Whenever they need to define what Dr. Hannibal Lecter is, they don't hesitate: They call him a terrifying monster. They are right.
He is a terrifying monster.
Everybody agrees to that. He's always called a monster – yet while they are right to call him that, considering the 'evidence' and the rest, she stands by her words: They don't have a name for what he is. He's a genius and a psychopath, an artist and a cannibal, a physician and a murderer – but he's also more than all that: He is the paragon of excellence and a real gentleman with manners one wouldn't expect from such a person. And if one asks her, she'd say that above all his features, she's most afraid of his gentlemanly actions.
It's quite inane of her to say this, one might think, but she really finds the gentleman in him the most terrifying. Allow her to explain before jumping to conclusions: She can't remind herself of what he really is when he is a gentleman, and this is a pretty good reason according to her. She has dealt with him before, after all. One might say she knows him – not his past and history perhaps, but his ways of dealing with people. He did manipulate her, it is a part of what he is: He is a true manipulator whose methods are so efficient that you cannot comprehend what he's doing until all the damage is done.
All the things that make him what he is, including the last one, separate him from them. Them, ordinary people with no ability similar to the ones he possesses – they aren't what he is. They can never be. They are lucky they will never be.
A monster, they call him, but simply because they lack a better definition.