Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/166

 a mystic, and gullible and sentimental, of that blood which painted smiling Madonnas and miraculous children seated in fields starred with impossible flowers beneath throngs of pretty angels. The other was of the blood of the philosophers, of Voltaire and the eighteenth century, a creature inquiring and restless, skeptical and touched with the despair of those who stand in awe of that which they are too proud to believe. All that was French in him found satisfaction in facing the truth and knowing it however unpleasant it might be.

There was in him, too, a monster, born perhaps of the long struggle in his soul. This, too, at sixty he knew well. He had known it for a long time now. It was a monster not easy to tame, perverse and cruel, which sometimes claimed possession of his very soul and destroyed what he loved best.

He was thinking of these things when the Princess dropped him before the door of his own house, a great house which he owned, for he was a rich man, and in which he kept for himself only two small rooms under the eaves looking down upon the square beneath the lovely tower of San Stefano. Of those who occupied his house he knew nothing. They lived their lives beneath him, lives that were tangled and complex, tragic or comic, pathetic and nondescript. He preferred not knowing his tenants. And he owned, too, the old rookery called the Palazzo Gonfarini where this strange woman Miss Annie Spragg had died. But as he climbed the stairs, a little wearily, he was not thinking of Miss Annie Spragg but of his own life and the life of Anna d'Orobelli. 