Some days later, in the evening, Tarr was to be found in a strange place. Decidedly his hosts could not have explained how he got there. He displayed no consciousness of the anomaly.

He had introduced himself—now for the second time—into Fr?ulein Lipmann’s ?sthetic saloon, after dining with her and her following at Flobert’s Restaurant. As inexplicable as Kreisler’s former visits, these ones that Tarr began to make were not so perfectly unwelcome. There was a glimmering of meaning in them for Bertha’s women friends. He had just walked in two nights before, as though he were an old and established visitor there, shaken hands and sat down. He then listened to their music, drank their coffee and went away apparently satisfied. Did he consider that his so close connexion with Bertha entitled him to this? It was at all events a prerogative he had never before availed himself of, except on one or two occasions at first, in her company.

The women’s explanation of this eccentric sudden frequentation was that Tarr was in despair. His separation from Bertha (or her conduct with Kreisler) had hit him hard. He wished for consolation or mediation.

Neither of these guesses was right. It was really[200] something absurder than that that had brought him there.

Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with “those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour of that life lived with Bertha about them!

But not only with them, but with Bertha herself he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted, as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her belongings.

On this particular second visit to Fr?ulein Lipmann’s he met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful these people in truth were.

He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak.

“How is Bertha?” they had asked him.

“She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before.—“How strange!” they thought.—“So he sees her still!”

“She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” Renée Lipmann said. “I’ve been so busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she?”

“Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr answered.

Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute? What could all this[201] mean? Their first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant, eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme égo?ste! Homme sensuel!” in Van Bencke’s famous words.

On seeing him talking with new liveliness, not displayed with them, to Anastasya, suspicions began to germinate. Even such shrewd intuition, a development from the reality, as this: “Perhaps getting to like Germans, and losing his first, he had come here to find another.” Comfortable in his liberty, he was still enjoying, by proxy or otherwise, the satisfaction of slavery.

The arrogance implied by his infatuation for the commonplace was taboo. He must be more humble, he felt, and take an interest in his equals.

He had been “Homme égo?ste” so far, but “Homme sensuel” was an exaggeration. His concupiscence had been undeveloped. His Bertha, if she had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. She did not succeed in waking his senses, although she had attracted them. There was no more reality in their sex relations than in their other relations.

He now had a closer explanation of his attachment to stupidity than he had been able to give Lowndes. It was that his artist’s asceticism could not support anything more serious than such an elementary rival, and, when sex was in the ascendant, it turned his eyes............