I.INTRODUCTORY:
I had a thought to call this book Pale Hands or Fair Hands Imbrued--so
easy it is to fall into the ghastly error of facetiousness.
Apart, however, from the desire to avoid pedant or puerile humour, reexamination
of my material showed me how near I had been to crashing
into a pitfall of another sort. Of the ladies with whose encounters with
the law I propose to deal several were assoiled of the charges against them.
Their hands, then--unless the present ruddying of female fingernails is the
revival of an old fashion--were not pink-tipped, save, perhaps, in the way
of health; nor imbrued, except in soapsuds. My proposed facetiousness
put me in peril of libel.
Interest in the criminous doings of women is so alive and avid among
criminological writers that it is hard indeed to find material which has not
been dealt with to the point of exhaustion. Does one pick up in a
secondhand bookshop a pamphlet giving a verbatim report of a trial in
which a woman is the central figure, and does one flatter oneself that the
find is unique, and therefore providing of fresh fields, it is almost
inevitable that one will discover, or rediscover, that the case has already
been put to bed by Mr Roughead in his inimitable manner. What a nose
the man has! What noses all these rechauffeurs of crime possess! To
use a figure perhaps something unmannerly, the pigs of Perigord, which,
one hears, are trained to hunt truffles, have snouts no keener.
Suppose, again, that one proposes to deal with the peccancy of women
from the earliest times, it is hard to find a lady, even one whose name has
hitherto gleamed lurid in history, to whom some modern writer has not
contrived by chapter and verse to apply a coat of whitewash.