Jeff was too fully occupied in taking in the newcomer's many perfections to be capable of speech. His mind was in a sort of emotional welter, to the surface of which, like an egg shell in a maelstrom, there kept bobbing one coherent thought—to wit, that if this was the sort of girl who frequented the offices of private investigators, he had been mad not to have become a private investigator before. It was true that almost anybody who did not look like Myrtle Shoesmith would have appealed to him at the moment, and Anne Benedick was supremely unlike Myrtle Shoesmith, but the thing went deeper than that. There was something about this visitor that seemed to touch some hidden chord in his being, setting joy bells ringing and torchlight processions parading through the echoing corridors of his soul. Romeo, he fancied, must have experienced a somewhat similar, though weaker, emotion on first beholding Juliet. As for Anne, her reactions, if less ecstatic, were distinctly favourable. Halsey Court, and particularly the staircase of Halsey Buildings, had prepared her for something pretty outstandingly bad in the way of investigators—something, indeed, very like the Chimp Twist who might so easily have been there to receive her: and this agreeable, clean-cut young man came as a refreshing surprise.
