Her eyes were watching him intently.
“You commiserate me, monsieur?” she said.
“How can you doubt it, Nicette?”
“Yet you do not love children?”
“Don’t I?”
“But their cunning and their vindictiveness, monsieur?”
“What of them?”
“What, indeed? It is monsieur’s own words I recall.”
“Nicette, can you think me such a brute? I hold myself abashed in the presence of the innocents. If I have ever decried them, it was only because their truthfulness rebuked my scepticism. They have shown me how to die, since I saw you last, Nicette. I shall try to remember when my hour comes.”
She passed a hand across her eyes, as though she were bewildered.