Her face contracted with a gesture of scorn and pity. "Ah, those
Latins!…"
"They're all the same,—Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen…. They were born for the same thing. They hardly meet an attractive woman but they believe that they are evading their obligations if they do not beg for her love and what comes afterward…. Cannot a man and woman simply be friends? Couldn't you be just a good comrade and treat me as a companion?"
Ferragut protested energetically. No; no, he couldn't. He loved her and, after being repelled with such cruelty, his love would simply go on increasing. He was sure of that.
A nervous tremor made Freya's voice sharp and cutting, and her eyes took on a dangerous gleam. She looked at her companion as though he were an enemy whose death she longed for.
"Very well, then, if you must know it. I abominate all men; I abominate them, because I know them so well. I would like the death of all of them, of every one!… The evil that they have wrought in my life!… I would like to be immensely beautiful, the handsomest woman on earth, and to possess the intellect of all the sages concentrated in my brain, to be rich and to be a queen, in order that all the men of the world, crazy with desire, would come to prostrate themselves before me…. And I would lift up my feet with their iron heels, and I would go trampling over them, crushing their heads … so … and so … and so!…"
She struck the sands of the garden with the soles of her little shoes.
An hysterical sneer distorted her mouth.
"Perhaps I might make an exception of you…. You who, with all your braggart arrogance, are, after all, outright and simple-hearted. I believe you capable of assuring a woman of all kinds of love-lies … believing them yourself most of all. But the others!… Ay, the others!… How I hate them!…"
She looked over toward the palace of the Aquarium, glistening white between the colonnade of trees.
"I would like to be," she continued pensively, "one of those animals of the sea that can cut with their claws, that have arms like scissors, saws, pincers … that devour their own kind, and absorb everything around them."
Then she looked at the branch of a tree from which were hanging several silver threads, sustaining insects with active tentacles.