She nodded.
"He has great faith in my powers," she went on, looking him full in the face, "also, apparently, some belief in your susceptibility. Is that unkind of me? Never mind, it is the truth. He imagined, perhaps, that I might help him to rid Paris of your presence. There was just one thing he could offer me which I desired. He came to offer it."
"You refused?" Julien exclaimed.
Her eyes rested upon his. Her expression was faintly provocative.
"How could I accept an offer," she asked, "to deal with a thing which did not belong to me? You have shown no signs at present, Sir Julien, of becoming my abject slave."
The car rushed through a straggling village. All the time she was watching him. Then she threw herself back among the cushions with a little laugh.
"A week or so ago," she murmured, "I had a fancy that if I had tried—well, that perhaps you were not so different from other men. I should have loathed my conquest, I should probably have loathed you, but I think that I should have expected it. At the present moment," she went on, glancing into a little gold mirror which she had picked up from a heap of trifles lying on the table before her, "at the present moment I am disillusioned. My vanity is wounded though my relief is great. Nevertheless, Sir Julien, tell me what has happened to you during the last few days?"
"Work," Julien replied, "the sort of work I was craving for."
"Not only that," she insisted, setting down the mirror with a sigh.
"There is something else."
"If there is," Julien assured her, "I am not yet conscious of it."