MR. HUNTER: I stand corrected, I suppose. May it please the Court, my understanding was that any interruption of this reading would be made by counsel, in an orderly manner, not by the accused who is not at present under oath.
JUDGE MANN: It must be so ordered. I hope you understand the legal necessity, Miss Blake. If any other point comes up, please draw your counsel's attention and let him deal with it. That is the method required of us here. Incidentally, if anything during this reading makes it desirable for you to confer at any length with Mr. Warner, a short recess can always be requested, and the Court stands ready to allow it. Go ahead, Mr. Hunter.
MR. HUNTER: Well, the first letter is nearly finished. It concludes with these words:
"Understand, Jimmy, that I fit no pattern. No one can own me, no one can make me over. I was born a heretic and so live. No one can catch me except if I will.
"I love you.
"Callista."
The second letter, also from Callista Blake to James Doherty, bears no date except Thursday, but it is in an envelope marked PERSONAL, addressed in typing to Mr. Doherty at his office at Judd and Doherty, 12 Somerset Street, Winchester. The postmark on this envelope is June 18th. It reads as follows:
"Dear—
"More than a month ago I wrote you a letter, and I remember that although you didn't say so, you weren't exactly pleased at my doing it. So I am reckless, but look, love, the heavens didn't fall, the grass is still green and soft (as we should know) and so here I go again, because I want to take advantage of an evening when I seem to be fairly clear-headed, or as near it as I ever am. Anyway, darling, you told me Miss Anderson is out with a cold, so this is sure to pass through no hands but yours, isn't it?
"Jimmy, I can almost wish that Ann did know. Don't blow your top—caution will prevail. I'm just wishing. The fact of secrecy I don't particularly mind—what business of anyone else is it that I love you? I don't care about parading you before the world in a proper woman's look-what-I-caught manner—that's nothing, to me there's even a kind of indecency in public possessiveness. But I do mind the limitations and humiliations of secrecy, the haunting by social fears, enforced furtiveness—can't go alone into a restaurant with you, where some friend of yours and Ann's might notice you together with that screwball broad with the limp. That I hate. It's a spoiling thing. I wonder more and more whether we are big enough to stand much more of it. And yet if you tire of me, or if the dreary social pressure forces you away from me—I swear the world's turning into one big God-damned suburb—I don't know what will happen to me. I don't know if I'm big enough to take it. I suppose I am. I just don't know.
"Please tell me: is your own religious feeling so strong that you do actually feel sinful when you're with me? I hardly dared write that. Do you realize how badly you hedged when I asked you almost the same thing two nights ago? I wasn't asking about Ann's views, blast you—I know she'd condemn the whole thing without a moment's pause for thought—I wanted to find out how it was with you, but all you could talk about was how Ann would feel. Well, I picked the wrong time of course. A real feminine trick, to cross-examine you with your head on my breast and only a few minutes after the little death. Bitchy of me, I suppose I was going by instinct, and when I do that, bitchy is my middle name. But see, dear, everything's calm now, I'm not whispering in your ear, I'm only fumbling for words on paper. I suppose you do know, don't you, that if you had to be free of me I would let you go? The dryad's thorns would scratch some—that I couldn't help, couldn't help your bleeding a bit—but they couldn't hold you, and would not. I don't want you as a prisoner. You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.
MR. WARNER: I will call the jury's attention to the fact that there is no actual break in the letter at the point where Mr. Hunter stopped reading. The thought there is incomplete, and Miss Blake went on to complete it in the same paragraph.
MR. HUNTER: I will call the jury's attention to the fact that I have been reading a rather difficult handwriting for several minutes, and am slightly hoarse. I would also point out that it is the end of a page, and the indentation at the beginning of the next page looks to me very much like the beginning of a paragraph.
MR. WARNER: Mr. District Attorney, you must have noticed that Miss Blake's writing does not make a very precise left-hand margin, but the paragraph indentations are characteristically quite deep.