He engrossed himself in his sense of physical well-being. From his pocket he produced a tin box containing tobacco, papers, and a little steel machine for rolling cigarettes given him by Bertha. A long slim hinged shell, it nipped in a little cartridge of tobacco, which it then slipped with inside a paper tube, and slipping out again empty, the cigarette was made. Tarr began manufacturing cigarettes. Reflections from the shining metal in his hand scurried about amongst the bilious bric-à-brac. Like a layer of water lying on one of oil, the light heated stretch by the windows appeared distinct from the shadowed part of the room. This place was cheap and dead, but rich with the same lifelessness as the trees without. These looked extremely near and familiar at the opened windows, breathing the same air continually as Bertha. But they were dusty, rough, and real. Bertha came in from the kitchen. She went on with a trivial rearrangement of her writing-table. This had been her occupation as he appeared at the gate beneath, drawing her ironical and musing eye from his image to himself. A new photograph of Tarr was being placed on her writing-table flush with the window. Ten days previously it had been taken in that room. It had ousted a Klinger and generally created a restlessness, to her eye, in the other objects. “Ah, you’ve got the photographs, have you?—Is that me?” She handed it to him. “Yes, they came yesterday!” “Yesterday” he had not been there! Whatever he asked at the present moment would draw a softly thudding answer, heavy German reproach concealed in it with tireless ingenuity. These photographs would under other circumstances have been produced on his arrival with considerable noise. Tarr had looked rather askance at this portrait and Bertha’s occupation. There was his photograph, calmly, with an air of permanence, taking up its position on her writing-table, just as he was preparing to vanish for good. “Let’s see yours,” he said, still holding the photograph. What strange effects all this complicated activity inside had on the surface, his face. A set sulky stagnation, every violence dropping an imperceptible shade on to it, the features overgrown with this strange stuff—that twist of the head that was him, and that could only be got rid of by breaking. “They’re no good,” she said, closing the drawer, handing her photographs, sandwiched with tissue-paper, to Sorbert. “That one”—a sitting pose, face yearning from photograph, lighted, not with a smile, but a sort of sentimental illumination, the drapery arranged like a poster—“I don’t think that’s so bad,” she said slangily, meant to be curt and “cheeky.” “What an idiot!” he thought; “what a face!” A consciously pathetic ghost of a smile, a clumsy sweetness, the energetic sentimental claim of a rather rough but frank self. There was a photograph of her in riding habit. This was the best of them. He softened. Then came a photograph of them together.