“More than engrossment. Amazement. Philip finds in the envelope no note at all. He finds a word from me in such strange hands ... and no note.” “That is true. It would be enough to bewilder: to stun. That is important. But why my envelope?” “Well, it _is_ your envelope?” she smiled again. “I feel certain of it.” “There must be a reason. Possibly to attach suspicion to yourself?” “A clumsy way, Mildred. A clumsy thing to do since I never met the man. Besides, the envelope lies on the floor of a passage where the police failed even to find it. The murderer would not have bungled there after his perfect blow. The envelope would have been in the victim’s hand if it was to serve as a false clew.” “You are assuming perfection in the murderer, John. That does not strike me as correct. If he’d been perfect he’d have left no clew at all ... and he was seen, seen clearly. Therefore, he is not perfect. Therefore, illogic might enter in: even contradiction--even absurd elaboration.” “Yes.” I was thinking of my talk with Doctor Stein. Where had my sudden words sprung from?--Perfection ... illogic ... contradiction: Mildred went on: “You can’t assume that this act is a perfect single whole, with no excrescence, no alien details.” I marveled at her. “A man so perfect as to murder perfectly would not murder at all.” “Go on.” “Not murder Philip LaMotte.” “Go on.” “The fact that he needed to destroy a person so noble, so great, proves his own imperfection: proves that there was a flaw in him; a flaw of bad thinking, a flaw of impure action. By that flaw you will find him.” “Mildred, you mean that it is precisely in some act of his which we who are not murderers would reason could not have been committed, that we will find him?” “That you will find him, John.” “I?” “I think you will look for him, John.” “Not we?” “I cannot look for him, John. But I feel that you will look for him ... and you are going to find him.” So quietly she spoke: almost so pleasantly: again I knew how in her perfection there could be room not alone for no fear, even for no emphasis. She had the ruthlessness of purity. And I was caught in it: held now forever in the white fierce light of her exaction. Would I burn in it? or grow luminous? Would I grow luminous first, and burn at last? So quietly she spoke: “I feel that you will find him.” And I was quiet, too. I had resolved to tell my whole experience: in the street at the hour of Philip LaMotte’s death, in his room this morning where his wound had told so mysterious a tale. Her way silenced me. She did not want to enter, in her own person, this dark threshold. Was she commanding me to proceed for her, or was she expressing her impersonal knowledge of what I was going to do? It mattered little. I knew the event chained me. I knew that she knew what I was going to do. Perhaps when I saw light I might know also why.