"No, Miss Blake, I am still concerned with your attitude toward law, as it bears on your credibility and on the issues of this trial. Now I hear that the marriage sacrament to you is a superstition proper to savages—that's what you meant, isn't it?"
"Marriage is a legal status. A marriage certificate is a legal document. When you talk about the sacrament of marriage you're expressing a religious view that has no legal meaning."
"Oh, well—"
"Ask any lawyer."
"Why, as an amateur lawyer, Miss Blake, you happen to be perfectly right. But that isn't quite the point, is it? It seems to me that in tossing off a comment like that to James Doherty on the subject of his marriage to Ann Doherty you were placing yourself pretty far above the law as well as above religion. Heard now, under these circumstances, doesn't it sound pretty arrogant even to you?"
"Not nearly as arrogant as the first premises of a true believer or a prosecuting attorney—"
The break in her voice had been unmistakable. Warner knew that if he stood up then and spoke, he would only be compounding disaster by drawing more attention to it. When did I lose her? When did she go away? A little while ago she still desired to live. He tried to recast the outline of his closing speech—more emphasis here, less there. And perhaps in redirect some of the damage could be repaired. The defense never rests.
"I suppose I must leave it at that," Hunter said. "But maybe I ought to remind you, Miss Blake, that I could have no interest in making any personal attack against you, as you seem to feel I'm doing. I am simply a servant of the State, with a duty to perform."
"No," she said emptily, "that's not quite true. Impartiality isn't any part of the system. You hate and fear me because—"
"Miss Blake," said Judge Mann sharply, "for your own sake there must be no such expressions of personal feeling. It's perfectly true that impartiality is hard to achieve, because we're all human. But in a law court we do try to achieve it. This procedure, this sometimes clumsy mechanism of a trial—it's an attempt at fairness, objectivity, the best we can do under the present conditions of society. Now I must warn you, and very urgently: simply answer the prosecutor's questions as plainly as you can, unless the Court rules you need not answer, and don't try to go beyond those questions. That rule—in fact the whole procedure—is for your own protection."