the shock of seeing my husband dead, shot dead, has done to me. It has shaken things loose. I am doing something very remarkable, for me. I don’t usually talk, below the surface. I never have, since childhood, except with two people. My husband, my dear husband, and Paul Chapin. But we aren’t talking about my husband, there’s nothing to say about him. He’s dead. He is dead... I shall have to tell myself many times... he is dead. He wants to go on living in me, or I want him to. I think — this is what I am really saying — I think I would want Paul to.—Oh, it’s impossible!” She jerked herself up, and her hands got clasped again. “It’s absurd to try to talk about this — even to a stranger — and with Lorrie dead — absurd...”
I said, “Maybe it’s absurd not to. Let it crack open once, spill it out.”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing to crack open. There’s no reason why I should want to talk about it, but I do. Otherwise why should I let you question me? I saw farther inside myself this evening than I have ever seen before. It wasn’t when I saw my husband dead, it wasn’t when I stood alone in my room, looking at a picture of him, trying to realize he was dead. It was sitting here with that police inspector, with him telling me that a plea of guilty is not accepted in first degree murder, and that I would have to talk with a representative of the District Attorney, and would have to testify in court so that Paul Chapin can be convicted and punished. I don’t want him punished. My husband is dead, isn’t that enough? And if I don’t want him punished, what is it I want to hold onto? Is it pity? I have never pitied him. I have been pretty insolent with life, but not insolent enough to pity Paul Chapin. You told me that he has a box filled with my gloves and stockings which Dora stole for him, and that Nero Wolfe said it holds his soul. Perhaps my soul has been put away in a box too, and I didn’t even know it...”
She got up, abruptly. The ash tray slid off the couch to the floor. She stooped over, and with deliberate fingers that showed no sign of trembling picked up the burnt match stick and the cigarette and put them on the tray. I didn’t move to help her. She went to the table with the tray and then came back to the couch and sat down again. She said:
“I have always disliked Paul Chapin. Once, when I was eighteen years old, I promised to marry him. When I learned of his accident, that he was crippled for life, I was delighted because I wouldn’t have to keep my promise. I didn’t know that then but I realized it later. At no time have I pitied him. I claim no originality in that, I think no woman has ever pitied him, only men. Women do not like him — even those who have been briefly fascinated by him. I dislike him intensely. I have thought about this; I have had occasion to analyze it; it is his deformity that is intolerable. Not his physical deformity. The deformity of his nervous system, of his brain. You have heard of feminine cunning, but you don’t understand it as Paul does, for he has it himself. It is a hateful quality in a man. Women have been fascinated by it, but the two or three who surrendered to it — I not among them, not even at eighteen — got only contempt for a reward.