"One, that I shall not say I am guilty."
"Yes. The other is that when Hunter is attacking you, as he will, without mercy and with every trick he knows, you'll remember that you, and your friends, desire you to live."
"That I can promise. The other—"
"Callista, look up at me."
"Not yet. In a moment."
"Tell me this: is there any virtue, any rational good, in declaring a literal truth when misinterpretation is inevitable, when you know to a certainty that your hearers cannot grasp the whole truth nor keep the partial truth in proportion, nor even guess at the background, the related truths?"
"Virtue—rational good—I'm too confused, Cecil. Other thoughts. I don't know. I suppose not."
"You call yourself guilty—of a momentary lapse that happened to end in disaster. But if you say that much, the jury will inevitably charge you with a different sort of guilt. They will say: she brooded and planned to murder her lover's wife, the old story—let her burn! But is it right, reasonable, is it anything but insane, that for such a lapse, when you were sick in mind and body, you should be strapped in a chair and the life burned out of you?"
"You can frighten me, Cecil. It's strange. I don't think the brute fact has really frightened me before, not completely. It wasn't real."
"It's real. I was trying to frighten you. You must not say on the stand what you've said to me tonight. I know it to be truth, because you've said it to me. Telling it to the jury will not serve truth, because their minds will make a lie of it. Look up at me now."