As she spoke she felt that the air was clearing, the clouds were flying.  Constraint at least was at an end.  And she had really the sensation of setting a captive at liberty.  She turned to leave him, but he said: 

“Please, stop, Madame.”

“Why?”

“You have made a mistake.”

“In what?”

“I do want to see this garden.”

“Really?  Well, then, you can wander through it.”

“I do not wish to see it alone.”

“Larbi shall guide you.  For half a franc he will gladly give up his serenading.”

“Madame, if you will not show me the garden I will not see it at all.  I will go now and will never come into it again.  I do not pretend.”

“Ah!” she said, and her voice was quite changed.  “But you do worse.”

“Worse!”

“Yes.  You lie in the face of Africa.”

She did not wish or mean to say it, and yet she had to say it.  She knew it was monstrous that she should speak thus to him.  What had his lies to do with her?  She had been told a thousand, had heard a thousand told to others.  Her life had been passed in a world of which the words of the Psalmist, though uttered in haste, are a clear-cut description.  And she had not thought she cared.  Yet really she must have cared.  For, in leaving this world, her soul had, as it were, fetched a long breath.  And now, at the hint of a lie, it instinctively recoiled as from a gust of air laden with some poisonous and suffocating vapour.

“Forgive me,” she added.  “I am a fool.  Out here I do love truth.”

Androvsky dropped his eyes.  His whole body expressed humiliation, and something that suggested to her despair.

“Oh, you must think me mad to speak like this!” she exclaimed.  “Of course people must be allowed to arm themselves against the curiosity of others.  I know that.  The fact is I am under a spell here.  I have been living for many, many years in the cold.  I have been like a woman in a prison without any light, and—­”

“You have been in a prison!” he said, lifting his head and looking at her eagerly.

“I have been living in what is called the great world.”

“And you call that a prison?”

“Now that I am living in the greater world, really living at last.  I have been in the heart of insincerity, and now I have come into the heart, the fiery heart of sincerity.  It’s there—­there”—­she pointed to the desert.  “And it has intoxicated me; I think it has made me unreasonable.  I expect everyone—­not an Arab—­to be as it is, and every little thing that isn’t quite frank, every pretence, is like a horrible little hand tugging at me, as if trying to take me back to the prison I have left.  I think, deep down, I have always loathed lies, but never as I have loathed them since I came here.  It seems to me as if only in the desert there is freedom for the body, and only in truth there is freedom for the soul.”