Spring fills the garden. Felix is melancholy beyond expression when a lady on horseback, veiled in black, speaks his name. She throws up the veil. Every mark of sorrow leaves his face. He calls her his sweet Arabian. That night he says good night, sweet Safie. She has a language of her own. The creature sits through the same lessons and, in two months, outruns her broken accents. Felix reads Volney's Ruins of Empires aloud because its style imitates Eastern authors, and he explains as he goes. The creature hears of empires, of the American hemisphere, and weeps with Safie over its original inhabitants.
The words turn him toward himself. He hears of property, rank, and noble blood. A man may be respected with one of those advantages; without either he is a vagabond. The creature has no money, no friends, no kind of property, and a figure he now knows is loathsome. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth? He wishes he had stayed in the wood with only hunger, thirst, and heat. Knowledge clings like lichen on rock.
The smiles of Agatha and Safie are not for him. No father watched his infant days. No mother blessed him. He has never seen a being who resembled him. What was I? The question returns to be answered only with groans. He will come back, he says, to the cottagers' own story.
Coming Up in Chapter 18
The old man's name is De Lacey. Months earlier they lived in Paris. A Turkish merchant is condemned, and Felix, present at the trial, vows to deliver him. Safie at the prison grate becomes the reward Felix will not name as a price.
