“You do try then?”
“Yes. I try—I struggle—but it is never any use. I was taught evil. I do evil as other people do good. I do evil just as I breathe. That was what they willed.”
“Who?”
“My mother,” she muttered in a low voice.
“Your mother? The spy? The woman who made up all this Cagliostro story?”
“Yes. But you’re not to blame her. She was very fond of me. Only she had not succeeded.... She had become poor and wretched and she wished me to succeed ... and grow rich.”
“Yet you were beautiful. And for a woman beauty is riches. Beauty is enough.”
“My mother was beautiful too; and yet her beauty was of no use to her,” she retorted.
“You were like her?”
“You could not tell one from the other. And that was my ruin. She wished to carry out through me her great idea—Cagliostro’s legacy.”