The most placid, benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious passion for crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a _musee maccabre_ of murderers' relics.

From the thumb-joint of a notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions, while the blood-stains on an assassin's knife fill him with the delicious lust of slaughter.

In the same way predestined spinsters obtain vicarious enjoyment of the tender passion by reading highly coloured love-stories." "Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus from this sort of thing," said Pasquale.
And he fished from the side of his chair, and held up by the tip of a monstrous heel, the most audacious, high-instepped, red satin slipper I ever saw.
I eyed the thing with profound disgust.

I would have given a hundred pounds for it to have vanished.

In its red satin essence it was reprehensible, and in its feminine assertion it was compromising.
How did it come there?
I conjectured that Carlotta must have been trespassing in the drawing-room and dropped it, Cinderella-like, in her flight, when she heard me enter the house before dinner.
Pasquale held it up and regarded me quizzically.