"Would you call it weakness?" she asked.
"She fell in love with Johannes, did she not? That was weakness—for her. She herself recognized it as such."
The girl looked at him thoughtfully for a moment.
"That is true," she said.
"Some of the world's most daring and accomplished criminals have been women," he went on. "But Nature never intended woman to be the bearer of burdens; there is a weakness in her soul structure somewhere; she usually sinks under the consciousness of guilt."
"More so than men, do you think?"
"As a rule—yes."
She put down the book and clasped her hands in her lap.
"There is no need to sympathize with Rebecca," she said. "She was brave and strong, even in her love for Johannes. But he," and there was a note in her voice that recalled the night he had listened to it over the telephone, "he was different. There is no more dreadful thing in the play, to me, than the character of Rosmer. To think of him sitting quietly in that charnel house, prospering in soul, growing sleek in thought, becoming stored with high ideas. Perfect peace came to him in spite of the stern-faced portraits which shrieked murder from the walls. He dreamed of freeing and ennobling mankind, and all the time Fate was weaving a net about him that was to drag him from the mill bridge after his dead wife."
"Kroll knew him," said the investigator. "And he said Rosmer was easily influenced. It is usually men of that type who are drawn into the vortex which swirls at every door."