she said to Mills.

The person who had provoked all those remarks and as much hesitation as
though he had been some sort of wild beast astonished me on being
admitted, first by the beauty of his white head of hair and then by his
paternal aspect and the innocent simplicity of his manner. They laid a
cover for him between Mills and Dona Rita, who quite openly removed the
envelopes she had brought with her, to the other side of her plate. As
openly the man's round china-blue eyes followed them in an attempt to
make out the handwriting of the addresses.

He seemed to know, at least slightly, both Mills and Blunt. To me he
gave a stare of stupid surprise. He addressed our hostess.

"Resting? Rest is a very good thing. Upon my word, I thought I would
find you alone. But you have too much sense. Neither man nor woman has
been created to live alone. . . ." After this opening he had all the
talk to himself. It was left to him pointedly, and I verily believe that
I was the only one who showed an appearance of interest. I couldn't help
it. The others, including Mills, sat like a lot of deaf and dumb people.
No. It was even something more detached. They sat rather like a very
superior lot of waxworks, with the fixed but indetermined facial
expression and with that odd air wax figures have of being aware of their
existence being but a sham.

I was the exception; and nothing could have marked better my status of a
stranger, the completest possible stranger in the moral region in which
those people lived, moved, enjoying or suffering their incomprehensible
emotions. I was as much of a stranger as the most hopeless castaway
stumbling in the dark upon a hut of natives and finding them in the grip
of some situation appertaining to the mentalities, prejudices, and
problems of an undiscovered country--of a country of which he had not
even had one single clear glimpse before.

It was even worse in a way. It ought to have been more disconcerting.
For, pursuing the image of the cast-away blundering upon the
complications of an unknown scheme of life, it was I, the castaway, who
was the savage, the simple innocent child of nature. Those people were
obviously more civilized than I was. They had more rites, more
ceremonies, more complexity in their sensations, more knowledge of evil,
more varied meanings to the subtle phrases of their language. Naturally!
I was still so young! And yet I assure you, that just then I lost