"Am I then an exceptional character?" he asked himself, following with his eyes the prints of Mila's little feet on the gravelled paths of his garden. "It seems to me that I am, when I compare myself with the mountaineers with whom I am compelled to live, and with these bandits whose leader I am. I have more than one brother among them, so it is said. The fact that they have none of my qualities, makes it impossible for me to believe it. The passions which serve as a bond between us differ as much as our features and our bodily strength. They desire booty in order to convert into money everything that is not money; and I care for nothing which is not of value by reason of its beauty or its rarity. What they succeed in obtaining they hoard because they are miserly; I use it sparingly, so that I may be able to bear myself royally with them on occasion, and extend my power and influence over everyone about me. "Thus gold is to me only a means, while to them it is the end. They love women as chattels, and I, alas! would fain be able to love them as human beings! They are intoxicated with delight by acts of violence which make me sick at heart, and by which I should be humiliated, knowing that I have the power to please, and having never been compelled to force myself upon anyone. No, no! they are no brothers of mine; if they are the _Destatore's_ sons, they are the offspring of wild dissipation and of his years of moral decadence. I am the son of Castro-Reale; I was conceived on a day when his mind was lucid. My mother was not violated like the rest. She abandoned herself to him willingly, and I am the fruit of the intercourse of two free hearts, who did not give me life against their wills. "But, in that world which is called society, and which I call the legal community, are there not many persons of both sexes with whom I could enter into relations, and so escape this ghastly solitude of my thoughts? Are there not men of intelligence, endowed with keen perception, whose friend I might be? Are there not many women, proud and adroit, whose lover I might be, without being compelled to laugh at the pains I had taken to overcome them? In a word, am I doomed never to find emotion of any sort in this life which I embraced as being most fruitful in violent emotions? Shall I always be obliged to expend endless stores of imaginative power and of tact, in order to succeed in pillaging a vessel on the coast or a party of travellers in the gorges of the mountain? And all to obtain a multitude of petty trinkets, a little money, and the hearts of a few Englishwomen, ugly or half-mad, who adore adventures with brigands as a remedy for the spleen!