Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 261

Am I being told that this ... Vitelli would be there in the room too?

STEVENS

Yes, That was why he brought him. You can see now what I meant by

connoisseur and gourmet.

GOVERNOR

And what you meant by the boot too. But he's dead. You know that.

STEVENS

Oh yes. He's dead. And I said 'purist'too. To the last: hanged the next

summer in Alabama for a murder he didn't even commit and which nobody

involved in the matter really believed he had committed, only not even his

lawyer could persuade him to admit that he couldn't have done it if he

wanted to, or wouldn't have done it if the notion had struck him. Oh yes,

he's dead too; we haven't come here for vengeance.

GOVERNOR

(to Temple) Yes. Go on. The letters.

TEMPLE

The letters. They were good letters. I mean--good ones.

(staring steadily at the Governor) What I'm trying to say is, they were

the kind of letters that if you had written them to a man, even eight

years ago, you wouldn't-would-rather your husband didn't see them, no

matter what he thought about your-past.

(still staring at the Governor as she makes her painful confession) Better

than you would expect from a seventeen-yearold amateur. I mean, you would

have wondered how anybody just seventeen and not even through freshman in

college, could have learned the-right words. Though all you would have

needed probably would be an old dictionary from back in Shakespeare's time

when, so they say, people hadn't learned how to blush at words. That is,

anybody except Temple Drake, who didn't need a dictionary, who was a fast

learner and so even just one lesson would have