Frederick did not turn a deaf ear to this correct reasoning. He had long before realised that her delicate constitution was with difficulty holding the balance between debit and credit. Each instant it was in danger of losing its balance. "If I were your physician," he said, "I should send you to live for three years with a German country pastor, or an American farmer. I should not let you see anybody but the old pastor or the old farmer and his wife and their daughters. I should not let you go to see a play, let alone appear on the stage yourself. It is those cursed variety shows that have sent you to the dogs, physically and morally." "I am a ruffian," he thought, "and there's medicine for her." "Do you want to become a farmer?" "Why?" "Because you are already a pastor," she laughed. The conversation was interrupted by the screeching of a cockatoo on a stand in the back of the cabin. Until then Frederick had not noticed it. "What else will be turning up? Where did you get that beast?" She laughed again. "Please give me the beast. Koko! Koko!" Frederick arose and let the great, rosy-white seafarer clamber on his hand. "I like animals better than I do most people I meet," she said. The bird kept screaming "Cockatoo!" until Frederick felt it fairly applied to him. In the meantime the _Roland_, sinking into deep troughs and climbing over watery mountain crests in an ocean that was like a great machine regularly at work, had plowed its way into fog. The siren was bellowing. "Fog?" exclaimed Ingigerd. Every bit of blood vanished from her face, which was already too pale. "But I am never afraid," she added immediately, took a bonbon in her mouth, and let the cockatoo nibble at it. The bird unfeelingly trod on the girl's beautifully heaving breast. She made it sing _Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_ and some well-known music-hall airs, and told stories of her menagerie. Every instant Frederick had to perform some small service, and while she was giving an enthusiastic description of a little monkey from Java that she had once owned, he asked himself whether he was a physician, a nurse, a hairdresser, a chambermaid, or a steward, and whether Ingigerd Hahlstroem would not in the end reduce him to a messenger boy. He yearned to be on deck in the open air. Soon after, Achleitner entered with an anxious, questioning expression in his eyes, and Ingigerd dismissed Frederick most ungraciously. There was a look of hatred in her glance. But scarcely was Frederick outside in the fog with the knob of the door still in his hand, when it seemed to him as if ropes and chains, the chains of an enslaved man, were dragging him back to the girl's couch. XXIV