She spoke with her wicked little laugh and her cold voice: the voice and the laugh which she employed when she feared lest she should be wounded in her secret sensitiveness and when therefore she hid deep within herself, offering to the outside world something very different from what she really was. Jules had opened his eyes and sat looking at her; and his steady glance troubled her.
“You live in a charming house, on the Scheveningen Road.”
“Yes.”
She realized suddenly that her coldness amounted to rudeness; and she did not wish this, even though she did dislike him. She threw herself back negligently; she asked at random, quite without concern, merely for the sake of conversation:
“Have you many relations in The Hague?”
“No; my father and mother live at Velp and the rest of my family at Arnhem chiefly. I never fix myself anywhere; I can’t stay long in one place. I have spent a good many years in Brussels.”
“You have no occupation, I believe?”
“No. As a boy, my one desire was to enter the navy, but I was rejected on account of my eyes.”
Involuntarily she looked into his eyes: small, deep-set eyes, the colour of which she could not determine. She thought they looked sly and cunning.
“I have always regretted it,” he continued. “I am a man of action. I am always longing for action. I console myself as best I can with sport.”