“Art is merely _the dead_, then?” “No, but _deadness_ is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; _that_ opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other. “Deadness, then,” Tarr went on, “in the limited sense in which we use that word is the first condition of art. The second is absence of _soul_, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the _inside_ of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; _to have no inside_, nothing you cannot _see_. Instead, then, of being something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.” Tarr was developing, from her point of view, too much shop. She encouraged him, however, immediately. “Why should human beings be chiefly represented in art?” “Because what we call art depends on human beings for its advertisement. As men’s ideas about themselves change, art should change too.” They had waded through a good deal of food while this conversation had been proceeding. She now stretched herself, clasping her hands in her lap. She smiled at Tarr as though to invite him to smile too, at her beautiful, heavy, hysterical anatomy. She had been driving hard inscrutable Art deeper and deeper into herself. She now drew it out and showed it to Tarr. “Art is paleozoic matter, dolomite, oil-paint, and mathematics; also something else. Having established that, we will stick a little flag up and come back another day. I want to hear now about _life_. But do you believe in anything?” Tarr was staring, suspended, with a smile cut in half, therefore defunct, at the wall. He turned his head slowly, with his mutilated smile, his glasses slanting in an agreeably vulpine way. “Believe in anything? I only believe in one thing, pleasure of taste. In that way you get back though, with me, to mathematics and paleozoic times, and the coloured powders of the earth.” Anastasya ordered a _gâteau reine de Samothrace_. “Reine de Samothrace! Reine de Samothrace!” Tarr muttered. “Donnez-moi une omelette au rhum.”