“Between a hand that is empty, and one that commands immeasurable treasures, there is a fatal difference,” Lorm said with deep earnestness. “I have worked my way up from poverty. You have no faintest notion of the meaning of that word. All that I am and have, I owe to the immediate exertions of my body and my brains. By your birth you have been accustomed all your life to buy the bodies and the brains of others. And though you had a thousand times more instinct and vision for practical things and for the necessities of a sane life than you have, yet you do not and could not comprehend the profoundly moral and rightly revered relation of accomplishment to reward. Your adventitious advantages have constantly made it possible for you to ignore this relation, and to substitute for it an arbitrary will. To me your wealth would be paralysis, a mockery and a spectre.” He looked at her with head thrown back. “And so you think our case hopeless?” Judith asked, pale and defiant. “Since I cannot and dare not expect you to abandon your millions and share the fate of a play-actor, it does indeed seem hopeless.” Judith’s face was quite colourless. “Let us go,” she said; “the others will remark our absence, and I dislike being gossiped about.” Swiftly and silently they walked on. They came to a clearing and saw beneath a black rampart of clouds the throbbing, crimson disc of the sun. Judith stared into it with raging fury. For the first time her will had encountered a still stronger will. It was rage that filled her eyes with tears, rage that wrung from her discordant laughter. When Lorm looked at her in pained surprise, she turned away and bit her lip. “I’m capable of doing it,” she said to herself in her rage. And the impulse hardened into a stubborn determination: “I will! I will!” XII When Christian arrived in Berlin with Amadeus Voss he found, quite as he had expected, many people and a great tumult about Eva. He could scarcely get to her. “I am tired, Eidolon,” she cried out, when she caught sight of him. “Take me away from everything.” And again, when she had escaped the oppressive host of admirers, she said: “How good it is that you are here, Eidolon. I have waited for you with an ache in my heart. We’ll leave to-morrow.” But the journey was postponed from day to day. They planned to live alone and in retirement at the Dutch watering place that was their immediate goal, but Christian had already met a dozen people who had ordered accommodations there, and so he doubted the seriousness of Eva’s intentions. People had become indispensable to her. When she was silent she wanted, at least, to hear the voices of others; when she was quiet she wanted movement about her. When he stood before her the fragrance of her body penetrated him like a great fear. His blood flowed in such violent waves that his pulses lost the rhythm of their beating.