Well, there at Warner's house she came out to me later, told me how he'd talked more quietly a while, forgetting much of the present, and taking pleasure in the sound of ocean, which no one else would hear in this inland town, but he could hear it out of childhood. He died that night. My letter to Paulus was, as I said, too cerebral, and that's why it has left me discontented, aware of much that still ought to be said. In that letter I marshalled all the familiar arguments against capital punishment, for the sake of logic and completeness. Paulus has heard them all, and so have most citizens above the moron level. Capital punishment does not deter, nor have any effect on the crime rate one way or another--repeatedly demonstrated by statistical study long before the time of Warden Lawes; vengeance does not restore life, but only adds another evil, namely murder by the state; there can never be complete assurance that the innocent will not be punished and the guilty go free; punishment itself serves no purpose except to excite the self-deceptive emotions of the punisher; and so on, Jack. While I listed and discussed these and lesser arguments in my letter, I grew increasingly discouraged, mostly by realization that it has all been said before, more persuasively than I know how to say it, that the arguments on the other side seem (at least to my best understanding) monstrously shabby, unrealistic, archaic, some of them plain sadism with its nakedness barely hidden by doubletalk, and yet the laws remain on the books. You're a headshrinker, Jack--why do so many minds cling to unreason with such a sullen fury? I am thinking of people like Judge Cleever, or people who can read the entire transcript of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and still declare briskly and earnestly that the innocent are never punished. How do they do it? What's the faculty of the mind that makes it possible for an intelligent being to look directly on a glaring fact and somehow will it out of sight? For my part I _cannot_, from sheer physical inability, believe a lie when the demonstration is before me. And so finally, when I had done all I could with the clear, sensible, familiar arguments that have beaten on Paulus' head for forty-odd years without ever moving him to act on them, I found that I was closing my discourse with nothing more nor less than a plea for humility.