Josephine shrank away from him. He was no longer joking; bending over her he said quietly: “Just a trace of feeling--just a slightest trace--that was all you showed. You believed that the child was dead, dead by your order; and it did not move you at all. With you the death of others does not count. One is twenty, with all one’s life before one ... with charm and beauty.... You crush all that, as if you were cracking a nut. Your conscience does not make one protest. It is true that you do not laugh; but none the more do you weep. In reality you do not give it a thought. I remember that Beaumagnan called you a daughter of Hell--a designation that revolted me. Now I see that he was right. Hell is in you. You are a kind of monster about whom I can never think again without horror. But what about you, Josephine? Aren’t there times when you feel that horror yourself?” Still sitting at the toilet table, her head resting on her hands, in the attitude of which she was so fond, she did not stir. Ralph’s pitiless words did not provoke that access of indignation and fury for which he was looking. He felt that she was at one of those moments in life at which one sees into the deepest depths of one’s soul and cannot turn one’s eyes from the sight. He was not greatly surprised. Without being frequent, such moments could not be very uncommon in the life of this unbalanced creature, whose nature, impassible on the surface, was now and again ravaged by nervous convulsions in its depths. Matters were turning out so different from what she had expected, and the apparition of Ralph was so disconcerting that she was unable to rise to struggle with the enemy who was so cruelly outraging her. He took advantage of her weakness, and went on in a voice that demanded an answer: “Isn’t it a fact, Josine, that at times you terrify yourself? Aren’t there times when you are full of horror at yourself?” The distress of Josephine was so profound that she murmured: “Yes--yes sometimes. But you’re not to speak to me about it. I don’t _want_ to know. Be quiet--be quiet!” “But on the contrary, it is necessary that you should know,” said Ralph. “If such acts fill you with horror, why do you commit them?” “I can’t help it,” she said faintly in an extreme lassitude. “You do try then?” “Yes. I try--I struggle--but it is never any use. I was taught evil. I do evil as other people do good. I do evil just as I breathe. That was what they willed.” “Who?” “My mother,” she muttered in a low voice. “Your mother? The spy? The woman who made up all this Cagliostro story?” “Yes. But you’re not to blame her. She was very fond of me. Only she had not succeeded.... She had become poor and wretched and she wished me to succeed ... and grow rich.” “Yet you were beautiful. And for a woman beauty is riches. Beauty is enough.” “My mother was beautiful too; and yet her beauty was of no use to her,” she retorted. “You were like her?”