Karen scarcely listened. Her face grew darker and darker. She put her hands against her breast, arose clumsily, and looked around in the room. Her feet were turned inward and her abdomen protruded. “He comes and he goes, he comes and he goes,” she complained, in a voice that gradually became almost a scream. “That’s the way it is, day out and day in. If only he wouldn’t ask questions. It makes me feel hot and cold. It’s like being searched by a matron. D’you know how that is? Everything’s turned inside out and everything’s handled. Awful! And I ought to try to be comfortable here; there’s nothing better in the world. When you’ve been kicked around like some stinking animal, you ought to thank God to have a chance to breathe easy. But to sit and wait and tell how things was at this place and at that, and how this thing happened and the other--no, I can’t stand it no more! It’s too much! It’s like splitting a person’s head open!” She struck her fist against her temple. She seemed an animal, an animal with all the ugliness of a human soul dead or distorted, a wicked savage awakened now and untamable. Girke was confounded. He got up, and pushed the chair, both as a protection and a weapon, between the woman and himself. He said: “I won’t take up more of your time. I beg you to consider my proposition carefully. I shall drop in again some time.” He went with a sensation as of danger at his back. Karen hardly observed that she was alone in the room. She brooded. Her thinking processes were primitive. Two uncertainties tormented her to the point of morbidness and rage: What impelled Christian to search her soul and past, again and again, with the same patience, kindliness, and curiosity? And what inexplicable force made her answer, explain, relate, and give an accounting of her life? Every time he began she struggled, but she always yielded to that force. She always began by turning her face in horror from her own past. But soon she was forced by an implacable power to embrace that vision, and everything that she had experienced, everything that had vanished, all that was desolate, turbid, dark, and dangerous reappeared with an incomparable vividness. It was her own life, and yet seemed another’s, who was herself and yet some one else. It seemed to her that all those desolate, turbid, dark, dangerous things began over again, doubly terrible, with a foreknowledge of each day’s disconsolate end. Forgotten things and places plagued her and emerged terribly from her consciousness: rooms and beds and walls, cities and streets and street-corners and public houses and dark halls that led to police courts; human beings and words, and certain hours and days and tears and cries; and all terrors and degradations and crimes, all mockery and wild laughter--all this came back to her, and the past arose and lacerated her mind.