Madame Hugo had become insufferable. She had started with the peeking in at breakfast, and then moved on to skipping romps of faux-concern down the hallway at mid-day, speaking with trumpets in her throat and stumbling by my door with the grace of an elephant. In case it was not already clear, let me pronounce it: I loathed her. The violence I conjured up for her in that dark sanctum of mine was infinite, and the subject of her various fatalities and tortures came to almost—almost, but not quite—rival those intrusions which such thoughts of Sophia continued to make.
