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.
"Ugh! Let me go, let me go, I say!"
"What have I done to you?" Frederick asked. For a moment he was genuinely alarmed, scarcely knowing whether he had not been actually guilty of a wrong against her. He had been drinking champagne and was excited. If someone were to enter now, what would he think of him? Even centuries before, had not Potiphar's wife, from whom Joseph fled, resorted to certain successful slanderous means? "What have I done?" he repeated.
"Nothing," she said, "except what you are in the habit of doing. You have insulted an unprotected girl."
"Are you crazy?" he asked.
Suddenly she answered: "I don't know." And in that instant the hard, hateful expression of her face melted, turning into complete submission, a change that went irresistibly to the heart of a man like Frederick. He forgot himself. He was no longer master of his feelings.