It was at that juncture of despair that she thought of mandarins.  Or rather—­I may as well be frank—­she had been thinking of mandarins all the time since retiring to rest.  There might be something in Charlie’s mandarin theory....  According to Charlie, so many queer, inexplicable things happened in the world.  Occult—­ subliminal—­astral—­thoughtwaves.  These expressions and many more occurred to her as she recollected Charlie’s disconcerting conversations.  There might....  One never knew.

Suddenly she thought of her husband’s pockets, bulging with silver, with gold, and with bank-notes.  Tantalizing vision!  No!  She could not steal.  Besides, he might wake up.

And she returned to mandarins.  She got herself into a very morbid and two-o’clock-in-the-morning state of mind.  Suppose it was a dodge that did work. (Of course, she was extremely superstitious; we all are.) She began to reflect seriously upon China.  She remembered having heard that Chinese mandarins were very corrupt; that they ground the faces of the poor, and put innocent victims to the torture; in short, that they were sinful and horrid persons, scoundrels unfit for mercy.  Then she pondered upon the remotest parts of China, regions where Europeans never could penetrate.  No doubt there was some unimportant mandarin, somewhere in these regions, to whose district his death would be a decided blessing, to kill whom would indeed be an act of humanity.  Probably a mandarin without wife or family; a bachelor mandarin whom no relative would regret; or, in the alternative, a mandarin with many wives, whose disgusting polygamy merited severe punishment!  An old mandarin already pretty nearly dead; or, in the alternative, a young one just commencing a career of infamy!

‘I’m awfully silly,’ she whispered to herself.  ’But still, if there should be anything in it.  And I must, I must, I must have that thing for my dress!’

She looked again at the dim forms of her husband’s clothes, pitched anyhow on an ottoman.  No!  She could not stoop to theft!

So she murdered a mandarin; lying in bed there; not any particular mandarin, a vague mandarin, the mandarin most convenient and suitable under all the circumstances.  She deliberately wished him dead, on the off-chance of acquiring riches, or, more accurately, because she was short of fourteen and fivepence in order to look perfectly splendid at a ball.

In the morning when she woke up—­her husband had already departed to the works—­she thought how foolish she had been in the night.  She did not feel sorry for having desired the death of a fellow-creature.  Not at all.  She felt sorry because she was convinced, in the cold light of day, that the charm would not work.  Charlie’s notions were really too ridiculous, too preposterous.  No!  She must reconcile herself to wearing a ball dress which was less than perfection, and all for the want of fourteen and fivepence.  And she had more nerves than ever!