Inevitably the curious person would ask next: “Then you don’t care for Lorm?” Whereupon she would reply: “Not greatly. He forces me to take a certain interest; but I resent that. I think he’s terribly overrated.” One day a lady of her acquaintance asked her whether she was happy in her marriage. “I don’t know,” she answered, and laughed. “I haven’t any exact conception of what people mean by happiness.” Her friend then asked her why she had married. “Very simply,” she replied, “because being a young girl got to be such an undelightful situation that I sought to escape from it as soon as possible.” The lady wanted to know whether she didn’t, then, love her husband. “My dear woman,” Judith said, “love! There’s nothing so mischievous as the loose way in which people use that word. Most people, I believe, pretend quite shamelessly when they talk about it, and defend it simply because they don’t want to admit that they’ve been taken in. It’s exactly like the king’s new clothes in the old fable. Every one acts mightily important and enthusiastic, and won’t admit that the poor king is naked to the winds.” Another time she was asked whether she didn’t yearn to have a child. “A child!” she cried out. “Horrors! Shall I bring forth more food for the worms?” Once, in company, the conversation turned to the question of one’s sensitiveness to pain. Judith asserted that she could bear any bodily torment without moving a muscle. She was not believed. She procured a long, golden needle, and bade one of the gentlemen pierce her whole arm with it. When he refused in horror, she asked another of stronger nerves who obeyed her. And really she did not twitch a muscle. The blood gathered in a little pool. She smiled. Felix Imhof could weep at the least excuse. When he had a sick headache he wept. She despised this in him. The actor took hold of her. She resisted in vain. The spell he cast over her grew ever firmer, more indissoluble. She brooded over it. Was it his transformations that attracted her so? Although he was forty, his body was as elegant and flexible as polished steel. And like the ringing of steel was his voice. The words were sparks. Under his tread the wooden stage became a palæstra. Nothing clung or whined or crept. Everything was tension, progression, verve, the rhythm of storms. There was no inner weight or weariness. Bugles soared. She agreed with Felix when he said: “There is more of the true content of our age in this man than in all the papers, editorials, pamphlets, and plethoric three-deckers that the press has spewed forth within the past twenty years. He has crowned the living word and made it our king.”