`I grant your reservation,' he replied, after considering the question gravely for a minute or two. `It is not worth dispute -- the letter shall be destroyed when it comes into my hands.'
He rose, as he spoke, from the chair in which he had been sitting opposite to me up to this time. With one effort he appeared to free his mind from the whole pressure on it of the interview between us thus far. `Ouf!' he cried, stretching his arms luxuriously, `the skirmish was hot while it lasted. Take a seat, Mr Hartright. We meet as mortal enemies hereafter -- let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the meantime. Permit me to take the liberty of calling for my wife.'
He unlocked and opened the door. `Eleanor!' he called out in his deep voice. The lady of the viperish face came in. `Madame Fosco -- Mr Hartright,' said the Count, introducing us with easy dignity. `My angel,' he went on, addressing his wife, `will your labours of packing up allow you time to make me some nice strong coffee? I have writing business to transact with Mr Hartright -- and I require the full possession of my intelligence to do justice to myself.'
Madame Fosco bowed her head twice -- once sternly to me, once submissively to her husband -- and glided out of the room.
The Count walked to a writing-table near the window, opened his desk, and took from it several quires of paper and a bundle of quill pens. He scattered the pens about the table, so that they might lie ready in all directions to be taken up when wanted, and then cut the paper into a heap of narrow slips, of the form used by professional writers for the press. `I shall make this a remarkable document,' he said, looking at me over his shoulder. `Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?'
He marched backwards and forwards in the room, until the coffee appeared, humming to himself, and marking the places at which obstacles occurred in the arrangement of his ideas, by striking his forehead from time to time with the palm of his hand. The enormous audacity with which he seized on the situation 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 fist 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