"If it please the court, I wish to read a passage from the decedent's journal on the day of his disappearance."
Heads nod.
"Entry. As she spoke, she remained composed. I had walked out of the dimness of the library just moments before, and the glow of her face was quite like pale sunlight on tired concrete--a measured optimism tempered by experience and time. She was a dancer. You could tell by her dress and her height. Her slender movements mimicked her figure which now formed her manner--not coquettish or shy, not loud or assuming, but rather a sort of controlled tension, waiting. But when she smiled...it was a smile that would make you surrender..."
A chuckle from the stand.
"Yes?"
"A bit melodramatic for my taste is all."
"Hardly--it's simply a matter of thought and retrospection."
A heartier chuckle.
"Enlighten me."
"You were once a boy, I take it--no need to look so cross, merely rhetoric, merely rhetoric--but as such, you followed those that knew better. And just as my father taught me by rote or example, I am sure he taught you: do not cry, do not show weakness, protect your own, and when you have grown enough, protect your family to the end so that one day your sons might live on to do the same. An old virtue for an old time. However, the idea still remains. What men as our fathers see in the world is not far removed from a time when battle was glory, and glory, eternal. The armor, the weapons, the arena, may all have changed, but the idea--the idea has not. I cannot pretend to know precisely who the decedent saw, or what it meant, but it is clear that his conception of surrender is not weakness as our fathers imagined it; no, it is something else entirely--it is solace."
