"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!"