Tarr had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this. He had worked the first stage consummately. He swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled on the Latin terrace were each one a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the big doubtful heroes of 1840. The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the Lycée Henri Trois were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of Mammas and Papas, Tarr and Anastasya crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousels grinding out their antediluvian lullabies. This place represented the richness of four wasted years. Four incredibly gushing, thick years; what had happened to this delightful muck? All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence. _No one_, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much stuff in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly _his Park_ than it was anybody else’s. He should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well: that was what the Man of Action accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, trying the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park!—Well! he had spent himself into the Earth. The trees had his sap in them. He remembered a day when he had brought a book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual faith. The streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person. But perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant complete and solid times. Paris was like a patent food. * * * * *