He was a great big child, wandering through life! The young Latin wishes to impress you with his ability to look after himself. General idiocy of demeanour, on the other hand, is the fashionable English style. This young man was six feet one, with a handsome beak in front of his face, meant for a super-Emersonian mildness. His “wide awake” was large, larger than Hobson’s. Innumerable minor Tennysons had planted it on his head, or bequeathed a desire for it to this ultimate Dick of long literary line. His family was allied to much Victorian talent. But, alas, thought Tarr, how much worse it is when the mind gets thin than when the blood loses its body, in merely aristocratic refinement. Intellectual aristocracy in the fifth generation!—but Tarr gazed at the conclusive figure in front of him, words failing. Words failed, too, for maintaining conversation with it. He soon got up, and left, his first _apéritif_ at Montmartre unsatisfactory. He did not take possession of his new life with very much conviction. After dinner he went to a neighbouring music hall, precariously amused, soothed by the din. But he eventually left with a headache. The strangeness of the streets, cafés, and places of entertainment depressed him deeply. Had it been an absolutely novel scene, he would have found stimulus in it. But it was like a friend grown indifferent, or something perfectly familiar with the richness of habit taken out of it. Tarr was gregarious in the sense that usually he liked his room and some familiar streets with their traces of familiar men. And where more energetic spirit suggested some truer solitude to him, he would never have sought it where a vestige of inanimate friendship remained. Here, where he had chosen to live, he appeared as though fallen in some intermediate negative existence. Unusually for him, he felt alone. _To be alone_ was essentially a nondescript, lowered, and unreal state for him. The following morning Tarr woke, his legs rather cramped and tired, and not thoroughly rested. But as soon as he was up, work came quite easily. He got his paints out, and without beginning on his principal canvas, took up a new and smaller one by way of diversion. Squaring up a drawing of three naked youths sniffing the air, with rather worried Greek faces and heavy nether limbs, he stuck it on the wall with pins and drew his camp easel up alongside it. He squared up his canvas on the floor with a walking-stick, and fixed it on the easel. To get a threadlike edge a pencil had to be sharpened several times. By the end of the afternoon he had got a witty pastiche on the way. Two colours principally had been used, mixed in piles on two palettes: a smoky, bilious saffron, and a pale transparent lead. The significance of the thing depended first on the psychology of the pulpy limbs, strained dancers’ attitudes and empty faces; secondly, the two colours and the simple yet contorted curves.