They were silent for a moment, listening to the splashing of the fountain outside and the distant hum of the city.
"Do you know that you are very kind to me?" he said.
"You were very much afraid of me yesterday," she reminded him.
"Had I any cause?"
She smiled.
"I shall not tell you my secrets. You must find them out. I have dabbled in politics, I have dabbled in diplomacy. I have not as a rule very much sympathy with your sex, as I think you know. It has never interested me before even to give good advice to a man. If I were you, Sir Julien, beyond a certain point I would not trust Madame Christophor, for when the time comes I have always the feeling that if a man's career lay within my power, I would sooner wreck it than help him."
"Of course you are talking nonsense," he declared.
"Am I?" she replied. "Well, I don't know. I can look back now to a half-hour of my life when I loathed every creature that could call itself a man."
"But it was a single person," he reminded her, "who sinned."
"His crime was too great to be the crime of a single man," she asserted, with a quiver of passion in her tone. "It was the culmination of the whole abominable selfishness of his sex. One man's life is too light a price to pay for the tragedy of that half-hour. I have never spared one of your sex since. I never shall."