Chapter 20
I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the
moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for
my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of
whether I should leave my labour for the night or hasten its
conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I sat, a train of
reflection occurred to me which led me to consider the effects of
what I was now doing. Three years before, I was engaged in the same
manner and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had
desolated my heart and filled it forever with the bitterest
remorse. I was now about to form another being of whose
dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand
times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake,
in murder
