Without any anxiety about it, he began to talk to Bertha with the idea of a subsequent meeting. He had wished to avoid her because she had embodied for him the evening of the dance, and appeared to him in its disquieting colours. What he sought unconsciously now was a certain quietude, enlivened by healthy appetites. He had disconnected her with his great Night. “I was cracked the other night. I’m not often in that state,” he said. Bertha’s innuendoes had to be recognized. “I’m glad of that,” she answered. As to Bertha, to have been kissed and those things, under however eccentric circumstances, gave a man certain rights on your interest. “I’m afraid I was rather rude to Fräulein Lipmann before leaving. Did she tell you about it?” “I think you were rude to everybody!” “Ah, well⸺” “I must be going. My lunch⸺” “Oh, I’m so sorry! Have I kept you from your lunch? I wonder if you would procure me the extreme pleasure of seeing you again?” Bertha looked at him in doubtful astonishment, taking in this sensational request. See Kreisler again! The result as regards the Lipmann circle! But this pleaded for Kreisler. It would be carrying out her story. It would be insisting on it, and destroying that subtle advantage, now possessed by her friends, in presenting them with somewhat the same uncompromising spectacle again. In _deliberately_ exposing herself to criticism she would be effacing, in some sense, the extreme _involuntariness_ of the boulevard incident. He asked her simply if he might see her again. The least pretentious request. Would the refusal to do this simple thing be a concession to Lipmann and the rest? Did she want to at all? But it was in a jump of deliberate defiance or “carelessness” that she concluded: “Yes, of course, if you wish it.” “You never go to cafés? Perhaps some day⸺” “Good! Very well!” she answered very quickly, in her trenchant tone, imparting all sorts of particular unnecessary meanings to this simple acceptance. She had answered as men accept a bet or the Bretons clinch a bargain in the fist. Kreisler was still leisurely. He appeared to regard her vehemence with amusement. “I should like then to go with you to the Café de l’Observatoire to-morrow evening. I hope I shall be able to efface the rather unusual impression I must have made on you the other night!” (The tone of this remark did not ignore or condemn, however, the kisses.) “When can I meet you?” “Will you come and fetch me at my house?” But shivers went down her back as she said it. She was now thoroughly committed to this new step. She was delighted, or rather excited, at each new further phase of it. Its horrors were scores off her friends. These details of _meeting_!—these had not been reckoned on. Of course they would have to _meet_. Kreisler seemed like a physician conducting a little unpleasant operation in a genial, ironical, unhurrying way.