"I've never thought the world was all against me. I used to think it was a place where you could get by fairly well by telling the truth, minding your own business, trying not to hurt anyone."
"You don't think so now?"
She herself had heard the wiry unpleasant note of pain in her voice: "No comment." And Mr. Lamson had heard it, and could not quite hide a brief flare of gratification, a thin spear of flame shooting up from an ember behind his eyes. Oh, he was doubtless a decent and respectable man, father of a family, pillar of the church. It would be only her sickened imagination that made him something with a whip out of Krafft-Ebing.
"Miss Blake, you ought to understand that what we are trying to do here is to discover the truth."
"What is truth?"
"No comment."
"Mr. Lamson, since she must have got the poison in my apartment, and since I shouldn't have had it there, I do feel remorse. But I am not breaking down and screaming at sight of these pictures, because that is not my way."
"Oh, now, the pictures aren't all that important, Miss Blake. No occasion to make such an issue of the pictures. I thought it might be to your interest to look at them, since a jury will. The whole point, my dear girl—the whole point is we just don't believe your story."
Cecil Warner came back from the side-bar discussion, looking rather blind. He murmured: "Couldn't do much, Cal. They're all going in. An open protest would just antagonize the jury."
"Does it really matter? She'd look the same whether she fell in or was pushed."