women law-breakers, fighting for their constitutional rights.  And of course such a procedure as that was unthinkable.  Yet where a Brinsley sailed unhampered, undangered over these troubled waters, poor David often came near to crashing on the rocks.  “To hear the fellow talk,” said one angry K.C. in the Library at the Inner Temple, “you’d think he was a woman himself!” “Egad” said his brother K.C.—­yes, he really did say “Egad,” the oath still lingers in the Inns of Court—­“Egad, he looks like one.  No hair on his face and I’ll lay he doesn’t shave.”

There were of course other briefs he held, for payment or for love of justice; young women who had killed their babies (as to these he was far from sentimental; he only defended where the woman had any claim to sympathy or mitigation of the unreal death sentence); breach of promise actions where the woman had been grossly wronged; affiliation cases in high life—­or the nearest to high life that makes a claim on the man for his fatherhood.  He was a deadly prosecutor in cases where women had been robbed by their male trustees, or injured in any other way wherein, in those days, the woman was at a disadvantage and the marriage laws were unjust.

One way and another, with the zealous aid and business-like care of his interests by his clerk, Albert Adams, David must have earned between 1906 and the autumn of 1908, an average Three hundred a year.  As he paid Adams L150 a year and allowed him certain perquisites, and lived within his own fixed income (from his annuity and investments) of L290 a year, this meant a profit of about L500.  This was raised at a leap to L1,500 by the fees and the special gift he received for defending Lady Shillito.

The “Shillito Case,” an indictment for murder, was tried at the winter assize of the North-eastern Circuit, January or February, 1909.  I dare say you have forgotten all about it now:  Lady Shillito changed her name, married again (eventually), and was lost in the crowd—­she may even, eleven years afterwards, be reading this novel at the riper age of forty and be startled out of her well-fed apathy by the revival of acute memories.

There have been not a few similar cases before and since of comparatively young, beautiful women murdering their elderly, objectionable husbands in a clever cattish way, and of course getting off through lack of evidence or with a short term of imprisonment. (They were always treated in prison far more tenderly than were Suffragettes, and the average wardress adored them and obtained for them many little alleviations of their lot before the Home Secretary gave way and released them.) Nowadays the War and the pressing necessities of life, the coal famine, the milk famine, the railway strikes have robbed such cases of all or nearly all their interest.  I could quite believe that women in similar circumstances continue to murder their elderly husbands, and the doctors and coroners and relations on “his” side tacitly agree not to raise a fuss in the presence of much graver subjects of apprehension.