"Yes, it has."
"Do you at present do any artistic work yourself, besides photography?"
"Not just at present. I have in the past. Illustrations for a children's book a couple of years ago. Nothing grand, but I hear the kids liked them. A few things like that."
"In any case you do have professional training and professional standing. I'm going to ask you for what the law calls an expert opinion. Miss Nolan, if you were not personally acquainted with Callista Blake, and if you were called on to judge her work, say in an exhibition of good serious modern painters, how would you rate it?"
Judge Mann saw T. J. Hunter consider an objection and settle for a somewhat elaborate bored look. The red-haired woman smiled, for the first time. Mann's pencil on the doodle-pad rather angrily crossed out its attempt to draw her face, not in cartoon but in a portrait sketch. It had escaped him altogether. I haven't got it. He laid the pencil down.
"It's hard to imagine myself not acquainted with Callista. But I think I can do it, Mr. Warner, for that one question. If I knew nothing about her, if I were seeing her painting or drawing for the first time under those conditions, I think it would be likely to outshine anything else in the show."
"If it were like this, for instance?" Intent on Edith Nolan's face, Mann had not been aware of Warner's drawing from his pocket a folded cover paper. Now it was in the red-haired woman's hands, and she was taking from it a page, evidently from a small scratch-pad, gazing at it and steadying it with her other hand because her fingers had started to shake. He thought in distress: Damn it, we do have to have some rules—
"Oh! When did she do this, Mr. Warner?"
"This morning, in court. Scratch paper. Before the reading of the letters, when Mr. Hunter and I were in side-bar conference and nothing else was happening."