“With whips,” Ermelang repeated. “This man! And men still dare to laugh and speak, and the sun to shine.” “Perhaps I wanted to see a man writhing under the blows of the knout,” Eva said. “Perhaps it meant much to me as a stimulus. I must be nourished somehow, and the uncommon is my nourishment. A strange twitching, an original posture in crouching--such things satisfy my imagination. But as a matter of fact”--her voice grew sombre, and she stared fixedly at a spot on the wall--“I did not see him at all. But I saw others who have spent ten, twelve, fifteen years in dark cells of stone. Once they moved about in the great world and busied their minds with noble things; now they cower in their rags, and blink at the light of a little lantern. They have forgotten how to look, to walk, to speak. An odour of decomposition was about them, and all their gestures were full of a gentle madness. But it was not for their sake either that I went. I went for the sake of the imprisoned women, who, on account of an intellectual conviction, have been torn from love and life and motherhood and devotion, and condemned to death by slow torture. Many of them had never been condemned by any tribunal. They had merely been forgotten--simply forgotten; and if their friends were to demand a trial, the same fate would threaten them. I saw one who had been brought in when she was a girl; now she was an aged woman and near her death. I saw Natalie Elkan, who was violated by a colonel of gendarmes at Kiev, and killed the monster with his own sword. I saw Sophie Fleming, who put out her own eyes with a piece of steel wire, because they had hanged her brother in her presence. Do you know what she said when I entered her cell? She lifted her blind face, and said: ‘That’s the way a lady smells.’ Ah, that taught me something concerning women. I put my arms about her and kissed her, and whispered in her ear, asking whether I should smuggle some poison to her; but she refused.” Eva arose and walked up and down. “Yes,” she said, “and still men speak and laugh, and still the sun shines. This room is filled with precious things. Lackeys stand on the stairs. Fifty feet from here is the bed of state in which I sleep. It is all mine. What I touch is mine, what I glance at is mine. They would give me the round earth itself if they had it to give and I asked it. And I would cast it like a billiard-ball into a noisome puddle, so that it might no longer defile the home of stars with its filth and its torments. I am so full of hate! I no longer know where to hide it or how to be redeemed from it! I no longer believe in anything--neither in art, nor in poets, nor in myself. I only hate and destroy. I am a lost soul!” Ermelang folded his hands. “Wonderful as you are, you should remember all you have given and to how many.” Eva stood still. “I am a lost soul. I feel it.” “Why lost? You are playing a sad game with yourself.” She shook her head and whispered the verses of the _Inferno_: