“That wretched jest is threadbare.”
“A jest! Wretched? And threadbare, too? Poor Keyork! His wit is failing at last.”
He shook his head in mock melancholy over his supposed intellectual dotage. Unorna turned away, this time with the determination to leave him.
“I am sorry if I have offended you,” he said, very meekly. “Was what I said so very unpardonable?”
“If ignorance is unpardonable, as you always say, then your speech is past forgiveness,” said Unorna, relenting by force of habit, but gathering her fur around her. “If you know anything of women—”
“Which I do not,” observed the gnome in a low-toned interruption.
“Which you do not—you would know how much such love as you advise me to manufacture by force of suggestion could be worth in a woman’s eyes. You would know that a woman will be loved for herself, for her beauty, for her wit, for her virtues, for her faults, for her own love, if you will, and by a man conscious of all his actions and free of his heart; not by a mere patient reduced to the proper state of sentiment by a trick of hypnotism, or psychiatry, or of whatever you choose to call the effect of this power of mine which neither you, nor I, nor any one can explain. I will be loved freely, for myself, or not at all.”
“I see, I see,” said Keyork thoughtfully, “something in the way Israel Kafka loves you.”
“Yes, as Israel Kafka loves me, I am not afraid to say it. As he loves me, of his own free will, and to his own destruction—as I should have loved him, had it been so fated.”
“So you are a fatalist, Unorna,” observed her companion, still stroking and twisting his beard. “It is strange that we should differ upon so many fundamental questions, you and I, and yet be such good friends. Is it not?”