“And these women?” she asked, not daring to look at him.

“Do not be alarmed, you have nothing to fear.  One is the drunken widow of a butcher, and the other is a young girl who has a baby.”

“He dares to propose such women to a man like you!”

And Saniel repeated all that Caffie had said to him about these two women.

“What a monster he is!” Phillis said.

“While he was telling me these things I thought of what you said—­that if some one killed him, it would be no more than he deserved.”

“That is perfectly true.”

“Nothing would have been easier than for me to have made away with him.  He had the toothache, and when he showed me his teeth I could easily have strangled him.  We were alone, and a miserable diabetic, such as he is, who has not more than six months to live, I am sure, could not have resisted a grasp like this.  I could take his keys from his pocket, open his safe, and take the thirty, forty, sixty thousand francs that I saw heaped up there.  The devil take me if it were ever discovered.  A doctor does not strangle his patients, he poisons them.  He kills them scientifically, not brutally.”

“People who have no conscience can do such things; but for us they are impossible.”

“I assure you it is not conscience that would have restrained me.”

“The fear of remorse, if I may use an ugly word.”

“But intelligent persons have no remorse, my dear child, because they reason before the deed, and not after.  Before acting they weigh the pros and cons, and know what the consequences of their actions will be to others as well as to themselves.  If this previous examination proves to them that for some reason or other they may act, they will always be calm, assured that they will feel no remorse, which is only the reproach of conscience.”

“Without doubt what you say is to the point, but it is impossible for me to accept it.  If I have never committed crimes, I have often been foolish and have committed faults, many of them deliberately, after the examination of which you speak.  I should have been, according to you, perfectly placid and free from the reproach of conscience; however, the next morning I woke unhappy, tormented, often overwhelmed, and unable to stifle the mysterious voice that accused me.”

“And in whose name did it speak, this voice, more vague than mysterious?”

“In the name of my conscience, evidently.”

“‘Evidently’ is too much, and you would be puzzled if called upon to demonstrate this evidence; whereas, nothing is more uncertain and elusive than the thing that is called conscience, which is in reality only an affair of environment and of education.”

“I do not understand.”

“Does your conscience tell you it is a crime to love me?”

“No, decidedly.”

“You see, then, that you have a personal way of understanding what is good and bad, which is not that of our country, where it is admitted, from the religious and from the social point of view, that a young girl is guilty when she has a lover.  Of course, you see, also, that conscience is a bad weighing-machine, since each one, in order to make it work, uses a weight that he has himself manufactured.”