"I suppose--I suppose the remark about her condemning us--I suppose I wrote that in a moment of exasperation, and was calmer later on. I don't know--must a love-letter be consistent like a dictionary?" "All right, I see what you mean, but on that point the inconsistency is really glaring, isn't it? You knew--elsewhere in the letters you even grudgingly admit--that Mrs. Doherty loved her husband. You knew, and you specifically said, that she would regard your adulterous relation with him as sinful--of course, how could you doubt it, what wife in her right mind wouldn't regard it so? Yet in almost the same breath you're talking about a separation, as if you expected Ann Doherty to throw away her marriage, violate her deepest religious convictions, humbly agree to letting her husband go live in sin with his ... with you. Consistent?" "I suppose it's inconsistent, if you make no allowance for the other things I said." "Oh--there is something else in the letter that makes it consistent?" "I don't know--I don't know." "Miss Blake, on the basis of these letters, and your testimony, I will ask you: weren't you, in all this talk of a separation, simply proposing an impossibility, knowing it was one, to--well, what? See what Jimmy would do? To feel him out maybe, find out if he'd go along with you on some much more direct method of--eliminating the woman who was in the way?" "That's idiotic." "Well, if I'm an idiot you should have no trouble defending yourself." "Witness and counsel will both confine themselves to the issues. No more of that sort of thing." "My apologies, your Honor. All right, Miss Blake, we'll let that stand. But in my--simple way, I keep trying to understand. Now for example in the rest of this second letter, where you attack Doherty's religious faith--" "I never attacked it! In that letter I was _asking_ about his beliefs, and stating some of my own ideas, nothing more." "Oh? I must have misunderstood. Let's see--you wrote here, speaking of his religion: 'Isn't it mostly a matter of being brought up in a certain way that automatically shuts out other views without seriously examining them? I'm trying to suggest that unlike Ann, you're really not embedded in religion like a fly in amber.' That's not an attack?" "No, it is not." "I see--the fault's with my understanding. And further on you wrote: 'just where is the mercy, the rationale, the loving-kindness in an ethical-religious system that makes me a whore bound for hell because I love you and welcome intercourse with you and want to live with you?' But you're telling me seriously now that this isn't to be called an attack on the man's most vital and deeply cherished religious convictions?" Callista said: "Mr. Hunter, I think your A is a little bit flat."