Frederick realised that this beginning was a foolish expression of embarrassment.
"I should like to be of service to you in anything I can, and you don't in the least bore me."
That was the truth. Alone with Ingigerd in her cabin, where the vessel's motion was less perceptible, he was sensitive to the full fascination of her presence. The pangs of the ocean crossing had given her sweet girlish face a waxen transparency. At her request the stewardess had loosened her hair, and it lay spread in a golden flood over her white pillow, a golden flood, the sight of which was highly disturbing to Frederick. Where was there an adornment for the head, a queen's diadem, which could exercise so powerful, so divine a charm? It seemed to Frederick as if that tremendous vessel, with its hundreds of human ants, were nothing more than the cocoon of this tiny silkworm, this delicately coloured, delicious little butterfly; as if the sixty naked helots down at the ship's bottom shovelling coal into the white heat under the boilers, were toiling and sweating merely to be of service to this childish Venus; as if the captain and officers were the paladins of the queen, and the rest of the crew her following; as if the steerage were rilled with blindly devoted slaves, and as if the Roland were proudly carrying a fairy tale from "A Thousand and One Nights" across the salt desert.
"Did I hurt your feelings yesterday by telling you my story?" she asked suddenly.
"Mine? No! You are the injured one in the life you have unfortunately led."
She looked at him with a sardonic smile, plucking a pink wad from the lid of a box of sweetmeats beside her. In her looks and smiles, Frederick felt her cold, wicked enjoyment. And since he was a man and knew he was impotent in the face of such fiendish mockery, a wave of physical fury mounted in him, driving the blood into his eyes and causing him involuntarily to clench his fists. His full-blooded nature occasionally had need of such frenzy. It was a phenomenon with which his friends were familiar.
"What is the matter with you?" whispered Ingigerd, plucking at the pink wad. "I am not afraid of a monk like you."
Her remark was not calculated to calm Frederick's passionate surge. However, he mastered his feelings with evident, redoubled exertion of his will power. Had he not succeeded in controlling himself, he might have more resembled a Papuan negro than a European. He might have turned into a beast in human form, and might have thrown overboard, as he himself clearly felt, more than was good of what both self-acquired and imposed culture had formed in him. He had no desire to turn into another animal in Circe's stables.
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."