powerful, so divine a charm? It seemed to Frederick as if that
tremendous vessel, with its hundreds of human ants, were nothing more
than the cocoon of this tiny silkworm, this delicately coloured,
delicious little butterfly; as if the sixty naked helots down at the
ship's bottom shovelling coal into the white heat under the boilers, were
toiling and sweating merely to be of service to this childish Venus; as
if the captain and officers were the paladins of the queen, and the rest
of the crew her following; as if the steerage were rilled with blindly
devoted slaves, and as if the _Roland_ were proudly carrying a fairy tale
from "A Thousand and One Nights" across the salt desert.

"Did I hurt your feelings yesterday by telling you my story?" she asked
suddenly.

"Mine? No! You are the injured one in the life you have unfortunately
led."

She looked at him with a sardonic smile, plucking a pink wad from the lid
of a box of sweetmeats beside her. In her looks and smiles, Frederick
felt her cold, wicked enjoyment. And since he was a man and knew he was
impotent in the face of such fiendish mockery, a wave of physical fury
mounted in him, driving the blood into his eyes and causing him
involuntarily to clench his fists. His full-blooded nature occasionally
had need of such frenzy. It was a phenomenon with which his friends were
familiar.

"What is the matter with you?" whispered Ingigerd, plucking at the pink
wad. "I am not afraid of a monk like you."

Her remark was not calculated to calm Frederick's passionate surge.
However, he mastered his feelings with evident, redoubled exertion of his
will power. Had he not succeeded in controlling himself, he might have
more resembled a Papuan negro than a European. He might have turned into
a beast in human form, and might have thrown overboard, as he himself
clearly felt, more than was good of what both self-acquired and imposed
culture had formed in him. He had no desire to turn into another animal
in Circe's stables.

It was as if Ingigerd were the very incarnation of the evil Psyche, so
few of a man's feelings were concealed from her. She knew what fight
Frederick had just fought and she knew he had conquered.

"Oh, I wanted to become a nun once myself," she said, and began in a
mixture of truth and fiction to prattle of a year she had spent in a
convent. "I wanted to turn good, but didn't get very far. I am religious.
Really I am. I can say so with a clear conscience. A