Anastasya and he were dining that night in Montmartre as usual. His piece of news hovered over their conversation like a bird hesitating as to the right spot at which to establish its nest.

“I saw Bertha to-day,” he said, forcing the opening at last.

“You still see her then.”

“Yes. I married her this afternoon.”

“You what? What do you mean?”

“What I say, my dear. I married her.”

“You mean you??” She put an imaginary ring on her finger.

“Yes. I married her at the Mairie.”

Anastasya looked blankly into him, as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow.

“You mean to say you’ve done that!”

“Yes; I have.”

“Why?”

Tarr stopped a moment.

“Well, the alleged reason was that she is enceinte.”

“But—whose is the child?”
 
“Kreisler’s, she says.”

The statement, she saw, was genuine. He was telling her what he had been doing. They both immediately retired into themselves, she to distance and stow away their former dialogue and consider the meaning of this new fact; he to wait, his hand near his mouth holding a pipe, until she should have collected herself. But he began speaking first:

“Things are exactly the same as before. I was bound to do that. I had allowed her to consider herself engaged a year ago, and had to keep to that. I have merely gone back a year into the past and fulfilled a pledge, and now return to you. All is in perfect order.”

“All is not in perfect order. It is Kreisler’s child to begin with, you say?”

“Yes, but it would be very mean to use that fact to justify one in escaping from an obligation.”

“That is sentimentality.”

“Sentimentality! Sentimentality! Cannot we, you and I, afford to give Bertha that? Sentimentality! What an absurd word that is with its fierce use in our poor modern hands! What does it mean? Has life become such an affair of economic calculation that men are too timid to allow themselves any complicated pleasures? Where there is abundance you can afford waste. Sentimentality is a cry on a level with the Simple Life! The ideal of perfect success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of Man and Perfectibility. Sentimentality is a privilege. It is a luxury that the crowd does not feel itself equal to, once it begins to think about it. Besides, it is different in different hands.”

“That may be true as regards sentimentality in general. But in this case you have been guilty of a popular softness?”

“No. Listen. I will explain............