We all of us see more and understand better what we see, in those
surroundings most familiar to us, and it is a general law that the average
intelligence likes the best that which it understands with the least
effort. The mechanical part of us, too, when free from any direct and
especial impulse of the mind, does unknowingly what it has been in the
habit of doing. Two-thirds of all the physical diseases in the world are
caused by the disturbance of the mental habits and are vastly aggravated
by the direction of the thoughts to the part afflicted. Idiots and madmen
are often phenomenally healthy people, because there is in their case no
unnatural effort of the mind to control and manage the body. The Count
having bestowed no thought upon the direction of his walk, mechanically
turned towards the scene of his daily labour.
Considering that he believed himself to have abandoned for ever the
irksome employment of rolling tobacco in a piece of parchment in order to
slip it into a piece of paper, it might have been supposed that he would
be glad to look at anything rather than the glass door of the shop in
which he had repeated that operation so many hundreds of thousands of
times; or, at least, it might have been expected that on realising where
he was he would be satisfied with a glance of recognition and would turn
away.
But the Count's fate had ordained otherwise. When he reached the shop the
lights were burning brightly in the show window and within.
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