She knew, of course, that she'd hurt him badly again. She expected his anger. Well, how could he help but be angry? Hadn't any of the things he'd told her ever made any impression on her? "Susanne." She raised her head and he saw the stubborn, angry set to her mouth. "Father, please don't lecture me again." Every word was low, tight, and controlled. Kimmensen clenched his hands. He'd never been able to understand this kind of defiance. Where did she get that terribly misplaced hardness in her fiber? What made her so unwilling to listen when someone older and wiser tried to teach her? If I didn't love her, he thought, this wouldn't matter to me. But in spite of everything, I do love her. So I go on, every day, trying to make her see. "I can't understand you," he said. "What makes you act this way? Where did it come from? You're nothing like your mother,"--though, just perhaps, even if the thought twisted his heart, she was--"and you're nothing like me." "I am," she said in a low voice, looking down again. "I'm exactly like you." When she spoke nonsense like that, it annoyed him more than anything else could have. And where anger could be kept in check, annoyance could not. "Listen to me," he said. "Don't lecture me again." "Susanne! You will keep quiet and listen. Do you realize what you're doing, flirting with a man like Messerschmidt? Do you realize--has anything I've told you ever made an impression on you?--do you realize that except for an accident in time, that man could be one of the butchers who killed your mother?" "Father, I've heard you say these things before. We've all heard you say them." Now he'd begun, it was no longer any use not to go on. "Do you realize they oppressed and murdered and shipped to labor camps all the people I loved, all the people who were worthwhile in the world, until we rose up and wiped them out?" His hands folded down whitely on the arms of his chair. "Where are your grandparents buried? Do you know? Do I? Where is my brother? Where are my sisters?" "I don't know. I never knew them." "Listen--I was born in a world too terrible for you to believe. I was born to cower. I was born to die in a filthy cell under a police station. Do you know what a police station is, eh? Have I described one often enough? Your mother was born to work from dawn to night, hauling stones to repair the roads the army tanks had ruined. And if she made a mistake--if she raised her head, if she talked about the wrong things, if she thought the wrong thoughts--then she was born to go to a labor camp and strip tree bark for the army's medicines while she stood up to her waist in freezing water.