"My regrets, your Honor. I had no such intention." Throws it like a bone to a dog—Terry's no dog—but—"Miss Blake, I will read to you from the second letter. You had been asking about Doherty's religious views, and then you wrote: '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.' Miss Blake, by what reasoning it is possible to reconcile that remark with your alleged intention of asking Mrs. Doherty to agree to a separation? How could you write that about her, and then in the very same letter talk about her meekly agreeing to a separation?"
"I suppose—I suppose the remark about her condemning us—I suppose I wrote that in a moment of exasperation, and was calmer later on. I don't know—must a love-letter be consistent like a dictionary?"
"All right, I see what you mean, but on that point the inconsistency is really glaring, isn't it? You knew—elsewhere in the letters you even grudgingly admit—that Mrs. Doherty loved her husband. You knew, and you specifically said, that she would regard your adulterous relation with him as sinful—of course, how could you doubt it, what wife in her right mind wouldn't regard it so? Yet in almost the same breath you're talking about a separation, as if you expected Ann Doherty to throw away her marriage, violate her deepest religious convictions, humbly agree to letting her husband go live in sin with his ... with you. Consistent?"
"I suppose it's inconsistent, if you make no allowance for the other things I said."
"Oh—there is something else in the letter that makes it consistent?"
"I don't know—I don't know."
"Miss Blake, on the basis of these letters, and your testimony, I will ask you: weren't you, in all this talk of a separation, simply proposing an impossibility, knowing it was one, to—well, what? See what Jimmy would do? To feel him out maybe, find out if he'd go along with you on some much more direct method of—eliminating the woman who was in the way?"
"That's idiotic."
"Well, if I'm an idiot you should have no trouble defending yourself."
"Witness and counsel will both confine themselves to the issues. No more of that sort of thing."