“That’s something we won’t drink a toast to.  Rather let us toast the healthy, cynically outspoken ideal of the American, the exploiter ideal, with its tolerance and levelling down.”

“Yes, a thousand times rather,” said Frederick.

So they drank a toast to America.

A second-cabin stewardess led in the Russian Jewess.  The girl was holding a handkerchief to her nose and mouth.  Her nose had been bleeding for an hour without cease.

“Oh,” she said, retreating a step from the threshold back to the deck, “I am in the way.”  But Doctor Wilhelm insisted on her coming in.

It turned out that this was not the real mission on which the stewardess had come to see Doctor Wilhelm.  She whispered a few words, unintelligible to the others, into his ear.  He excused himself to Frederick, asked him to look after the Jewess, and left the cabin with the stewardess.

XXX

“You are a doctor?” asked the Russian Jewess.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Without wasting many words, he made her lie prone on the couch, inserted a tampon in her nose, and used other means to stanch the flow of blood.  He had kept the door to the deck open to let the cigarette smoke out and the fresh, healing salt air in.  The girl lay quietly on the couch; and Frederick thought it advisable to look through one of Wilhelm’s medical books.

“So far as I am concerned, you may smoke,” she said after a while, having noticed that Frederick absent-mindedly started to light a cigarette several times and then, recollecting himself, desisted.

“No,” he said curtly, “I won’t smoke now.”

“You might at least offer me a cigarette,” she said.  “I am bored.”

“That’s proper,” he said.  “A patient should be bored.”

“Oh, I am not a patient.”

“Patientia is the Latin for ‘patience,’ my dear young lady.  You are not a patient in so far as you are very impatient.”

“If you let me have a cigarette, then I will say ‘Yes, you are right.’”

“I know I am right, and there can be no question of your smoking now.”

“But I want to smoke.  You are impolite,” she said, obstinately kicking up her heel.

Frederick ordered her to be quiet, and she let her foot drop again on the leather upholstery.  He looked at her with an intentionally exaggerated expression of sternness.

“I am not your slave, do you understand?  Do you think I left Odessa, where there is enough ordering about, to be ordered about by every stranger I meet?” she grumbled.  “I am cold.  Please shut the door.”

“If you want, I will shut the door,” said Frederick, getting up to do so with an air of resignation not altogether genuine.

In the morning in the steerage, Frederick and this Deborah had exchanged 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.