“If you are not wasting your time,” I replied to him, “I shall be very surprised. I studied her yesterday, and as you admit the eagle eyes of our profession, let me tell you that I have diagnosed in her the signs of the most complete absence of temperament, which are a little throat, small hips, skin without down, thin lips, the lower one receding a little, hard and lean nostrils, and metallic voice. I would wager that she has no palate, and that she does not know what she eats or drinks. She is a creature all intellect without a shadow of sensuality.” “But these cold women have just as many intrigues as the others!” he interrupted. “You do not know that class then? They give themselves, not to surrender themselves, but to take others. When it is necessary for them to grip a lover tightly, a lover they need, they do so with their person the more easily since the pleasure of it is a matter of indifference to them. They know that possession detaches some men and attaches others. It is simply a question of persuading them that one is of the kind who become attached in this way, when one is not. Then, too, there are cold women who are hunters, and then! Sometimes I place Madam de Bonnivet in the first group, sometimes in the second. I do not pretend to solve the riddle of this sphinx. But failing the answer to the riddle of this sphinx, I will have the sphinx in person, or my name is not Jacques Molan. Then, as you have helped me and are just, you shall have a reward. You will no longer reproach me with that dinner in the Rue des Écuries d’Artois. You shall be paid for your unpleasant task. What time is it? Half-past one. Prepare to see in ten minutes Mademoiselle Camille Favier herself enter with her respectable mother to arrange about the portrait. Is not that good of me? But I have been better still, and I have not told her where you dined yesterday.”