You're leading an unhealthy life." The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.
"You see," insisted the other.

"Solitude works like a sort of poison.
And then you perceive suggestions in faces--mysterious and forcible, that no sound man would be bothered with.

Of course you do." Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as much as the others.

He detected a degrading quality in the touches of age which every day adds to a human countenance.

They moved and disturbed him, like the signs of a horrible inward travail which was frightfully apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his isolation in Malata, where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and exploration.
"It's a fact," he said, "that when I am at home in Malata I see no one consciously.