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.  Anybody with whom I don’t feel I could pray to God, is disgusting to me.  Perhaps, after all, I shall end by being a nun, but not because I am pious.”  She did not realise how egregiously she was contradicting herself.  “Oh, no!  It wouldn’t occur to me to be pious.  I don’t believe in anything but myself.  Life is short, and nothing is coming afterward.  A person ought to enjoy life.  A person who deprives himself of a single enjoyment sins against himself, beside practising self-deception.”

She was led to speak of her mother.  Frederick was startled by the hatred, the vulgarity with which she referred to her.

“I could kill her,” she said, “although, or just because she is my mother.”  Her face lost its purity of expression and assumed an ugly, repulsive look.  “With papa it is different.  But it gets to be an awful nuisance always to be dragging him about with me.”

The stewardess came in.  She spoke to Ingigerd in a loud, cheery way.

“Better here than down below, isn’t it, Miss?”

She bolstered up her cushions, rearranged her coverings, and left again.

“The silly thing has already fallen in love with me, too,” said Ingigerd.

“Why am I sitting here?” Frederick thought, and was about to attempt in all kindness to remove the cataract from the eyes of the foolish little creature.  Why did great waves of pity keep sweeping over him?  Pity for which she did not ask.  Why could he not rid himself of the idea of innocence, of chastity, of the uncontaminated while in the presence of this child fiend?  She seemed pure and unsullied, and each capricious movement, each remark of hers only heightened the impression of touching helplessness.

“All love is pity.”  This sentence of Schopenhauer’s, which he held to be both true and paradoxical, flashed into his mind.  He took one of her dolls in his hand, and tried in the kindly way that he had acquired with his patients to make Ingigerd Hahlstroem understand that one does not go through life unpunished in the belief that life is mere doll’s play.

“Your dolls,” he said, “are actually beasts of prey.  Woe to you, if you don’t realise they are beasts before they bury their claws in your flesh and rend you with their fangs.”

She gave a short laugh without answering.  She complained of a pain in her breast.

“You’re a physician.  Won’t you examine me?”

“That’s Doctor Wilhelm’s business,” Frederick answered brusquely.