Hobson stared with bright meditative sweetness down the boulevard. “I think there must be a great difference between your way of approaching Germans and mine,” he said. “Ay: it is different things that takes us respectively amongst them.” “You like the national flavour, all the same.” “I like the national flavour!”—Tarr had a way of beginning a reply with a parrot-like echo of the words of the other party to the dialogue; also of repeating _sotto voce_ one of his own sentences, a mechanical rattle following on without stop. “Sex is nationalized more than any other essential of life. In this it is just the opposite to art.—There is much pork and philosophy in German sex.—But then if it is the sex you are after, it does not say you want to identify your being with your appetite. Quite the opposite. The condition of continued enjoyment is to resist assimilation.—A man is the opposite of his appetite.” “Surely, a man _is_ his appetite.” “No, a man is always his _last_ appetite, or his appetite before last; and that is no longer an appetite.—But nobody _is_ anything, or life would be intolerable, the human race collapse.—You are me, I am you.—The Present is the furthest projection of our steady appetite. Imagination, like a general, keeps behind. Imagination is the man.” “_What_ is the Present?” Hobson asked politely, with much aspirating, sitting up a little and slightly offering his ear. But Tarr only repeated things arbitrarily. He proceeded: “Sex is a monstrosity. It is the arch abortion of this filthy universe.—How ‘old-fashioned!’—eh, my fashionable friend?—We are all optimists to-day, aren’t we? God’s in his Heaven, all’s well with the world! I am a pessimist, Hobson. But I’m a new sort of pessimist.—I think I am the sort that will please!—I am the Panurgic-Pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss. I gaze on squalor and idiocy, and the more I see it, the more I like it.—Flaubert built up his _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ with maniacal and tireless hands. It took him ten years. That was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap? He had an appetite like an elephant for this form of mirth. But he grumbled and sighed over his food.—I take it in my arms and bury my face in it!” As Tarr’s temperament spread its wings, whirling him menacingly and mockingly above Hobson’s head, the Cantab philosopher did not think it necessary to reply.—He was not winged himself.—He watched Tarr looping the loop above him. He was a drole bird! He wondered, as he watched him, if he was a _sound_ bird, or _homme-oiseau_. People believed in him. His Exhibition flights attracted attention. What sort of prizes could he expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable _ambitieux_ be satisfied? The childish sport proceeded, with serious intervals.