Leila. Ah, but I’m a sleuth. I’m _ professionally interested, you see.
Raglan. Pearl White?
Leila. Yes. That’s right. Pearl White. Besides, it’s a simple question of bringing assassins to justice.
Rupert. Oh—how would you do that?
Leila. Why—by having them arrested, of course.
Rupert. Oh—would that do it? I have heard of assassins being brought to the Old Bailey, but I have seldom heard of them being brought to justice. I hope you’re not confusing the two.
Leila. Well, what’s wrong with the Old Bailey, anyway?
Rupert. My dear Leila, its blemish is single but ineradicable. It is human. Justice is not.
Brandon. Hear, hear!
Raglan. Oh, I say—are you one of these people who don’t approve of capital punishment?
Rupert. I think, possibly, I approve of murder too much to approve of capital punishment.
Leila and Raglan. Approve of murder!
[Brandon looks at Rupert sharply.
Rupert. My dear Leila, there are so many people I would so willingly murder—particularly the members of my own family—and including the aunt so felicitously described by Mr. Raglan as living in Bayswater—that it would be positively disingenuous to say that I don’t approve of murder. Furthermore, I have already committed murder myself.
Brandon. How do you get that?
Rupert. It is all simply a question of scale. You, my friends, have, paradoxically, a horror of murder on a small scale, a veneration for it on a large. That is the difference between what we call murder and war. One gentleman murders another in a back alleyway in London for, let us say, since you have suggested it, the gold fillings in his teeth, and all society shrieks out for revenge upon the
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