It could be true that Warner's words might have helped to topple old Judd, by making Judd sense for an instant some failure of charity and of perception in himself. Ill, embarrassed, he might not have rallied self-justifications quickly enough, so Warner's words might have caused a brief stab of conscience, enough to send him over the edge. _But if he dies the chief fault is mine. I am guilty. To live is to destroy--true or false? I am small; my only real quarrel with Hunter is that if he has his way I shall never grow. How stubborn the life that can't desire to die!_ Last August she had desired it, or thought she had, until a moment of that Saturday night, on the stairs, her mother weeping in a room left behind, her mind visited strangely by Victoria's grandchild the Funny Thing. She had begun to desire death earlier--in July, after Jim's letter, the only one he ever wrote. Stilted, timid; needless doubletalk; the awkwardness and misspelled words not endearing or funny but rather shocking, evidence of the blindness of her love. _I will not say part of me died when I read that dismal thing. We die and regenerate with every breath. All that happened (I-would-say-to-Edith) was that my journey had taken me beyond the region where I met Jimmy and learned some aspects (not all) of a passion called love._ _Notice also (am-I-still-talking-to-Edith?) how the laughing-crying devil-angel that Jimmy woke up in me has not died, but rouses me even in the prison night, stinking bare-light-bulb night, starved for the pressure, the almost-anger, furious crescendo, meteoric release. Oh, in an enlightened society I could have been a splendid high-class whore!_ "You may call your next witness, Mr. Hunter." "Sergeant Lloyd Rankin!" Callista heard Cecil Warner's short involuntary sigh, felt his hostile stiffening and alertness. Detective Sergeant Lloyd Rankin of the Winchester Police came down the aisle and held up a flat hand for the oath, the slab-faced sober man. His gray hair under the cold light glinted like dull steel, his eyes a lighter gray but opaque, oyster gray. _Draw him as a bulldozer--Cecil might like it._ She ran her fingers softly over the wrinkled hand, lifted away the idle pencil and drew his scratch pad toward her. A bulldozer has its own squat dignity. If it's directed to knock over some little house loved by generations, that's no fault of the dozer. The blade advances, the Diesel bellow swells to the roar of a caged hurricane. Old timbers--nobody wants them--crumble like dry cheese. And look!--the picture grew in swift lines and leaping shadows--look, a doll! Left behind maybe under the eaves years ago. It had tumbled into brief light in front of the caterpillar treads, which would of course move on. Too bad, but no time to stop.