The Young Clementina by D. E. Stevenson

Her evidence will be very simple, a mere formality.”
    â€œYes, of course,” Kitty agreed.
    â€œCouldn’t you leave me out, if my evidence isn’t important?” I asked, grasping at any straw that could save me from an ordeal that I dreaded.
    Mr. Corrieston appeared to consider. “I think not,” he said. “I think your evidence might strengthen our case. You remember the date of the night in question?”
    â€œNo,” I said, “but I shall have it in my diary.”
    Mr. Corrieston rubbed his hands. “Admirable!” he exclaimed. “How truly admirable to keep a diary! Let me congratulate you upon your perseverance, Miss Dean. How often have I started upon January first with the best intentions, only to fall away in a lamentable manner before the end of the month was reached!”
    â€œI don’t know how you can be bothered,” Kitty said.
    â€œIt’s just a habit,” I told them.
    It was an easy matter, when I went home that night, to turn back the pages of my diary and find that the night Kitty had spent with me was the night of the eighteenth of March.
    â€œAdmirable, my dear lady,” said Mr. Corrieston, and even Kitty agreed quite pleasantly that diaries had their uses.
    The time of waiting passed unbearably slowly. The Wisdon case was a defended one and therefore had to wait until the undefended petitions had been heard. I realized very clearly during those weeks that Kitty was a woman who lived entirely for herself. Nobody else mattered; nothing mattered except that she should have what she wanted, that she should be comforted when she needed comfort and sympathized with when she needed sympathy. After twelve years, during which I had scarcely seen her for more than a few minutes at a time, she returned to me almost as a stranger; but, unlike a stranger, she leaned upon me to the point of exhaustion. She brought every mood to me, every transitory mood of anger or fear. She had no reticences—except those imposed upon her by her solicitor—she discussed the most intimate details of her life with a frankness that I found embarrassing; she burdened me with her troubles and perplexities and purposely misled me as to the essential facts of the case.
    Kitty had become an undisciplined woman. She had been an undisciplined child, for her charm had carried her through trouble and saved her again and again from just punishment for her childish faults; but an undisciplined child can be lovable, can easily be forgiven, whereas an undisciplined woman is a weariness of the flesh. I realized, too, that Kitty had coarsened, not physically—for her body had been cared for with unremitting skill and attention—but coarsened mentally, or perhaps spiritually would be nearer the truth. This new Kitty was so different from the child I had loved that I could scarcely recognize her, and this feeling of strangeness made it all the more difficult for me to give her the sympathy she demanded so urgently. The coarsening of her mental fibers dismayed me. It was more grief to realize her degeneration, than to contemplate the mess she had made of her life, for the one was an inner and the fundamental thing and the other merely fortuitous.
    So Kitty came back to me—a stranger in the deepest sense of the word—and leaned upon me with all her weight, and, because she was my sister and had been dear to me in days gone by, I did what I could for her and gave her what strength I had. I bore her no grudge for her long years of neglect, but I could not help feeling that I should have been more help to her in her hour of need if she had not shut me out of her life so completely for twelve years.

Chapter Three
Fog in Court
    The strain of waiting for the case to be heard was so great that I was almost glad when the day came. By tomorrow or next day at the latest—for Mr. Corrieston had warned us that it might take two days—the whole thing would be over