“Are you married?” he heard before he had fully recovered his balance.  He turned pale.  His answer was hard and repellent.

“It would be well, Miss Hahlstroem, if you were to examine me more closely before you treat me as one among many.  So far, I don’t believe in the bond that unites us.  During your dance you looked not only at me, but at everybody else.”  He spoke with increasing coldness.  “At any rate, it doesn’t in the least concern you whether I am, or am not, married—­just as little as it concerns me what repulsive personages, whom nothing but a depraved instinct can enjoy, you keep company with.”  He meant Achleitner.

Ingigerd gave a short laugh.  “Do you take me for Joan of Arc?”

“Not exactly that,” rejoined Frederick, “but if you would allow me, I should like to regard you as still a girl, a distinguished little lady, whose reputation cannot be too carefully guarded against the faintest blemish.”

“Reputation!” sneered the girl.  “You are very much mistaken if you think I ever cared for anything of the sort.  I’d rather be disreputable ten times over and live as I please, than have a good reputation and die of boredom.  I must enjoy my life, Doctor von Kammacher.”

Frederick’s teeth clenched.  Outwardly composed, he was suffering the pangs of torture.

Ingigerd proceeded to reveal her life in a series of confidences of such shocking content as to be worthy of a Lais or a Phryne.  Doctor von Kammacher, she said, might be sorry for her if he wanted to, but nobody was to make a mistake about her.  Everybody associating with her was to know exactly who she was.  In this she betrayed a certain dread, as one who would absolutely guard others as well as herself against the catastrophe of disillusionment.

When the sun had set, and Ingigerd, still with that suggestive, sensual, evil smile on her lips, had finished her hideous confession, Frederick found himself confronting the knowledge of a childhood so outrageous as to be worse than anything he had met with in all his experience as a physician.

Several times in the course of her narrative, Achleitner and her father had come to take her inside, but she had angrily driven them away.  It was Frederick who finally helped her back to her cabin.

In his own cabin, without even removing his overcoat, he threw himself on his berth to think over the inconceivable story.  He sighed, he gnashed his teeth, he wanted to doubt it.  Several times he said aloud, “No!” or “Impossible!” and beat his fists against the mattress of the berth above.  He could have sworn an oath that this time there had not been a single lie in Mara’s whole shameless narrative.  “Mara, or the Spider’s Victim.”  Now, of a sudden, he understood her dance!  She had danced the thing she had lived in her own life!

XIV

“I have set my all on nothing.”

To the accompaniment of this refrain beating in his soul Frederick maintained an outer show of hilarity.  He and the ship’s doctor were drinking champagne.  He had ordered the first bottle with the soup and had immediately drunk several glasses.