Niels Heinrich continued with his fatalistic outer calm. Ruth had tried to make him relent. He would never forget her words, but he could not repeat them. She had spoken feverishly, with glowing eyes, her hair falling over her cheeks; she had lifted her hands in beseeching and leaned across the table, and in her sweet, bell-like voice had spoken of people who needed her, of work and duty, of difficult tasks ahead, and also of the pleasant things in the world. And she had asked him whether nothing in the world was pleasant to him, whether his own life meant nothing to him at all, and he was willing to take up the burden of this crime before man and God. This is what she had said, only her words had been finer and firmer and exacter. At that a rancorous rage had flamed up in his brain, and he had roared at her to stop her crazy jabbering, damned Jewess that she was, and listen to him, listen to what he had to say in reply. In silence and with a drawn expression, she had listened. Crime, he had said, crime and such talk--there wasn’t no sense in that; he didn’t know what it meant. It had all been thought out by the people who pay the soldiers and the courts to do their bidding, but who, if it served their purposes, committed the same crimes in the name of the State or the Church or Progress or Liberty. If a man was strong enough and cunning enough, he didn’t give a damn for all their laws. Laws were for fools and cowards. If the individual has got to submit to force, he’s got the right to use force too. If he was willing to risk the vengeance and punishment of society, he had a right to satisfy his desires. The only question was whether he was willing to take up the burden of crime, and couldn’t be made to stop by the hocus-pocus invented by teachers and parsons. If he, Niels Heinrich, could work his will, there wouldn’t be one stone left standing on another, all rules would be wiped out, all order destroyed, all cities blown up sky-high, all wells choked, all bridges broken, all books burned, all roads torn up, and destruction would be preached, and war--war of each against all, all against each, all against all. Mankind wasn’t worthy of nothing better.