I so ardently desire
The same phrasing was used by the Creature to describe his obsession with
learning to speak (see 2.4.3 and, more
loosely, 2.4.7). After all the
variants on the term, applied to and linking the intellectual passions of
Walton, Victor, and the Creature, the reader is hardly prepared to
encounter it here in its primary sense, as an expression of uninhibited
and undeflected sexual instinct.
