"I think it is—I think you—no, never mind, I don't mean that. Go ahead and ask your question—what do you want to know?"
"I am asking for your interpretation of that sentence: 'You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free'—insofar as it does refer to Ann Doherty."
Her voice had gone dull and flat, hard to hear from Warner's place: "No interpretation except the obvious one. His marriage trapped him, confined him." Warner's ears had begun a faint ringing; he undid the top button of his shirt—a little better. "I suppose marriage does that for anyone, man or woman, and usually the restrictions are voluntarily accepted, welcomed, or so people like to think. I suppose that's all I meant."
"But the rest of the sentence, Miss Blake—'I wish I might set you free'—what did you mean by that?"
"Why, the—the separation—what I've said repeatedly—I think I wrote about that in the very next paragraph, didn't I?"
"Yes, you did," said Hunter in a dull and abstracted voice that curiously echoed her own. "So you did. 'You are already a prisoner, and I wish I might set you free.'" He came out of his abstraction briskly. "Well—no more about that? Nothing you wish to add?"
"Nothing."
"I see. 'Are we savages to be held in line by magic words mumbled in the mouth of a priest?'—do you want to comment on that sentence from your letter, Miss Blake? Explain, perhaps, why it's not to be taken as an attack on James Doherty's religion?"
"Genuine faith can't be attacked, Mr. Hunter, because it hasn't anything to do with reason. Religious people sometimes admit that themselves, if they've done any thinking about it. I remember hoping rather foolishly that he would be able to see my side of the question. As for what I wrote there, it's a—a comment on superstition. If you heard it in ordinary conversation it wouldn't trouble you much. It's important now only because you've decided to try me for irreligion as well as murder."