from the situation. I hoped I might persuade Miss Lambert to settle for a small amount of damages, so at least Melville might not be financially ruined, as well as socially and professionally." He found the words difficult to say. They still hurt. The failure was deep and twisting inside him.
"Did you tell Miss Melville your hopes?"
"Of course."
"Do you know of anything that occurred that afternoon t which would so alter the circumstances as to make her despair and take her own life?"
"Sacheverall had called a prostitute to the stand in the morning who had sworn that the affair she had observed was of a sexual nature," Rathbone said bitterly, "not the friendship both Wolff and Melville had insisted. But if that was the final incident, then I would have expected her to have taken the poison during the luncheon adjournment, and according to the surgeon she did not."
"Did Miss Melville at any time speak of taking her life, or I say anything which led you, even in hindsight, to suppose she was thinking of it?"
"No." Rathbone's voice sank. "Perhaps I should have realized how desperate she was, but I had formed the belief that her art was so precious to her she would have lived to practice it regardless of anything else. I... in hindsight, I even wondered if she had been murdered... but I know of no way in which anyone else could have administered the poison to her, nor any reason why they should."
"I see. Thank you, Sir Oliver. I have nothing further to ask you."
Rathbone remained where he was. He wanted to say something else, something about the whole ridiculous situation which had brought about a needless tragedy and destroyed one of the most luminous talents he had ever known, not to mention a vibrant, intelligent human being capable of suffering and laughter and dreams.
"It need not have happened!" he said angrily, leaning forward a little over the slender rails of the witness stand, his hands gripping them. "If any of us had behaved with a little more sense, a little more charity, it would all have been avoided. Keelin Melville could be alive now, still creating beauty for us and for our heirs in this city, this country."
There was a murmur of shock in the gallery, and then something which could even have been approval.
He leaned over farther. "For God's sake, why can't we allow women to use whatever talents they have without hounding and denying them until they are reduced to pretending to be men in order to be taken at their true value?"
There was a shifting of weight on the public benches, and a rustle and creak of fabric. People were uncomfortable.
"Why can't we allow people to break a betrothal if they realize it was a mistake," he went on passionately, "without assuming there must be some fearful sin on the part of one or the other of them? Why do we care so much if a woman is pretty or not? If all we want is something lovely to look at, we can buy a picture and hang it on the wall. We do this!" He flung out his arms. "We create a society where people go to law instead of saying to each other the simple truth. And now instead of a broken romance-which, God knows, hurts enough, but we all experience it-we have scandal, disgrace, shame, and worst of all, we have destroyed one of the brightest talents of our generation. And over what? A misunderstanding."
There was definite movement in the gallery now, a whispering, a buzz. Even the jurors were muttering.
Sacheverall rose to his feet, his face red.
"Sir Oliver is being disingenuous, sir, and I cannot sit here in silence and allow it. He knows as well as I do that a young woman's reputation is precious to her. A man who robs another person of reputation steals one of his, or her, most priceless possessions... one that can never be got back again." He glanced at the jurors; he did not care about the public. "That is not a false value. It is a very real one."
His expression twisted to undisguised contempt, and he was moving forward from his seat. "Sir Oliver would be one of the first to complain if his good name was compromised. In fact, he may discover after the loss of this case just how painful it can be when people no longer think of you as well as they once did." He was