"He was, as you say, a model of discretion."
"Ah. There are records? Well, you were justified in destroying them."
"It is hard to understand."
"To understand whom—Sir Jacques or the girl? You cannot mean the girl. A man who reaches the age of thirty without understanding women is like a bluebottle who devotes a summer morning to an endeavour to fly through a pane of glass."
"You speak like an early Roman."
"What more admirable model? Consider the Roman institutions; perfect sanitation and slavery. We abolish one and adopt the other, with the result that a healthy democracy has swallowed us up. The early Romans were sages."
"You have no sympathy for Sir Jacques' victims?"
"Except where the chivalrous warriors of Prussia are concerned, and with other rare exceptions, I never think of women as victims, Mr. Mario."
"Not even in the case of an aged hypocrite who probably posed as the Platonic friend?"
"Platonic friendship is impossible up to sixty-five. The most ignorant girl knows it to be so, for every woman has hereditary memory."