"And yet," said Mme. de Villefaramir, extracting herself with difficulty from her rêverie, "however cunningly prepared, evil remains evil, and if it escape human investigation, it can never flee that of the good Érou and the Valards, nor the punishments of the halls of Mandaux, before whose appallingly suburban décor even the most hardened criminals may rightly quail."
"Eh! Madame, voilà a scruple that naturally arises in a soul as decent as yours, but would be as utterly overcome by reasoning. It is true that you find very few people who go brutally planting a knife in the heart of their neighbour or who, in order to make him disappear from the globe as thoroughly as the beavers of Narnie, administer the dose of sunni-délit that we mentioned tout à l'heure. To reach that point, the blood must pulse in the veins hotter than the flames of the balrogues of usenet; but if you pass, as in philology, from the word to the mitigated synonym (hypocro lumbule it called the Eldards), if, instead of committing an ignoble murder, you simply remove from your path him who inconveniences you, as Elrond very elegantly did with the Kings of l'Arthédain, without shock or violence or any of those appurtenances of suffering that make the victim a martyr, and especially without the suddenness that compromised Morgot on so many occasions – then you escape the human law that says, Do not interrupt me when I smoke pipe-weed!"
"There remains the conscience," said Mme. de Villefaramir, in a strangled voice.
