“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has been a hermitage ever since.”
“Ah!”
“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”
“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh—or the bricks and mortar. But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman if ever a house did.”
“What sort of woman?”
Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.
“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing them into the islands of the sirens.”
“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”
“Don’t you know it?”
He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.