The gloom of Benjulia’s grave eyes deepened: they stared with a stern fixedness into vacancy. His great head bent slowly over his broad breast. The whole man seemed to be shut up in himself. “I go on a way of my own,” he growled. “Let nobody cross it.”
After that reply, to persist in making inquiries would only have ended in needlessly provoking an irritable man. Ovid looked back towards Carmina. “I must return to my friends,” he said.
The doctor lifted his head, like a man awakened. “Have I been rude?” he asked. “Don’t talk to me about my experiments. That’s my raw place, and you hit me on it. What did you say just now? Friends? who are your friends?” He rubbed his hand savagely over his forehead—it was a way he had of clearing his mind. “I know,” he went on. “I saw your friends just now. Who’s the young lady?” His most intimate companions had never heard him laugh: they had sometimes seen his thin-lipped mouth widen drearily into a smile. It widened now. “Whoever she is,” he proceeded, “Zo wonders why you don’t kiss her.”
This specimen of Benjulia’s attempts at pleasantry was not exactly to Ovid’s taste. He shifted the topic to his little sister. “You were always fond of Zo,” he said.
Benjulia looked thoroughly puzzled. Fondness for anybody was, to all appearance, one of the few subjects on which he had not qualified himself to offer an opinion. He gave his head another savage rub, and returned to the subject of the young lady. “Who is she?” he asked again.
“My cousin,” Ovid replied as shortly as possible.
“Your cousin? A girl of Lady Northlake’s?”
“No: my late uncle’s daughter.”
Benjulia suddenly came to a standstill. “What!” he cried, “has that misbegotten child grown up to be a woman?”’
Ovid started. Words of angry protest were on his lips, when he perceived Teresa and Zo on one side of him, and the keeper of the monkeys on the other. Benjulia dismissed the man, with the favourable answer which Zo had already reported. They walked on again. Ovid was at liberty to speak.