"I think—not. Where were you born? When? How old are you? Who is your mother?"
And as I told him how I was abandoned he smiled and put the knife back on the table.
"I was not in the district at that time," he answered.
I became embarrassed and uncomfortable. It was as if I had begged for charity and been refused.
"Well," he said, "and if I had been your father, what then?"
"Nothing," I answered.
"Exactly. That is the way I think about it. We are living together in a place where there are no fathers and no children in the flesh, only in the spirit. On the other hand, we are all abandoned on this earth—that is, we are brothers in misery, which we call life. Man is an accident in life, do you know that?"
I read in his eyes that he was making fun of me. I was still laboring under the unpleasant impression which my strange and incomprehensible question had aroused in me, and I would have liked to explain the question to him or to forget it altogether. But I made matters worse by asking:
"Why did you take that knife in your hand?" Anthony gazed at me and then laughed low:
"You are a bold questioner. I took it because I took it, and why I really do not know. I like it; it is a very pretty thing."