To-day he must break the fact to Bertha that he could no longer regard himself as responsible. He was faced with the necessity, for the first time, of seriously bargaining. The debt was not to be repudiated, but he must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that he had been seized by somebody else. He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making his boots sound loudly on the gravel. It was like entering a vault, the trees looked like weeds; the meaning or taste of everything, of course, had died. The concierge looked like a new one. He had bought a flower for his buttonhole. He kept smelling it as he approached the house. During the last week or so he had got into the habit of writing his letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony. This time there would be no letter-writing. This visit would be more like the old ones. “Come in, Sorbert,” she said, on opening the door. It was emphasizing the fact of the formality of the terms on which they at present met. Any prerogative of past and more familiar times was proudly rejected. There was the same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days preceding that. She appeared stale, somehow deteriorated and shabby, her worth decreased, and extremely pitiable. Her “reserve” (a natural result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as it seemed; it also shut her up in herself, in an unhealthy, dreary, and faded atmosphere. She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. She seemed sitting on them in rather dismal hen-like fashion, waiting to be asked to come out of herself and reveal something. It was a corpse among other things that she was sitting on, as Kreisler was one of her secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she kept guard over her secrets, a store of bric-à-brac that had gone out of fashion and were getting musty in a neglected shop. Their meetings sometimes were made painful by activity on Bertha’s part. An attempt at penetration to an intimacy once possessed can be more indecent than the same action on the part of a stranger.