The Count stroked one of his white mice reflectively with his chubby little finger before he answered.

“It is truly wonderful,” he said, “how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its shortcomings with a little bit of claptrap. The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective⁠—and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not