"That is just it. It would need an enormous imagination."
"But I am not sure that I should like to think of you as being on very good terms with Donna Adele, and I am almost glad to hear you admit that you are enemies. There is a satisfaction in knowing that you are human, as well as in believing you to be good."
"How is Adele?" Laura asked.
"The last I heard was that she was much worse. She behaves in the most unaccountable way. She has the look of a woman in some very great mental distress—pursued and haunted by something very painful from which she cannot escape."
"I had the same feeling about her the last time I saw her. I know that look very well. I have seen it in your face, sometimes, as well as in hers."
"In mine?" Ghisleri looked keenly at her, as though to ascertain whether she meant more than she said, for the first time in his acquaintance with her. "When did I ever show you that I was in trouble?" he asked.
"That was some time ago. You have changed since your illness. You used to look harassed sometimes, like a man who has a wound in the heart. Perhaps it is only something which depends on the way your eyes are made. The first time I ever noticed it was—yes, I remember very well—it was more than a year ago, that night when you spoke your poem in the Shrove Tuesday masquerade. It was not when you were talking to me. You looked perfectly diabolical then. It was later. I saw you standing alone in a doorway after a dance."
"What a memory you have! I was probably in a bad humour. I generally am, even now."
"Why do you say even now?" asked Laura, watching his face.
"Oh, I hardly know," he answered. "All sorts of things have happened to me since then, to simplify my existence. At that time it was very particularly complicated."