Idle Ideas in 1905

   I don't believe in these innocent people who do not know what they
are doing half their time. Ask any London magistrate what he thinks
of the lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch:-

   "Not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it. I would not do
such a thing. It just happened this way, your Worship. I was
standing as you might say here, and not seeing anyone about in the
shop I opened the case and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might
belong to someone; and then this gentleman here, as I had not noticed
before, comes up quite suddenly and says; 'You come along with me,'
he says.  'What for,' I says, 'when I don't even know you?' I says.
'For stealing,' he says.  'Well, that's a hard word to use to a
lady,' I says; 'I don't know what you mean, I'm sure.'"

   And if she had put them all on, not thinking, what would a really
nice girl have done when the gentleman came up and assured her they
were hers? She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and
flinging them back into the box.

   "Thank you," she would have said, "I'll trouble you to leave this
garden as quickly as you entered it and take them with you. I'm not
that sort of girl."

   Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man's arm for
a moonlight promenade. And when it does enter into her innocent head
that he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does
she do when she has said good-bye and shut the door? She opens the
ground-floor window and begins to sing!

   Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other girls do
these sort of things they get called names. I cannot see why this
particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her mother.
According to her own account this was an accident. It is not an
original line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence
for the prosecution. She also kills her baby. You are not to blame
her for that, because at the time she was feeling poorly. I don't
see why this girl should have a special line of angels to take her up
to heaven. There must have been decent, hard-working women in
Nurnburg more entitled to the ticket.

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