Ingigerd Hahlström had dishonoured his love for her, his conscience smote
him all the more. His whole mentality seemed to have entered a state of
reaction against the poison of his passion. A high fever raged in his
veins. The thing that in this condition represented his "I" was engaged
in a wild chase after the "you" of Mara. He picked her up in the streets
of Prague and dragged her back to her mother. He discovered her in houses
of ill repute. He saw her standing before the home of a man who had taken
her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she
stood for hours weeping outside his window. Frederick had by no means
fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth. The old
hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred
aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no
matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried with all
the moral strength of his being to destroy her image in his mind, her
face in its golden setting, her frail, white girlish body pierced through
each curtain, each wall, each thought with which he strove to conceal the
evil spirit that would not be exorcised either by prayers or curses.

Shortly after one o'clock, Frederick was tossed out of his berth. This
time it was not one of those dream-like visions that had roused him with
a start from a doze. The next instant he was thrown against the frame of
the berth. It was evident that the weather had grown worse and the
_Roland_ was travelling in heavier waters of the Atlantic.




XV