She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple altars. To die at his will and be of use to him;—this seemed to her the most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker's daughter lying there in such calm content.
"Why do you look so much at her?" he said at length. "I shall do her no harm; if I did, what would she know?"
"I was not thinking of her," she answered slowly, with a certain perplexed pain upon her face. "I was thinking I might be of more use to you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often thought of it lately."
He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they gained from their study but little.
For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical development, but mindless as any clod of earth.
He did not know how to answer her.
"Why should you think of death?" he said at last. "Is your life so bitter to you?"
She stared at him.
"Is a beaten dog's bitter? or is a goaded ox's sweet?"
"But you are so young,—and you are handsome, and a woman?"