"We find the defendant, Callista Blake, guilty of murder in the first degree, without recommendation of mercy." III _From a letter written by Terence Mann, formerly Justice of the Court of General Sessions of Winchester County, New Essex, July 17, 1960, to Dr. John Sever Mann, of Boston_: ... For that matter, I can hardly understand that more than a week has passed since Callista died. My sense of time seems to be still slightly distorted. For many days and months, too much to endure and understand, hope for and relinquish; then quiet, aftermath. Finished. The new things that begin, some of them surely good, are not yet clear in my mind, nor in Edith's--we're tired, Jack. Last night I finished and mailed that letter I told you about, to the president of the New Essex Bar Association, setting out in writing my reasons for resigning from the bench. Mr. Paulus, president of the B.A., is a very pleasant character, a successful gentleman but also mellow and moderately philosophical, capable of filling that position with no sense of strain, and yet able to see quite a distance into a stone wall. In him, I'd say that intellectual compromise rises to the level of a fine art, a hedonistic achievement which I respect, though I can't imitate it--my own hedonism requires its ethical frame of reference to be in plain sight, accessible, subject to change if reason demands. You might understand Paulus better than I do, since in your work compromise (though a very different kind) has to be the order of the day. You try to help your patients live in the jungle, which must mean plenty of yielding here to gain a little there. Well, what I started to say--Paulus is a good joe. It was Paulus who kindly suggested, away back at the time of my resignation, that I should write such a letter, and he gave me advance permission to send copies to newspapers if I cared to--which I've done. Perhaps some of them will allow my cerebral verbiage to rub for a moment against Miss Americas and Russian face-making. I wasn't able to start that letter at the time of my resignation. I kept putting it off. For a while--April and most of May--Edith and I were in a suspended mental state, waiting out the appellate decision. I couldn't say it to Edith--(especially since we knew by that time that she was pregnant, your first nephew apparently aiming for next February)--I couldn't say it to her, but after the appeal was denied I never had any hope of the Governor. I know him, a cultured nothing, mentally gelded by the modern political rule, never stick your neck out. Even his fishing trip last week was perfectly predictable.