'
This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back
half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the
ball of her outstretched foot. In the clarid gold of the platform I saw
her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red. She
turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan goblet which I had
brought from the temple of Boro Budor, her head quite covered in by it.
Then, the little hairs at her lip-corners still wet, says she:
'Vices and climes, climes and vices. Always the same. What were these
climes and vices?'
'Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred--'
'But what made them _do_ them?'
'Their evil nature--their base souls.'
'But _you_ are one of them, _I_ am another: yet you and I live here
together, and we do no vices and climes.'
Her astounding shrewdness! Right into the inmost heart of a matter does
her simple wit seem to pierce!
'No,' I said, 'we do no vices and crimes, because we lack _motive_.
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