woman the destruction of a mangy stray cat or of an incurably
diseased dog by means of a clean, well-placed shot, and the
chances are that she will shudder. But--no lethal chamber being
available--suggest poison, albeit unspecified, and the method
will more readily commend itself. This among women with no
murderous instincts whatever.

I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not
only by women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or
himself ahead as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant
upon the victim. No need here, I think, to number the cases
where the ministrations of murderers to their victims have
aroused the almost tearful admiration of beholders.

I shall say nothing of the secrecy of the poison method, of the
chance which still exists, in spite of modern diagnosis, that the
illness induced by it will pass for one arising from natural
causes. This is ground traversed so often that its features are
as familiar as those of one's own house door. Nor shall I say
anything of the ease with which, even in these days, the
favourite poison of the woman murderer, arsenic, can be obtained
in one form or another.

One hears and reads, however, a great deal about the sense of
power which gradually steals upon the poisoner. It is a
speculation upon which I am not ready to argue. There is,
indeed, chapter and verse for believing that poisoners have
arrived at a sense of omnipotence. But if Anna Zwanziger (here I
quote from Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry's essay on her in his Twenty
Human Monsters), ``a day or two before the execution, smiled and