Tarr left Bertha punctually at seven. She looked very ill. He resolved not to go there any more. He felt upset. Lejeune’s, when he got there, was full of Americans. It was like having dinner among a lot of canny children. Kreisler was not there. He went on a hunt for him afterwards, and ran him to earth at the Café de l’Aigle. Kreisler was not cordial. He emitted sounds of surprise, shuffled his feet and blinked. But Tarr sat down in front of him on his own initiative. Then Kreisler, calling the _garçon_, offered him a drink. Afterwards he settled down to contemplate Bertha’s Englishman, and await developments. He was always rather softer with people with whom he could converse in his own harsh tongue. The causes at the root of Tarr’s present thrusting of himself upon Kreisler were the same as his later visits at the Lipmann’s. A sort of bath of Germans was his prescription for himself, a voluptuous immersion. To heighten the effect, he was being German himself: being Bertha as well. But he was more German than the Germans. Many aspects of his conduct were so un-German that Kreisler did not recognize the portrait or hail him as a fellow. Successive lovers of a certain woman fraternizing; husbands hobnobbing with their wives’ lovers or husbands of their unmarried days is a commonplace of German or Scandinavian society. Kreisler had not returned to Bertha’s. He was too lazy to plan conscientiously. But he concluded that she had better be given scope for anything the return of Tarr might suggest. He, Otto Kreisler, might be supposed no longer to exist. His mind was working up again for some truculent action. Tarr was no obstacle. He would just walk through Tarr like a ghost when he saw fit to “advance” again. “You met Lowndes in Rome, didn’t you?” Tarr asked him. Kreisler nodded. “Have you seen Fräulein Lunken to-day?” “No.” As Tarr was coming to the point Kreisler condescended to speak: “I shall see her to-morrow morning.” A space for protest or comment seemed to be left after this sentence, in Kreisler’s still very “speaking” expression. Tarr smiled at the tone of this piece of information. Kreisler at once grinned, mockingly, in return. “You can get out of your head any idea that I have turned up to interfere with your proceedings,” Tarr then said. “Affairs lie entirely between Fräulein Lunken and yourself.” Kreisler met this assurance truculently. “You could not interfere with my proceedings. I do what I want to do in this life!” “How splendid. _Wunderbar!_ I admire you!” “Your admiration is not asked for!” “It leaps up involuntarily! Prosit! But I did not mean, Herr Kreisler, that my desire to interfere, had such desire existed, would have been tolerated. Oh, no! I meant that no such desire existing, we had no cause for quarrel. Prosit!” Tarr again raised his glass expectantly and coaxingly, peering steadily at the German. He said, “Prosit” as he would have said, “Peep-oh!”