INDEX





INTRODUCTORY: I.

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, re-examination 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