She looked at me dubiously. "You are either very queer," she said, "or else a very great liar."
"But I am neither," I protested, piqued that the girl in her innocence should yet brand me either mentally deficient or deceitful. "It is impossible to make you understand me," I went on, "and yet you must trust me. These other men, they approve the system under which you live, but I do not. I offer you money, I insist on your taking it because there is no other way, but it is not to force you to accept me but only to make it unnecessary for you to accept some one else. You have been very brave, to stand out so long. You must accept my money now, but you need never accept me at all--unless you really want me. If I am to make love to you I want to make love to a woman who is really free; a woman free to accept or reject love, not starved into accepting it in this so-called freedom."
"It is all very wonderful," she repeated; "a minute ago I thought you deceitful, and now I want to believe you. I can not stand out much longer and what would be the use for just a few more days?"
"There will be no need," I said gently, "your courage has done its work well--it has saved you for yourself. And now," I continued, "we will bind this bargain before you again decide me crazy."
Taking out my check book I filled in a check for two hundred marks payable to--"To whom shall I make it payable?" I asked.
"To Bertha, 34 R 6," she said, and thus I wrote it, cursing the prostituted science and the devils of autocracy that should give an innocent girl a number like a convict in a jail or a mare in a breeder's herd book.
And so I bought a German girl with a German check--bought her because I saw no other way to save her from being lashed by starvation to the slave block and sold piecemeal to men in whom honour had not even died, but had been strangled before it was born.
With my check neatly tucked in her bosom, Bertha walked out of the café clinging to my arm, and so, passing unheeding through the throng of indifferent revellers, we came to her apartment.
At the door I said, "Tomorrow night I come again. Shall it be at the café or here?"
"Here," she whispered, "away from them all."