She heard the voice of the man beside her, stern and threatening: “You will not? Have I asked you whether you will?” He had not asked the tiger or the buffalo. Was he to ask a weak woman? Was he to ask _her_? She, too, was his prey. This idea filled her with a sort of voluptuous dread. She was the prey of the strongest man whom she had ever known. How could she defend herself? He had simply taken her. Were there men whose will was strong enough to give them possession of a woman if they never even touched her? “How did I come here?” she asked. “We have something more important than that to talk about,” he answered in a cold, harsh voice that made her tremble. “How are you going to adapt yourself to the situation?” “I will never adapt myself to it!” she cried; and it seemed as if instruments of torture were engraven on her brain. “That is not the question!” answered the voice, falling like a stone, falling, lying, lying for thousands of years. “The question is, are you going to remain with me of your own free will or as my prisoner?” The Countess, now fully alive to the force and compulsion which threatened her, strove to collect her wits. She looked, listened, considered, and slowly began to ask herself, “Shall it be cunning or resistance?” After a time she answered, “You cannot keep me as your prisoner in Munich.” Mabuse replied roughly, “How do you know that you are in Munich?” “Have you run away with me?” she cried. “I am not a gorilla.” “Who _are_ you? What is your name?” “Whatever you like to call me!” “Then I shall call you a gorilla,” she was about to retort angrily, but it seemed as if her tongue refused to utter the hateful name. It would not be expressed, and something within her appeared to change and soften the situation, to promise allurement in the distance and play around her fancy like busy little elves of night. Yet something in her conscience seemed to tell her that there could be no ease for her while her husband was cast down by misfortune and her own future was so uncertain, and she spoke defiantly, “What do you want with me?” But the man looked at her long and steadily, and she felt as if her question floated away, minute and unconsidered as a trifle on the mighty ocean. The ocean was the breast of the man before her. There was no breast more mighty or powerful; it represented what her inmost being and her secret desires had yearned after. To rest upon it, to rest ... as in the jungle.... Then, after he had looked at her in a silence fraught with meaning, the man spoke. “The human race is too contemptible and inferior to give its men and women such force as nature has provided for its other creations; that the one sex should see, know and belong to the other as naturally and inevitably as light belongs to day!” “You mean to say,” said the Countess hesitatingly, “that you love me, and that--is why you have brought me here!”