Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with “those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour of that life lived with Bertha about them! But not only with them, but with _Bertha herself_ he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted, as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her belongings. On this particular second visit to Fräulein Lipmann’s he met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful these people in truth were. He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak. “How is Bertha?” they had asked him. “She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before.—“How strange!” they thought.—“So he sees her still!” “She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” Renée Lipmann said. “I’ve been so busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she?” “Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr answered. Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute? What could all this mean? Their first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant, eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme égoïste! Homme sensuel!” in Van Bencke’s famous words. On seeing him talking with new liveliness, not displayed with them, to Anastasya, suspicions began to germinate. Even such shrewd intuition, a development from the reality, as this: “_Perhaps getting to like Germans, and losing his first, he had come here to find another._” Comfortable in his liberty, he was still enjoying, by proxy or otherwise, the satisfaction of slavery. The arrogance implied by his infatuation for the commonplace was taboo. He must be more humble, he felt, and take an interest in his equals. He had been “Homme égoïste” so far, but “Homme sensuel” was an exaggeration. His concupiscence had been undeveloped. His Bertha, if she had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. She did not succeed in waking his senses, although she had attracted them. There was no more reality in their sex relations than in their other relations.