e, and how can I help it, if you have fallen into the
hands of exploiters? Besides, all of you intellectual Russians are
hysterical--a trait utterly repugnant to me."

She jumped to her feet and wanted to run away. To restrain her he caught
first her right, then her left wrist. She looked at him with such an
expression of hate and contempt that he could not but be sensitive of the
girl's passionate beauty. Her face was of the colour that greensickness
imparts. Her features were exquisitely delicate. In contrast, Ingigerd's
face, with which Frederick fleetingly compared hers, seemed unrefined,
even coarse. Here was the aristocracy of a too highly bred race, somewhat
faded, to be sure, but at that moment all the more seductive.

"Ugh! Let me go, let me go, I say!"

"What have I done to you?" Frederick asked. For a moment he was genuinely
alarmed, scarcely knowing whether he had not been actually guilty of a
wrong against her. He had been drinking champagne and was excited. If
someone were to enter now, what would he think of him? Even centuries
before, had not Potiphar's wife, from whom Joseph fled, resorted to
certain successful slanderous means? "What have I done?" he repeated.

"Nothing," she said, "except what you are in the habit of doing. You have
insulted an unprotected girl."

"Are you crazy?" he asked.

Suddenly she answered: "I don't know." And in that instant the hard,
hateful expression of her face melted, turning into complete submission,
a change that went irresistibly to the heart of a man like Frederick. He
forgot himself. He was no longer master of his feelings.

XXXI

This strange incident of meeting, seeing, loving, and parting forever had
passed swiftly as in a dream. Since Wilhelm had not yet returned,
Frederick, long after his visitor had fled, went out on deck, where the
exalted impression of the starry heavens shining over the infinite
expanse of the ocean, purified him, as it were. He was neither by nature
nor by habit a Don Juan, and it astonished him that the unusual,
surprising adventure seemed the most natural thing in the world.

The deck was empty. Another boy was on guard in Pander's place. The
temperature had sunk to below freezing-point, and a thick coating of
hoar-frost lay on the rigging.

As he stood leaning over the railing, he had a painful vision of the sum
total of life and death within the eons of life on earth. His innermost
being smarted with the pain of it. D