Ruthven didn’t go in for vicious murder, as a habit. And truth be told, as soon as Grisaille started telling his story, the flat blank hate had drained out of Ruthven’s mind, to be replaced with a weary, familiar kind of misery. The world was, as several of his kind had taken pains to point out, a terrible old vale of tears in which unspeakable things occurred with depressing regularity.
