“I don’t mind how impolite you are so long as you listen.” “Well, I am listening—with interest.” Tarr was tearing, as he saw it, at the blankets that swaddled this spirit in its inner snobberies.—A bitter feast was steaming hot, and a mouth must be found to eat it. This beggar’s had to serve. It was, above all, an ear, all the nerves complete. He _must_ get his words into it. They must not be swallowed at a gulp. They must _taste_, sting, and benefit by the meaning of an appetite.—He had something to _say_. It must be said while it was living. Once it was said, it could look after itself.—Hobson had shocked something that was ready to burst out. He must help it out. Hobson must pay as well for the intimacy. _He must pay Bertha Lunken afterwards._ * * * * * He felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her. * * * * * “A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his chief offices.—The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of our solitude.” * * * * * This was written in Tarr’s diary. He was now chastising this self he wrote of for not listening, by telling the first stranger met.—Had a friend been there he could have interceded for his ego. “You have followed so far?” Tarr looked with slow disdainful suspicion at Hobson’s face staring at the ground. “You have understood the nature of my secret?—Half of myself I have to hide. I am bitterly ashamed of a slovenly, common portion of my life that has been isolated and repudiated by the energies I am so proud of. ‘I am _ashamed_ of the number of Germans I know,’ as you put it.—I have in that rôle to cower and slink away even from an old fruit-tin like you. It is useless heroically to protect that section of my life. It’s no good sticking up for it. It is not worth protecting. It is not even up to _your_ standards. I have, therefore, to deliver it over to your eyes, and eyes of the likes of you, in the end—if you will deign to use them!—I even have to beg you to use your eyes; to hold you by the sleeve and crave a glance for an object belonging to me! “In this compartment of my life _I have not a vestige of passion_.—That is the root reason for its meanness and absurdity.—The best friend of my Dr. Jekyll would not know my Mr. Hyde, and vice versa. This rudimentary self is more starved and stupid than any other man’s. Or to put it less or more humbly, I am of that company who are reduced to looking to Socrates for a consoling lead.