There was no bitterness in his odd, ugly voice, yet surely the words implied bitterness. The wounded, the fearful, the disappointed, the condemned hide. Perhaps he remembered this, for he added rather quickly:
“I come here to be foolish, Madame, for I come here to think. This is my special thinking place.”
“How strange!” Domini exclaimed impulsively, and leaning forward on the divan.
“Is it?”
“I only mean that already Beni-Mora has seemed to me the ideal place for that.”
“For thought?”
“For finding out interior truth.”
Count Anteoni looked at her rather swiftly and searchingly. His eyes were not large, but they were bright, and held none of the languor so often seen in the eyes of his countrymen. His face was expressive through its mobility rather than through its contours. The features were small and refined, not noble, but unmistakably aristocratic. The nose was sensitive, with wide nostrils. A long and straight moustache, turning slightly grey, did not hide the mouth, which had unusually pale lips. The ears were set very flat against the head, and were finely shaped. The chin was pointed. The general look of the whole face was tense, critical, conscious, but in the defiant rather than in the timid sense. Such an expression belongs to men who would always be aware of the thoughts and feelings of others concerning them, but who would throw those thoughts and feelings off as decisively and energetically as a dog shakes the waterdrops from its coat on emerging from a swim.
“And sending it forth, like Ishmael, to shift for itself in the desert,” he said.
The odd remark sounded like neither statement nor question, merely like the sudden exclamation of a mind at work.