Anastasya regarded her woman’s beauty as a bright dress of a harlot; she was only beautiful for that. Her splendid and bedizened state was assumed with shades of humility. Even her tenderness and peculiar heart appeared beneath the common infection and almost disgrace of that state.
The Bonnington Club was not far off and they had decided to walk, as the night was fine. It was about half-past nine when they started. Seven or eight led the way in a suddenly made self-centred group; once outside in the spaciousness of the night streets the party seemed to break up into sections held together in the small lighted rooms within—Soltyk and his friend, still talking, and a quieter group, followed.
Fräulein Lunken had stayed behind with another girl, to put out the lights. Instead of running on with her companion to join the principal group, she stopped with Kreisler, whom she had found bringing up the rear alone.
“Not feeling gregarious to-night?” she asked.
Kreisler walked slowly, increasing, at every step, the distance between them and the next group, as though hoping that, should he draw her far enough back in the rear, like an elastic band she would in panic shoot forward. “Did he know many English people?” and she continued in a long eulogy of that race. Kreisler murmured and muttered sceptically. And she seemed then to be saying something about Soler’s, and eventually to be recommending him a new Spanish professor of some sort.
Kreisler cursed this chatterer and her complaisance in accompanying him.
“I must get some cigarettes,” he said briskly, as a bureau de tabac came in sight. “But don’t you wait, Fräulein. Catch the others up.”
Having purposely loitered over his purchase, when he came out on the Boulevard again there she was waiting for him. “Aber! aber! what’s the matter with her?” Kreisler asked himself in impatient astonishment.
What was the matter with Bertha? Many things, of course. Among old general things was a state hardly of harmony with the Lipmann circle. She was rather suspect for her too obvious handsomeness. It was felt that she was perhaps a little too interested in the world. She was not quite obedient enough in spirit to the Lipmann. Even nuances of disrespect had been observed. Then Tarr had turned up nearly at the commencement of her incorporation. This was an eternal thorn in their sides, and chronic source of difficulty. Tarr was uncompromisingly absent from all their gatherings, and bowed to them, when met in the street, as it seemed to them, narquoisement, derisively, even. He had been excommunicated long ago, most loudly by Fräulein Van Bencke.
“Homme sensuel!” she had called him. She averred she had caught his eye resting too intently on her well-filled-out bosom.