Cecil came to see me after you left--he looks ill, Edith. Does poor old Mrs. Wilks really do enough about looking after him? Look--I tried to tell him more about Mother and Herb, and the Saturday night uproar with Mother that I described to you. Give him more of that, will you? I made a botch of telling him, I suppose because I love him, my mind wouldn't focus on my own mess. How does it happen (C. let it slip) that Herb is meeting so many of the incidental expenses when I said so damn plain it was to come out of my money from Father's estate? Please try to find out, will you? I can't think straight any more tonight. I slop off into self-pity, lose track altogether. I don't believe human beings are _adequate_ for this kind of thing, Edith, I know I'm not anyway. You heard me whimper once, only once. Alone, I do a good deal of that, friend, I can't help it--hermit crab's a soft blob of nothing-much inside the borrowed shell. I'm no Latimer sticking his hand in the fire. Not even jailed for a Cause, just want to live. I don't know what love is either, but now and then I wonder if anyone ever knew more about it than I do. My love to you, Callista II Terence Mann stopped playing, tense with a dissonance of perplexity. A wrong time and mood for Chopin: his hands had been dull in the C-sharp Minor Impromptu. No music now, but an impulsive sorrow of December wind leaning against the building in the dark. "_Callista never cried._" To Maud Welsh, that had been "real unnatural." Judge Mann did not find it so. Self-pity was not evident as a quality of Callista Blake. He understood with almost amused distress that he _liked_ the girl. That, plus old dislike for the representative of her accuser the State: how far can you go with such a bias before the judicial lid blows off? He remembered doubtfully a talk with Joe Bass the evening before--anything more than a flurry of wishful thinking? Increase of humanitarianism in the last century and a half? Well, social history agreed, if you read it with some detachment from the immediate terrors of the decade. And the increase could hardly be ignored or dismissed except by someone bitterly in love with his own pessimism. Modern postwar pessimism, although a cult like any other, was persuasive, deceptively articulate. Something contagious in a comprehensive the-hell-with-it.