"Oh, Cecil, this isn't belief, this is knowledge. You're trying to give me a way out before you even hear. It's like this: it came back as a clear auditory memory, the dull noise of that bottle being pulled forward on the shelf, and the cork, and a clink of glass, then the tap of her little high heels outside the bedroom door. I remembered what she said, each word very clear in that high sweet voice of hers: 'Callie, come on now!--I poured a little drink for you.' That's how it was, Cecil. And I lay still. I didn't speak. Knowing what might happen. I won't say, wishing for it to happen, but knowing, Cecil. Oh, sure enough, my mind squirmed around a bit trying to imagine the drink was from an innocent bourbon bottle, but knew all the time that the bourbon had been emptied the week before and the bottle thrown away. I'm no split personality, Cecil. Call it a paralysis from conflicting drives, if you want to. The self that had no wish to murder was the same self that--that hated her guts and wished she was dead. So I lay still. And my brain began generating the smoke-screen, first the useless fraud about a bourbon bottle that wasn't there, then the amnesia." "I don't believe you hated her guts, Callista. She was a frustration, someone in the way, as T.J. would insist on saying, has said in fact. But I don't think you hated her as a person." "Not for long, but long enough. I killed her." "That was a thing that happened. You did not will it to happen. You were sick, bewildered, temporarily unable to prevent it from happening. If you'd been out in the living-room with her--do you remember that bronze paper-knife you kept on the table, a handsome thing with a sharp point? She was small, slight, your arms are strong. You know you could never in the world have taken it up against her." "Why, dear apologist, you're only saying that I'm a coward about physical violence. I killed her by lying still. She's as dead as if I'd taken that knife to her. I say the guilt is greater. Seeing red might have excused me, or so most people would say. My very cowardice, weakness, retreat--that's what killed her. Cecil, I killed her by a failure in simple decency and common sense. If I'd been decent, sensible, I'd have run out there the moment I heard that bottle move on the shelf." "Callista, if the good, the righteous, the respectable were half as stern in self-judgment as you are--" "Oh, there'd be no living with them at all. Mother's a Colonial something-or-other because some worm-eaten ancestor was a Saint in the Bay Colony. I think Father must have laughed at it, but I was too young to get the point. The Puritan in me gives many a squirm. But the point is, my self-judgment serves no one now--she's dead. Well, it seems to be a jury of the righteous and respectable, more or less, who are stern enough in judging others, I've noticed. Cecil, will you give me a sharp honest answer to a question you don't want me to ask?" "I'll try."