He had taken his new resolve outside in the rain; and it behoved him now to utilize these few remaining hours in putting it into shape. Rejecting the demand for the liberty of this wretched woman he must consent to the verdict being given against her, and place his hope in the clemency of the court. For two inexpressibly weary hours he strove with clenched lips to piece together and elaborate this new line; but in spite of all his efforts it was so dull and lifeless that the task seemed beyond him. Whatever talent he possessed it was only too clear that so vacillating a method of defence was quite out of harmony with its workings. This way and that he twisted each listless uninspired suggestion, but at each laborious attempt it grew less possible to breathe upon their dry bones and create them into living flesh. These maimed and halting emendations were as far removed from the swift and audacious repleteness of the original as to express the difference between light and dark. It was the difference between life and death. The one was informed with the living breath, a vital and a surprising piece of art; the other was cold and heavy, a confection of wormwood and ditch-water. A bitter chagrin overcame him when he saw all that his resolve implied. He would be sent into court dumb, tongue-tied--he with a philippic against injustice packed away at the back of his brain. This would mark the end of the ambition that had nourished the fires of his heart through full many a weary winter’s day. The new words would not glow; they were so much sound without meaning. Yet the new words were the true words. They embodied the actual; they stood for the established fact in its impartial fearlessness; they were the servants of justice. That the accused had committed the crime was clear to the meanest intelligence. It only remained for her advocate to announce her guilt and to pray for mercy. Yet the phrases in which he shaped this bald proposition crept to his lips as false, devious, and dishonorable. The old words conceived in sophistry were burning things, brilliant with the blood and flame of their emotion. Beneath them paradox itself stood forth as but a subtler knowledge. The accent of conviction made these words resonant, these words whose design was to pervert and mislead. They were breaking in constantly upon the dull and tortured phrases which he was striving to weave, the insensitive phrases whose function it was to embody immaculate truth. The commonest platitudes were not so stale as these. At last with a cry of rage he spurned them vehemently from his mind.