The hungry touch was an invention of the moment. “You make him quite a romantic character. I’m afraid he has been working on your feelings, my dear girl. I didn’t see any signs of an empty stomach myself,” said Fräulein van Bencke. “He refreshed himself extensively at the dance, in any case. You can put your mind at rest as to his present emptiness,” Renée Lipmann said. Things languished. The Lipmann had taken her stand on boredom. She was committed to the theory of the unworthiness of this discussion. The others not feeling quite safe, Bertha’s speeches raised no more comment. It was all as though she had been putting in her little bit of abuse of the common enemy. Bertha might have interrupted with a “Yes. He outraged me too!”—and this have been met with a dreary, acquiescing silence! She was exculpating herself, then (heavily), at his expense. The air of ungenerosity this had was displeasing to her. The certain lowering of the vitality of the party when she came on the scene with her story offended her. There should have been noise. It was not quite the lifelessness of scepticism. But there was an uncomfortable family likeness to the manner of people listening to discourses they do not believe. She persevered. She met with the same objectionable flaccid and indifferent opposition. Her intervention had killed the topic, and they seemed waiting till she had ended her war-dance on its corpse. The red-headed member of the party had met Tarr by chance. Hearing he had not seen Bertha since the night of the ball, she had said with roguish pleasantness: “He’d better look after her better; why hadn’t he come to the ball?” Tarr did not understand. “Bertha had had an adventure. All of them, for that matter, had had an adventure, but especially Bertha. Oh, Bertha would tell him all about it.” But, on Tarr insisting, Bertha’s story, in substance, had been told. So with Bertha, the _fact_ was still there. Retrospectively, her friends insisted upon passing by the two remarkably unanimous-looking forms on the boulevard in stony silence. She shouted to them and kissed Kreisler loudly. But they refused to take any notice. She sulked. They had been guilty of catching her. She kept to herself day after day. She would make a change in her life. She might go to Germany; she might go to another _quartier_. To go on with her life just as though nothing had happened, _that was out of the question_. Demonstration of some sort must follow, and change compatible with grief.