So Bertha’s story had come uncomfortably and difficultly to flower. She wished she had not waited so long. But it was impossible now, the matter put in the light that Fräulein Lipmann’s intervention had caused, to delay any longer. She was, there was no doubt about it, vaguely responsible for Kreisler. It was obviously her duty _to explain_ him. And now Fräulein Lipmann had just put an embargo on explanations. There were to be no more explanations. In Kreisleriana her _apport_ was very important: much more definite than the indignation or hypothesis of any of the rest. She had been _nearer to him_, anyway. She had waited too long, until the sea had risen too high, or rather in a direction extremely unfavourable for launching her contribution. It must be in some way, too, a defence of Kreisler. This would be a very delicate matter to handle. Yet could she sit on there, say nothing, and let the others in the course of time drop the subject? They had not turned to her in any way for further information or as to one peculiarly susceptible of furnishing interesting data. Maintaining this silence was a solution. But it would be even _bolder_ than her first plan. This would be a still more vigorous, more insolent development of her plan of confessing—_in her way_. But it rather daunted her. They might easily mistake, if they pleased, her silence for the silence of acknowledged, very eccentric, guilt. The subject was drawing perilously near the point where it would be dropped. Fräulein Lipmann was summing up, and doing the final offices of the law over the condemned and already unspeakable Kreisler. No time was to be lost. The breaking in now involved inevitable conflict of a sort with Fräulein Lipmann. She was going to “say a word for Kreisler” _after_ Fräulein Lipmann’s words. (How much better it would have been before!) So at this point, looking up from the table, Bertha (listened to with uncomfortable unanimity and promptness) began. She was smiling with an affectedly hesitating, timid face, smiling in a flat strained way, the neighbourhood of her eyes suffused slightly with blood, her lips purring the words a little: “Renée, I feel that I ought to say something—” Her smile was that made with a screwing up of the eyes and slow flowering of the lips, noticed on some people’s faces when some snobbery they cannot help has to be allowed egress from their mouth. Renée Lipmann turned towards her composedly. This interruption would require argument; consciousness of the peculiar nature of Bertha’s qualifications was not displayed.