"I shouldn't have minded the beating so much. Among our people, parents have the right to be severe, and it is better to take a beating from your father than to be punished by the rabbi."
"Your dear father will forgive you in time," suggested Elsa gently.
She felt miserably uncomfortable, and would have given worlds to be rid of Klara. She couldn't think why the girl had stopped to talk to her and Andor: in fact she was more than sure that Klara had come out this evening on purpose to talk to her and to Andor; for now she stood deliberately in front of them both with arms crossed in front of her and defiant eyes fixed now upon one and now upon the other. Andor too was beginning to look cross and sullen; this meeting coming on the top of that lovely walk seemed like a black shadow cast over the radiance of their happiness, and this thin, tall girl, all in black, with black hair fluttering round her pale face, seemed like a big black bird of evil presage: her skirts flapped round her knees like wings and her voice sounded cold and harsh like the croaking of a raven.
But Elsa's kindly disposition did not allow her to be too obviously unkind to the Jewess. Perhaps after all the girl meant no harm, and had only run out now like a released colt, glad to feel freedom in the air around her and the vastness lying stretched out before her to infinity beyond. Perhaps she had only sought the company of the first-comers in order to get a small measure of sympathy. But now, though Elsa's gentle words should have softened her mood, she retorted with renewed fierceness:
"Curse him! I don't want his forgiveness! and if ever he wants mine—on his deathbed—he won't get it—even if he should die in torment for want of a kind word from me."
"Klara, you mustn't say that," cried Elsa, horrified at what she considered almost blasphemy. "Your father is your father, remember—and even if he has been harsh to you . . ."
Klara interrupted her with a loud and strident laugh.
"If he has been harsh to me!" she exclaimed. "Didn't I tell you that he thrashed me like a dog, so that I was sick for days. But I wouldn't mind that so much. Bruises mend sooner or later, but it's that abominable marriage which will make me curse him to my dying day."
"Marriage? . . . what marriage? . . ."
"With a man I had never seen in my life until it was all settled. Just a man who is so ugly and so bad-tempered and so repugnant to every girl whom he knows that nobody would have him—but just a man who wanted a wife. The rabbi at Arad knew about him and he spoke about him to father—it seems that he is quite rich—and father has given me to him and I am to be married within a fortnight. Curse them! curse them all, I say! Oh! I wish I had the pluck to run away, or to kill myself or do something—but I am such an abominable coward—and I shall loathe to live in Arad in a tiny secondhand clothes shop, with that hideous monster for a husband—pointed at by everyone as the girl with a disgraceful story to her credit and sold to a creature whom no one else would have—in order to cover up a scandal."