Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/140

"Haven't you yourself told me," she protested, "about our future home, somewhere on the Tunisian coast, far from all the tumult and strife of the continent? Where in the evening we might sit on the terrace and watch the waves break on the rocky shore?--and now you look at me as though I were out of my mind or something."

"Not as though you were out of your mind, dearest." Eric protested. "But it's as though you're quoting from some book, some fantastic piece of writing, without a crumb of logic in it. Do you really believe, darling, that it's possible to run away from the world? To isolate yourself somewhere in a corner and live alone, away from everyone else like Robinson Crusoe? No, dearest; Crusoe is the dream of the damned bourgeois who thinks he can live alone in his own body and soul, separated from the soul of the folk. We're civilized Europeans with a sense of duty to our blood and soil."

Eric's reference to "blood and soil" fell like ice upon her being. She froze up within her, aware of the fact that her lover was becoming infected with Nazi ideology, with Hitlerian notions of inferior and superior races. She felt a deep chasm suddenly yawn between them, a chasm that her love for Eric desperately sought to bridge. She felt trapped, frightened into silence by her ominous thoughts. He eyed her with his amorous burning look and became alarmed. Like Niobe she seemed to have turned into stone, a stone mourning its lost humanity. He tried to rouse her to an emotional response. "Just think of it, Anna," he bragged. "I've been elected president of the German Club. And just imagine, not one single opposing vote."

Anna remained silent. He fingered her hair fondly, compassionately. "Come, darling, there's something I must talk over with you," he said. "Lately all my plans have become