“My dear Tarr, you’re a strange fellow. I _can’t_ see why these things should occupy you.—You have just told me a lot of things that may be true or may not. But at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—_quoi?_ one asks. You contradict yourself. You know you don’t _think_ what you talk. You deafen me with your upside-downness.” He gesticulated, got the French guttural r with satisfaction, and said the _quoi_ rather briskly. “In any case my hat is my business!” he concluded quickly, after a moment, getting up with a curling, luscious laugh. The _garçon_ hurried up and they paid. “No, I am responsible for you.—I am one of the only people who _see_. That is a responsibility.”—Tarr walked down the boulevard with him, speaking in his ear almost, and treading on his toes. “You know Baudelaire’s fable of the obsequious vagabond, cringing for alms? For all reply, the poet seizes a heavy stick and belabours the beggar with it. The beggar then, when he is almost beaten to a pulp, suddenly straightens out beneath the blows; _expands_, _stretches_; his eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls on the poet tooth and nail. In a few seconds he has laid him out flat, and is just going to finish him off, when an _agent_ arrives.—The poet is enchanted. He has accomplished something! “Would it be possible to achieve a work of that description with you? No. You are meaner-spirited than the most abject tramp. I would seize you by the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my duty at least to do this for your hat. Your hat, at least, will have had its little drama to-day.” Tarr knocked his hat off into the road.—Without troubling to wait for the results of this action, he hurried away down the Boulevard du Paradis. CHAPTER II A great many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation. It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active and hustling spirit presided over this section of his life. Civilized men have for conversation something of the superstitious feeling that ignorant men have for the written or the printed word. Hobson had attracted a great deal of steam to himself. Tarr was unsatisfied.—He rushed away from the Café Berne still strong and with much more to say. He rushed towards Bertha to say it. A third of the way he came on a friend who should have been met before Hobson. Then Bertha and he could have been spared. Butcher was a bloody wastrel enamoured of gold and liberty.—He was a romantic, educating his schoolboyish sense of adventure up to the pitch of drama. He had been induced by Tarr to develop an interest in commerce. He had started a motor business in Paris, and through circularizing the Americans resident there and using his English connexions, he was succeeding on the lines suggested.