"One man couldn't do away with the fallacy. It's too heavily established, and maybe there isn't enough wisdom in the world yet to develop a better way. You had to work inside of what you found, and it's not wasted effort. Within the system, you've saved a good many lives from public vengeance—and never mind whether they've been good lives like Callista's, or the lives of crooks and psychopaths, that's not the point. Each time you've set your face against public vengeance, you've brought some minds that much nearer to learning that the whole notion of vengeance and punishment is wrong. You've done your share. You've been on the side of mercy. How many can say that?"
"Well, my dear, you're good for me. Maybe I should have been a doctor. I remember thinking of it for a while, when I was in college—but I felt that the wish wasn't enough, that I didn't have the other qualities it needs."
"I think a defense lawyer—your kind of defense lawyer, Cecil—is in something like a doctor's position, but without any adequate sciences to support him. A doctor can draw on chemistry, physiology, pharmacology, a dozen other disciplines, and rely pretty solidly on what he gets from them. A lawyer trying to be useful according to rational ethics—what is there to help him? An infant science of human behavior, full of errors and contradictions and blank spots, hardly more advanced than physiology was in the eighteenth century; and haunted by the crackpots and manipulators too, so that it's sometimes hell's own job to separate the science from the special pleading. So I think, Cecil, that anyone who defends a life against the crowd's desire for a victim, who shows up the flaws in the system by bucking it—he's pioneering, he's taking a part in bringing law nearer to reality. I'll set Clarence Darrow in the same company with Semmelweiss and Pasteur, any time, no strain. And you."
He covered his face quickly with his hands; said after a while: "I wish I were a younger man, to hear that."
Edith looked away at the clock. Her mind was caught in a brief paralysis of waiting for the next twitch of the minute hand. "I drew something the other night, Cecil, a memory sketch of that jury. It's curiously good." She heard his breathing slow and become quiet. "My own style, but the kind of thing I was never able to do before. I want you to see it. Come over soon anyway—I need my friends too, you know. We try, Cecil, oddballs like you and Callista and me, others here and there. Herb Chalmers told me he's having a thing with the Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists. I started laughing inside—just started because it seemed so damn far away from everything—and then stopped laughing. It's Herb's way of trying, using his brains in his own style on what's nearest to his reach."
"Callista and I put the human race on trial the other night. We came to no conclusion, no verdict."
"Well, I think there's an obvious verdict in that case, and maybe only one possible at the present stage."
"So? You tell me."
"Not proven."