tion in which I placed him, and made it the
pedestal on which his vanity mounted for the one cherished purpose of
self-display, mastered my astonishment by main force. Sincerely as I
loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in its
most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself.

The coffee was brought in by Madame Fosco. He kissed her hand in
grateful acknowledgment, and escorted her to the door; returned, poured
out a cup of coffee for himself, and took it to the writing-table.

"May I offer you some coffee, Mr. Hartright?" he said, before he sat
down.

I declined.

"What! you think I shall poison you?" he said gaily. "The English
intellect is sound, so far as it goes," he continued, seating himself
at the table; "but it has one grave defect--it is always cautious in
the wrong place."

He dipped his pen in the ink, placed the first slip of paper before him
with a thump of his hand on the desk, cleared his throat, and began.
He wrote with great noise and rapidity, in so large and bold a hand,
and with such wide spaces between the lines, that he reached the bottom
of the slip in not more than two minutes certainly from the time when
he started at the top. Each slip as he finished it was paged, and
tossed over his shoulder out of his way on the floor. When his first
pen was worn out, THAT went over his shoulder too, and he pounced on a
second from the supply scattered about the table. Slip after slip, by
dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side
of him till he had snowed himself up in paper all round his chair. Hour
after hour passed--and there I sat watching, there he sat writing. He
never stopped, except to sip his coffee, and when that was exhausted,
to smack his forehead from time to time. One o'clock struck, two,
three, four--and still the slips flew about all round him; still the
untiring pen scraped its way ceaselessly from top to bottom of the
page, still the white chaos of paper rose higher and higher all round
his chair. At four o'clock I heard a sudden splutter of the pen,
indicative of the flourish with which he signed his name. "Bravo!" he
cried, springing to his feet with the activity of a young man, and
looking me straight in the face with a smile of superb triumph.

"Done, Mr. Hartright!" he announced with a self-renovating thump of his
fist on his broad breast. "Done, to my own profound satisfaction--to
YOUR profound astonishmen