“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 me, 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.