Bertha’s was the intellectually fostered Greek type of German handsomeness. It is that beauty that makes you wonder, when you meet it, if German mothers have replicas and photographs of the Venus of Milo in their rooms during the first three months of their pregnancy. It is also found in the pages of Prussian art periodicals, the arid, empty intellectualism of Münich. She had been a heavy baby. Her body now, a self-indulgent athlete’s, was strung to heavy motherhood. A great believer in tepid “air-baths,” she would remain, for hours together, in a state of nudity about her rooms. She was wearing a pale green striped affair, tight at the waist. It looked as though meant for a smaller woman. It may have belonged to her sister. As a result, her ample form had left the fullness of a score of attitudes all over it, in flat creasings and pencillings—like the sanguine of an Italian master in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other. “What have you come for, Sorbet?” “To see you. What did you suppose?” “Oh, you _have_ come to see me?” “I brought these things. I thought you might be hungry.” “Yes, I am rather.” She stopped in the passage, Dryad-like on one foot, and stared into the kitchen. Tarr did not kiss her. He put his hand on her hip—a way out of it—and led her into the room. His hand remarked that she was underneath in her favourite state of nakedness. Bertha went into the kitchen with the provisions. She lived in two rooms on one side of the front door. Her friend, Fräulein Goenthner, to whom she sub-let, lived on the other side of it, the kitchen promiscuously existing between, and immediately facing the entrance. Tarr was in the studio or salon. It was a complete bourgeois-bohemian interior. Green silk cloth and cushions of various vegetable and mineral shades covered everything, in mildewy blight. The cold, repulsive shades of Islands of the Dead, gigantic cypresses, grottos of Teutonic nymphs, had invaded this dwelling. Purple metal and leather steadily dispensed with expensive objects. There was the plaster east of Beethoven (some people who have frequented artistic circles get to dislike this face extremely), brass jars from Normandy, a photograph of Mona Lisa (Tarr hated the Mona Lisa). A table just by the window, laid with a white cloth, square embroidered holes at its edges, was where Tarr at once took up his position. Truculence was denoted by his thus going straight to his eating-place. Installed in the midst of this ridiculous life, he gave a hasty glance at his “indifference” to see whether it were safe and sound. Seen through it, on opening the door, Bertha had appeared _unusual_. This impressed him disagreeably. Had his rich and calm feeling of bounty towards her survived the encounter, his “indifference” might also have remained intact.