Figures of Earth by James Branch Cabell

Now Manuel, driven out of Poictesme, went with his wife to Novogath, which had been for some seven years the capital of Philistia. Queen Stultitia, the sixtieth of that name to rule, received them friendlily. She talked alone with Manuel for a lengthy while, in a room that was walled with glazed tiles of faience and had its ceiling incrusted with moral axioms, everywhere affixed thereto in a light lettering of tin, so as to permit of these axioms being readily changed. Stultitia sat at a bronze reading-desk: she wore rose-colored spectacles, and at her feet dozed, for the while, her favorite plaything, a blind, small, very fat white bitch called Luck.

The Queen still thought that an alliance could be arranged against Duke Asmund as soon as public sentiment could be fomented in Philistia, but this would take time. "Have patience, my friend! " she said, and that was easy saying for a prosperous great lady sitting comfortably crowned and spectacled in her own palace, under her own chimneys and skylights and campaniles and domes and towers and battlements.