Back in her rooms, she examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been doing—conversations, appointments, complementary sensations, and all the rest, as she might have sat down before some distinctly expensive, troubling purchase[170] that she had not dreamt of making an hour before. “What a strange proceeding!”—as it might have been—“what sudden disease in my taste made me buy that!”

Had she been enveloped, in a way, by that idle Teutonically smiling manner of his? But at the bottom of her (for her) dramatic consent was the instantaneous image of Fr?ulein Lipmann and Company’s disapprobation. The carrying out and so substantiating her story, that notion turned the scale. Kreisler’s easy manner (he was unmistakably “a gentleman!”) contrasted with her friend’s indignant palaver gave him the advantage. He cannot, cannot have behaved so outrageously as they pretended!

These activities as well distracted her from brooding over Sorbert’s going.

Of Kreisler she thought very little. Her women friends held the centre of the stage.

In her thoughts they stared at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler. From bad to worse, for her friends. There was a strange continuity in her troubled friendship with these women. Always (only more so) at the same point, stretching the cord.

So this was the key to her programme; a person has made some slip in grammar, say. He makes it again deliberately, so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate.

She began her customary pottering about in her rooms. Fr?ulein Elsa Kinderbach, one of the Dresden sisters already spoken of, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, and welded in one.

“Isn’t it hot? It’s simply broiling outside. I left the studio quite early.” Fr?ulein Kinderbach sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it.

The most evident thing about these sisters was dirt, an?mia, and a sort of soiled, insignificant handsomeness. They explained themselves, roughly, by describing in a cold-blooded lazy way their life at home.

[171]

A stepmother, prodigiously smart, well-to-do, neglecting them; sent first to one place then another (now Paris) to be out of the way. Yet the stepmother supplies them superfluously from her superfluity.—They talked about themselves with a consciously dramatic matter-of-factness, as twin parcels, usually on the way from one place to another, expensively posted here and there, without real destination. They enjoyed nothing at all; painted well (according to Juan Soler); had a sort of wild uncontrollable attachment for the Lipmann.

“Oh! Bertha, I didn’t know your dear ‘Sorbert’ was going to England.” “Dein Sorbet” was the bantering formula for Tarr. Bertha was perpetually talking about him, to them, to the charwoman, to the greengrocer opposite, to everybody she met. Tarr did not quite bask in this notoriety.

“Didn’t you? Oh, yes; he’s gone.”

“You’ve not quarrelled—with your Sorbert?”

“What’s that to do with you, my dear?” Bertha gave a brief, indecent laugh she sometimes had. “By the way, I’ve just seen Herr Kreisler. We’ve arranged to go out somewhere to-morrow.”

“Go out—Kreisler! Liebes Kind!—What on earth possessed you—!—Herr—Kreisler!”

“What’s the matter with Herr Kreisler? You were all friendly enough with him a week ago.”

Elsa looked at her with the cold-blooded scrutiny of the precocious urchin.

“But he’s a vicious brute. Besides, there are other reasons for avoiding Herr Kreisler. You know the reason of his behaviour the other night? It was it appears, because Anastasya Vasek snubbed him. He was nearly the same when the Fogs wouldn’t take an interest in him. He can’t leave women alone. He follows them about and annoys them, and then becomes—well, as you saw him the other night—when he’s shaken off. He is impossible. He is not a person who can be accepted by anybody.”

“Where did you hear all that? I don’t think that Fr?ulein Vasek’s story is true. I am certain?”

[172]

“Well, he once was like that with me. He began hanging ro............