"A message. She wanted me to come to you with a message. 'Tell my friend Edith I'll sleep well tonight, and ask her whether she'd like me to try Doris Wayne in oil or watercolor.'" He would not quite look at her. "She was smiling, Edith. It seemed to be a little flash of happiness, like a breeze on a still day."
"It's good if she can think ahead. I've been trying to, but I can't. Herb Chalmers was here, wandered off—good Lord, half an hour ago! I've just been sitting like a vegetable." She saw his eyes were held by the clock, against his will. "Cecil, does it necessarily mean anything at all, when they stay out this long?"
He looked at her then, studying her face as if from a distance, deeply aware of her and certainly no less aware of the girl in the detention cell. He said: "It's not good."
"It's what would happen if there was a disagreement, isn't it?"
"Yes. A disagreement would not be good. A new trial very likely wouldn't come before Terence Mann. And I wouldn't be competent, physically competent, to go through it again. I'm getting pains down the left arm, other things—" he waved his hand quickly and irritably to dismiss the concern in her face. "Couldn't risk conking out in the middle of a trial. That would make a mistrial, then another wait, a third trial with some other attorney, quite likely some other judge—Hangman Cleever for instance. No good, no good. Oh, I shouldn't have taken it on this time. Or I should have got someone younger to work in court with me. That's only one mistake I made. I've made hundreds. Vanity, vanity, thinking myself better able to defend her than anyone else, and blundering all the time—"
"No."
"Don't waste your breath comforting me now. I can see it, Edith, I can see it. My last mistake was talking too long this morning. I couldn't let go, even when I knew I wasn't getting through to them. Some kind of idiot compulsion to hold off the moment when T.J. would start—as if that could make any difference. A cub fresh out of law school wouldn't make such an error—I've been at it forty years."
"Cecil, stop whipping yourself. You did everything possible."
"Everything I could, yes. But everything I could do wasn't enough, and a lot of it was done wrong. A stronger man could have done more, done it better. Why, there's the big evil of the adversary system, Edith, right under our noses. Should the life or freedom of a human being depend on the perfectly irrelevant strength or weakness of opposing counsel? What in hell do my skill and brains, or T.J.'s, have to do with Callista's innocence or any of the other facts? What could be more medieval? But we accept it, have accepted it for hundreds of years, meekly, stupidly, as if no other method were possible or worth a thought. I've spent my life inside the propositions of a vicious fallacy, and discovered it at sixty-eight."