The laws of so-called duty said nothing to her.
The morality of the world was in her sight a mere mass of affectation, hypocrisies, and timorous shifts.
To her sated and ever-curious intelligence a crime might have had some potent charm, because it would have possessed some novelty and proffered some strange experience.
But a meanness revolted her with the same sense of disgust as would have moved her before squalor or disease. The same impulse which moves the white-plumaged bird to keep aloof from dust or mud, moved her to recoil from what was base or was ungenerous.
She rose and approached one of the windows, and pushed the rose-coloured blind aside, and looked out over the wide white marble terrace and the blue silent sea beyond.
It was three in the afternoon.
He had waited ten hours for her answer.
She left the casement and sat down and wrote. She wrote rapidly, as her wont was; and when she had written, folded and sealed her letter rapidly, giving it no second glance or afterthought. Then she rang, and bade her women send her the African boy Mahmoud. When he obeyed her summons, she gave him a letter.
‘Take that to the château of S. Pharamond,’ she said to him. ‘You know Count Othmar. Wait until you can see him alone, and give it, when he is alone, into his own hands. You understand me.’