She sat up, and took hold of Christian’s arm with an iron grip. Her eyes sparkled, and she hissed out through clenched teeth: “But I didn’t really know it. When you’re in the thick of it you don’t know. You don’t feel that it’s no life for a human being; and you don’t want to see, and you don’t dare to know that you’re damned and in a burning hell! Why did you take me out of it? Why did things have to happen this way?” Christian did not answer. He heard the air roar past his ears. After a while she let his arm go, or, rather, she thrust it from her, and he arose. She flung herself back on her pillows. Christian thought: “It has been in vain.” The dread that he had felt turned to despair. In vain! He heard the words in the air about him: “In vain, in vain, in vain!” Then, in a clear voice that he had never heard her use before, Karen said: “I’d like to have your mother’s rope of pearls.” “What?” Christian said. It seemed to him that he must have misunderstood her. And in the same, almost childlike voice, Karen repeated: “Your mother’s pearls--that’s what I’d like.” She was talking nonsense, and she knew it. Not for a moment did she think it conceivable that her desire could be fulfilled. Christian approached the bed. “What made you think of that?” he whispered. “What do you mean by that? What?” “I’ve never wished for anything so much,” Karen said in the same clear voice. She was lying very still now. “Never, never. At least, I’d love to see them once--see how things like that look. I’d like to hold them, touch them, just once. They don’t seem real. Go to her and ask for them. Go and say: ‘Karen wants so much to see your pearls.’ Maybe she’ll lend them to you.” She laughed half madly. “Maybe she’d let you have them for a while. It seems to me that then”--she opened her eyes wide, and there was a new flame in them--“that then things might be different between us.” “Who told you of them?” Christian asked as though in a dream. “Who spoke to you of my mother’s pearls?” She opened the drawer of the little table beside her bed, and took out the photograph. Christian reached out for it eagerly, although she was going to give it to him. “Voss gave it to me,” she said. Christian looked at the picture and quietly put it away. “Yes, that’s what I’d like,” Karen said again; and there was a wildness in her face, and a childlikeness and a pathos and a greed, and a certain defiance which was also like a child’s. And her smile was wild, and her laughter. “Oh, there’s nothing else I’d want then. I would taste the pearls with my tongue and bury them in my flesh; and I’d let no one know and show them to no one. Yes, that’s what I want, only that--your mother’s pearls, even if it’s for just a little while.” Nothing could so have pierced the soul of Christian as this wild stammering and this wild begging. He stood by the window, gazing into the night, and said slowly and reflectively: “Very well, you shall have them.”