“Well, it’s understood. We shall see each other to-morrow,” he said. And with a smile of half raillery at her rather upset expression, he left her. So much fuss about a little thing, such obstinacy in doing it! What was the terrible thing? Meeting him! His smiling was only natural. She showed without disguise in her face the hazardous quality, as she considered it, of this consent. She would wish him to feel the largeness of the motive that prompted her, and for him to participate too in the certain horror of meeting himself! CHAPTER VI Back in her rooms, she examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been doing—conversations, appointments, complementary sensations, and all the rest, as she might have sat down before some distinctly expensive, troubling purchase that she had not dreamt of making an hour before. “What a strange proceeding!”—as it might have been—“what sudden disease in my taste made me buy that!” Had she been enveloped, in a way, by that idle Teutonically smiling manner of his? But at the bottom of her (for her) dramatic consent was the instantaneous image of Fräulein Lipmann and Company’s disapprobation. The _carrying out_ and so substantiating her story, that notion turned the scale. Kreisler’s easy manner (he _was_ unmistakably “a gentleman!”) contrasted with her friend’s indignant palaver gave him the advantage. He cannot, cannot have behaved _so_ outrageously as they pretended! These activities as well distracted her from brooding over Sorbert’s going. Of Kreisler she thought very little. Her women friends held the centre of the stage. In her thoughts they stared at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler. From bad to worse, for her friends. There was a strange continuity in her troubled friendship with these women. Always (only more so) at the same point, stretching the cord. So this was the key to her programme; _a person has made some slip in grammar, say_. He makes it again deliberately, so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate. She began her customary pottering about in her rooms. Fräulein Elsa Kinderbach, one of the Dresden sisters already spoken of, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, and welded in one. “Isn’t it hot? It’s simply broiling outside. I left the studio quite early.” Fräulein Kinderbach sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it. The most evident thing about these sisters was dirt, anæmia, and a sort of soiled, insignificant handsomeness. They explained themselves, roughly, by describing in a cold-blooded lazy way their life at home.