“Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard. I mean the cargo of inflated soul-stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt, but—Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things often enough? Our quarrels have been our undoing. A long chain of little quarrels has bound us down. We should neither of us be here if it hadn’t been for them.” Bertha gazed at Tarr half wonderingly. She realized that something out of the ordinary was on foot. Tarr proceeded. “I have accepted from you a queer sentimental dialect of life, I should have insisted on your expressing yourself in a more logical and metropolitan speech. Let us drop it. There is no need to talk negro, baby-talk, or hybrid drivel from no-man’s-land. I don’t think we should lead a very pleasant married life—naturally. In the second place, you are not a girl who wants an intrigue, but to marry. I have been playing at fiancé with a certain pleasure in the novelty, but I experience a genuine horror at the possible consequences. I have been playing with you!” He said this eagerly, as though it were a point in his argument—as it was. He paused, for effect apparently. “You, for your part, Bertha, don’t do yourself justice when you are acting. I am in the same position. I feel this. My ill-humour occasionally falls in your direction—yours, for its part, falling in mine when I criticize _your_ acting. We don’t act well together, and that’s a fact; though I’m sure we should be smooth enough allies off the boards of love. Your heart, Bertha, is in the right place; ah, ça⸺” “You are too kind!” “But—but I will go further! At the risk of appearing outrageously paradoxical. This heart in question is so much part of your intelligence, too⸺” “Thanks! Thanks!” “—despite your execrable fatuity as an actress! Your shrewdness and goodness give each other the hand.—But to return to my point. I had always till I met you regarded marriage as a thing beyond all argument _not_ for me. I was unusually isolated from this idea, anyway; I had never even reflected what marriage was. You introduced me to marriage! In so doing you are responsible for all our troubles. The approach of this horrible thing, so _surprisingly_ pleasant and friendly at nearer sight, caused revulsion of feeling beyond my control, resulting in sudden _fiançailles_. Like a woman luxuriously fingering some merchant’s goods, too dear for her, or not wanted enough for the big price, so I philandered with the idea of marriage.” This simplification put things, merely, in a new callous light. Tarr felt that she must naturally be enjoying, too, his points. He forgot to direct his exposition in such a way as to hurt her least. This trivial and tortured landscape had a beauty for him he could have explained, where her less developed sense saw nothing but a harrowing reality. The lunch had had the same effect on him that it was intended to have on his victim; not enough to overthrow his resolution, but enough to relax its form.