Her aunt's threat of seeing her father and the priest was nothing to
Nina. It was the natural course for her aunt to take, and a course in
opposition to which Nina was prepared to stand her ground firmly. But
the allusion to the police did frighten her. She had thought of the
power which the law might have over her very often, and had spoken of
it in awe to her lover. He had reassured her, explaining to her that,
as the law now stood in Austria, no one but her father could prevent
her marriage with a Jew, and that he could only do so till she was of
age. Now Nina would be twenty-one on the first of the coming month, and
therefore would be free, as Anton told her, to do with herself as she
pleased. But still there came over her a cold feeling of fear when her
aunt spoke to her of the police. The law might give the police no power
over her; but was there not a power in the hands of those armed men
whom she saw around her on every side, and who were seldom countrymen
of her own, over and above the law? Were there not still dark dungeons
and steel locks and hard hearts? Though the law might justify her, how
would that serve her, if men--if men and women, were determined to
persecute her? As she walked home, however, she resolved that dark
dungeons and steel locks and hard hearts might do their worst against
her. She had set her will upon one thing in this world, and from
that one thing no persecution should drive her. They might kill her,
perhaps. Yes, they might kill her; and then there would be an end of
it. But to that end she would force them to come before she would
yield. So much she swore to herself as she walked home on that morning
to the Kleinseite.

Madame Zamenoy, when Nina left her, sat in solitary consideration for
some twenty minutes, and then called for her chief confidant, Lotta
Luxa. With many expressions of awe, and with much denunciation of her