continued, "does not the passion for science in
you dominate every other passion? For science--and what science brings
you?"

With a sure hand she had touched his weak point. He had the passion to
acquire, and through his science of medicine he acquired.

"You cannot expect me to allow that I am dominated by anything," he
answered. "A man will seldom make a confession of slavery even to
himself, if he really is a man."

"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