In their Wisdom by C.P. Snow

March did not open the case for the defendants until the end of the week. When at last he did so, he simultaneously looked more deliberate and actually was more succinct than his friend. He disclaimed any special interest in Jenny: she was someone, and there were others, to whom money might or might not have been left according to what the old man finally desired. The essential things, March broke out, with the sudden thrust and bite which was one of his techniques, were what his state of mind was, whether he knew what he wanted or was being told: and whether Mrs Underwood's intervention in his last years wasn't just a simple act of kindness. March said that that was the most natural explanation, and the most natural explanation was usually the best. Here was an efficient woman who couldn't bear the sight of the old man's solitariness, and set about clearing it up. A well-run home wasn't everything in one's eighties, but it was preferable to squalor. All she could give him was her energy and her time and this she had done.

That was unsensational, deliberately so, and so was the evidence he called that Friday. The doctor who had been present in Skelding's chamber the previous October, head on one side in court like an exceptionally judicious bird or a politician being interviewed on television, pressed by Lander in cross-examination about Massie's state of mind – at the end of which some observers in court weren't going to be moved from the opinion that the old man was senile. A good many others thought that he was using old age to get his own way, and that he had a kind of self-willed, dislikeable cunning. None of the evidence, either that day or on the following Monday, cleared up the discrepancy.