“He left you there together, you and the defendant?”
“Well, he went away, but—”
“And left you together. He so testified. He also testified that he found you together the next morning. Is that true?”
“Oh, that's outrageous. I refuse to answer.”
Jim Dyckman rose from his chair in a frenzy of wrath. His lawyer, McNiven, pressed him back and pleaded with him in a whisper to remember the court. He yielded helplessly, cursing himself for his disgraceful lack of chivalry.
The judge spoke sternly. “Witness will answer questions of counsel or—”
“But, your Honor, he is trying to make me say that I—Oh, it's loathsome. I didn't. I didn't. He has no right!”
When a woman's hair is caught in a traveling belt and she is drawn backward, screaming, into the wheels of a great machinery that will mangle her beauty if it does not helplessly murder her there are not many people whose hearts are hard enough to withhold pity until they learn whether or not her plight was due to carelessness.
There are always a few, however, who will add their blame to her burden, and they usually invoke the name of justice for their lethargy of spirit.
Yet even the cruelty of that severity is a form of self-protection against a shattering grief; and a perfect heart would have pity even for the pitiless, since they, too, are the victims of their own carelessness; they, too, are drawn backward into the soul-crushing cogs of the world.