“Oh, you really are a man, but you have in you something of the woman.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know it; I feel it.”

“Feeling is woman’s knowledge.”

“And what is man’s?”

“Do women think he has any?”

“Some men have knowledge—­dangerous men, like you.”

“In what way am I dangerous?”

“If I tell you, you will be more so.  I should be foolish to lead you to your weapons.”

“You want no leading to yours.”

It was, perhaps, almost an impertinence; but he felt she would not think it so, and in this he accurately appraised her taste, or lack of taste.  Delicacy, reverence, were not really what she wanted of any man.  Nigel might pray to a pale Madonna; Isaacson dealt with a definitely blunted woman of the world.  And in his intercourse with people, unless indeed he loved them, he generally spoke to their characters, did not hold converse with his own, like a man who talks to himself in an unlighted room.

She smiled.

“Few women do, if they have any.”

“Is any woman without them?”

“Yes, one.”

“Name her.”

“The absolutely good woman.”

For a moment he was silent, struck to silence by the fierceness of her cynicism, a fierceness which had leapt suddenly out of her as a drawn sword leaps from its sheath.

“I don’t acknowledge that, Mrs. Chepstow,” he said—­and at this moment perhaps he was the man talking to himself in the dark, as Nigel often was.

“Of course not.  No man would.”

“Why not?”

“Men seldom name, even to themselves, the weapons by which they are conquered.  But women know what those weapons are.”

“The Madame Marneffes, but not the Baroness Hulots.”

“A Baroness Hulot never counts.”

“Is it really clever of you to generalize about men?  Don’t you differentiate among us at all?”

He spoke entirely without pique, of which he was quite unconscious.

“I do differentiate,” she replied.  “But only sometimes, not always.  There are broad facts which apply to men, however different they may be from one another.  There are certain things which all men feel, and feel in much the same way.”

“Nigel Armine and I, for instance?”

A sudden light—­was it a light of malice?—­flashed in her brilliant eyes.

“Yes, even Mr. Armine and you.”

“I shall not ask you what they are.”

“Perhaps the part of you which is woman has informed you.”

Before she said “woman” she had paused.  He felt that the word she had thought of, and had wished to use, was “Jewish.”  Her knowledge of him, while he disliked it because he disliked her, stirred up the part of him which was mental into an activity which he enjoyed.  And the enjoyment, which she felt, increased her sense of her own value.  Conversation ran easily between them.  He discovered,