nged
a glowing look of understanding. Now, although, or perhaps because, the
wine was in his veins, he was eager for Doctor Wilhelm's return. His
absence seemed to be unduly prolonged. For a time the girl lay silent.
Frederick found it necessary to examine the tampon in her nostril. As he
was doing so, he noticed tears in her eyes.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "Why are you crying?"

She suddenly began to beat him with her arms and fists, called him a
sleek, heartless bourgeois, and wanted to jump up; but she had to succumb
to Frederick's superior, gentle strength and return to her reclining
posture. Frederick seated himself as before on an upholstered chair
opposite the couch.

"My dear child," he said, very gently, "you are behaving queerly,
slinging about those honourable epithets. But we won't discuss that. You
are nervous. You are excited. You have no blood in your veins, and even
if you had a stronger constitution, the condition of your nerves after
the hardships of this trip, especially in the steerage, could scarcely be
different."

"I'll never travel first class, never!"

"Why not?"

"Because, considering the misery in which the majority of human beings
are languishing, it is a mean low thing to do to travel first class. Read
Dostoievsky, read Tolstoy, read Kropotkin! We are being chased like
animals. We are being persecuted. It doesn't matter where we die."

"It may interest you to know that I have read them all, Kropotkin,
Tolstoy, Dostoievsky. But don't suppose you are the only persecuted
person on earth. I am persecuted, too. We are all persecuted."

"Oh, you are travelling first class and you are not a Jew. I am a Jew.
Have you the faintest idea of what it means to be a Jew in Russia?"

"That is why you and I are now travelling to a new world," said
Frederick, "to America, the land of liberty."

"Indeed!" she sneered, "I and liberty! I know my fate. Don't you know
into what hands I have fallen? I am the victim of vile exploiters!"

The girl cried, and since she was young and of the same delicacy of
figure as Ingigerd, only of a very different race, a dark-haired,
dark-eyed race, Frederick felt himself perceptibly weakening. His
compassion grew; and he was well aware that openly expressed sympathy
is the surest approach to love. So he again forced himself into a hard,
repellent attitude of opposition.

"Now I am nothing but a physician representing another physician. What
does it concern m