The violet
light faded softly, and the dusk drank the last drop of it, and the
last swallow disappeared under the eaves; but still Malipieri leaned
upon the stone window-sill, looking down.
For a long time he thought of Signor Bruni. He wondered whether he had
ever seen the man before, or whether the face only seemed familiar
because it was the type of a class of faces all more or less alike,
all intensely respectable and not without refinement, expressing a
grave reticence that did not agree with the fluent speech, and a
polite reserve at odds with the inquisitive nature that revealed
itself.
Malipieri was inclined to think he had never met Bruni, but somehow
the latter recalled the hot times in Milan, and his short political
career, and the association was not to the man's advantage. He could
not recall the name at all. It was like any other, and rather
especially unobtrusive. Anybody might be called Vittorio Bruni, and
Vittorio Bruni might be anybody, from a senator to a shoemaker; but if
he had been a senator, or any political personage, Malipieri would
have heard of him.
There was something very odd, too, about his knowledge of Carthaginian
antiquities, which was entirely limited to the contents of Malipieri's
own pamphlets. He knew nothing of the Egyptians and very little about
the Greeks, beyond what Malipieri had necessarily written about both.
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