She considered it a great misfortune to be a woman.  She always envied men for their independence.  They could hold themselves aloof, abstaining from the passions that waste life, without anybody’s coming to importune them in their retreat.  They were at liberty to go wherever they wanted to, to travel the wide world over, without leaving behind their footsteps a wake of solicitors.

“You appear to me, Captain, a very charming man.  The other day I was delighted to meet you; it was an apparition from the past; I saw in you the joy of my youth that is beginning to fade away, and the melancholy of certain recollections....  And nevertheless, I am going to end by hating you.  Do you hear me, you tedious old Argonaut?...  I shall loathe you because you will not be a mere friend; because you know only how to talk everlastingly about the same thing; because you are a person out of a novel, a Latin, very interesting, perhaps, to other women,—­but insufferable to me.”

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.