Why do you cock your head on one side and look at me like a Christian?
Are you trying to make me think you have a soul?
You are made of nothing but corn meal and water, and a little wool, poor beast! But you have more sense than the Signora, and you are not an assassin, like her husband." At this, Nino threw himself upon his back with his four legs in the air and squirmed with sheer delight, showing his jagged teeth and the roof of a very terrible mouth, and emitting a series of wolfish snorts; after which he suddenly rolled over upon his feet again, shook himself till his shaggy coat bristled all over his body, walked sedately to the open door of the hut, and sat down to look at the weather.
"He is almost a Christian," Ercole remarked under his breath, as if he were afraid the dog might hear the compliment and grow too vain.
For Ercole was a reticent man, and though he told Nino what he thought about people, he never told any one else.

Marcello was the only person to whom he ever showed any inclination to attach himself.

He regarded even the Contessa with suspicion, perhaps merely because she was a woman; and as for Aurora, girls did not count at all in his cosmogony.
"God made all the other animals before making women," he observed contemptuously one day, when he had gone out alone with Marcello.
"I like them," laughed the boy.
"So did Adam," retorted Ercole, "and you see what came of it." No answer to this argument occurred to Marcello just then, so he said nothing; and he thought of Aurora, and his mother, and the sad-eyed Contessa, and wondered vaguely whether they were very unlike other women, as Ercole implied.
"When you know women," the man vouchsafed to add presently, "you will wish you were dead.

The Lord sent them into the world for an affliction and for the punishment of our sins." "You were never married, were you ?" asked Marcello, still smiling.
Ercole stopped short in the sand, amongst the sea-thistles that grew there, and Nino trotted up and looked at him, to be ready if anything happened.

Marcello knew the man's queer ways, and waited for him to speak.
"Married ?" he snorted.