proceedings. But now I went to it in
cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands.

Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in
a solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from
the actual scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I
grew restless and nervous. Every moment I feared to meet my
persecutor. Sometimes I sat with my eyes fixed on the ground, fearing
to raise them lest they should encounter the object which I so much
dreaded to behold. I feared to wander from the sight of my fellow
creatures lest when alone he should come to claim his companion.

In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably
advanced. I looked towards its completion with a tremulous and eager
hope, which I dared not trust myself to question but which was
intermixed with obscure forebodings of evil that made my heart sicken
in my bosom.

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 and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the
neighbourhood of man and hide himself in deserts, but she had not; and
she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning
animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation.
They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed
his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for
it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might
turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might
quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation
of being deserted by one of his own species. Even if they were to
leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one