He was engaging battle again with the most chivalrous sentiments. The reserves had been called up, his nature mobilized. As his will gathered force and volume (in its determination to “fling” her) he unhypocritically keyed up its attitude. It resembled extreme cunning. He had felt, while he had been holding her, at a disadvantage because of his listless emotion. With emotion equal to hers, he could accomplish anything. Leaving her would be child’s play. He appeared to be projecting the manufacture of a more adequate sentiment. Any indirectness was out of the question. A “letting her down softly,” kissing and leaving in an hour or two, as though things had not changed, that must now be eschewed—oh, yes. The genuine section of her, of which he had a troubled glimpse, mattered, nothing else. He must appeal obstinately to that. Their coming together had been prosecuted on his side with a stupid levity. He would retrieve this in the parting. He wished to do everything most opposite to his previous lazy conduct. He frowned on Humour. The first skirmish of his comic Armageddon had opened with the advance of his mysterious and _goguenard_ “indifference.” This dwindled away at the first onset. A new and more powerful thing had taken its place. This was, in Bertha’s eyes, a _difference_ in Tarr. * * * * * “Something has happened; he is _different_,” she said to herself. “He has met somebody else,” had been her rapid provisional conclusion. She suddenly got up without speaking. Rather spectrally, she went over to the writing-table for her handkerchief. She had not moved an inch or a muscle until quite herself again, dropping steadily down all the scale of feeling to normal. With matter-of-factness she got up, easily and quietly, making Sorbert a little dizzy. Her face had all the drama wrung out of it. It was hard, clear, and garishly white, like her body. If he were to have a chance of talking he must clear the air of electricity completely. Else at his first few words storm might return. Once lunch had swept through the room, things would be better. He would send the strawberries ahead to prepare his way. It was like fattening a lamb for the slaughter. This idea pleased him. Now that he had accepted the existence of a possible higher plane of feeling as between Bertha and himself, he was anxious to avoid display. So he ran the risk of outdoing his former callousness. Tarr was saturated with morbid English shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness. This shyness, as he contended, in its need to show its heart, discovers subtleties and refinements of expression, opposites and between shades, unknown to less gauche and delicate people. But if he were hustled out of his shell the anger that co-existed with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he possessed. Bertha had always left him alone. * * * * *