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 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