“Excuse me, Madame,” he said.  “Bon soir!”

“I am coming too,” Domini answered.

He looked uncomfortable and anxious, hesitated, then, as if driven to do it in spite of himself, plunged downward through the narrow doorway of the tower into the darkness.  Domini waited for a moment, listening to the heavy sound of his tread on the wooden stairs.  She frowned till her thick eyebrows nearly met and the corners of her lips turned down.  Then she followed slowly.  When she was on the stairs and the footsteps died away below her she fully realised that for the first time in her life a man had insulted her.  Her face felt suddenly very hot, and her lips very dry, and she longed to use her physical strength in a way not wholly feminine.  In the hall, among the shrouded furniture, she met the smiling doorkeeper.  She stopped.

“Did the gentleman who has just gone out give you his card?” she said abruptly.

The Arab assumed a fawning, servile expression.

“No, Madame, but he is a very good gentleman, and I know well that Monsieur the Count—­”

Domini cut him short.

“Of what nationality is he?”

“Monsieur the Count, Madame?”

“No, no.”

“The gentleman?  I do not know.  But he can speak Arabic.  Oh, he is a very nice—­”

“Bon soir,” said Domini, giving him a franc.

When she was out on the road in front of the hotel she saw the stranger striding along in the distance at the tail of the negro procession.  The dust stirred up by the dancers whirled about him.  Several small negroes skipped round him, doubtless making eager demands upon his generosity.  He seemed to take no notice of them, and as she watched him Domini was reminded of his retreat from the praying Arab in the desert that morning.

“Is he afraid of women as he is afraid of prayer?” she thought, and suddenly the sense of humiliation and anger left her, and was succeeded by a powerful curiosity such as she had never felt before about anyone.  She realised that this curiosity had dawned in her almost at the first moment when she saw the stranger, and had been growing ever since.  One circumstance after another had increased it till now it was definite, concrete.  She wondered that she did not feel ashamed of such a feeling so unusual in her, and surely unworthy, like a prying thing.  Of all her old indifference that side which confronted people had always been the most sturdy, the most solidly built.  Without affectation she had been a profoundly incurious woman as to the lives and the concerns of others, even of those whom she knew best and was supposed to care for most.  Her nature had been essentially languid in human intercourse.  The excitements, troubles, even the passions of others had generally stirred her no more than a distant puppet-show stirs an absent-minded passer in the street.

In Africa it seemed that her whole nature had been either violently renewed, or even changed.  She could not tell which.  But this strong stirring of curiosity would, she believed, have been impossible in the woman she had been but a week ago, the woman who travelled to Marseilles dulled, ignorant of herself, longing for change.  Perhaps instead of being angry she ought to welcome it as a symptom of the re-creation she longed for.