Among the many gemstones, Georgiana chose a blue one.
"What an excellent choice," the jeweler Nidor said approvingly. "I thought so too."
Georgiana lowered her head. The new necklace design she had chosen was a pendant resembling the Eye of Horus. That teardrop-shaped peridot would fit perfectly beneath it, like an eye shedding tears.
The combination reminded her of unpleasant things, so she put the gemstone down and picked up a yellow-green tourmaline instead. It had a color-changing sheen, like the eyes of a feline.
Nidor did not seem to like her choice very much, but she was the customer.
He then placed the designs and materials into a box.
Tourmaline was not a particularly expensive gemstone either. Nidor seemed to have already learned her preferences.
Rousseau had once said in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: I see every animal as an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses, so that it may move itself and protect itself, to some extent, from whatever tends to destroy or disturb it. I see precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone does everything in the operations of an animal, whereas man participates in his own operations as a free agent. An animal chooses or rejects by instinct, while man chooses or rejects by an act of freedom; thus an animal cannot stray from the rule prescribed to it, even if it would be advantageous to do so, while man often strays from it to his detriment.
This differed from the distinction between humans and animals generally accepted by wizards, yet she somewhat agreed with Rousseau's view.
Some people did evil once they gained freedom. It was not freedom itself that made them evil. Augustine had likewise said that doing good also required freedom.
During