The red-headed member of the party had met Tarr by chance. Hearing he had not seen Bertha since the night of the ball, she had said with roguish pleasantness: “He’d better look after her better; why hadn’t he come to the ball?” Tarr did not understand.
“Bertha had had an adventure. All of them, for that matter, had had an adventure, but especially Bertha. Oh, Bertha would tell him all about it.” But, on Tarr insisting, Bertha’s story, in substance, had been told.
So with Bertha, the fact was still there. Retrospectively, her friends insisted upon passing by the two remarkably unanimous-looking forms on the boulevard in stony silence. She shouted to them and kissed Kreisler loudly. But they refused to take any notice. She sulked. They had been guilty of catching her. She kept to herself day after day. She would make a change in her life. She might go to Germany; she might go to another quartier. To go on with her life just as though nothing had happened, that was out of the question. Demonstration of some sort must follow, and change compatible with grief.
Her burly little clock struck four. Hurrying on reform-clothes, she went out to buy lunch. The dairy lay nearly next door to Lejeune’s restaurant. Crossing the road towards it, she caught sight of Kreisler’s steadily marching figure approaching. First she side-stepped and half turned. But the shop would be reached before they met, so she went on, merely quickening her pace. Her eye, covertly fixed on him, calculating distances and speeds, saw him hesitate—evidently having just caught sight of her—and then turn down a side street nearly beside the dairy she was making for. Unwise pique beset her at this.
CHAPTER V
Kreisler, on his side, had been only a few paces from his door when he caught sight of Bertha. As his changed route would necessitate a good deal of tiresome circling to bring him back practically to the spot he had started from, he right-about-faced in a minute or two, the danger past, as he thought. The result was that, as she left the shop, there was Kreisler approaching again, almost in the same place as before.
She was greeted affably, as though to say “Caught! both of us!” He was under the impression, however, that she had lain in wait for him. He was so accustomed to think of her in that character! If she had been in full flight he would have imagined that she was only decoying him. She was a woman who could not help adhering.
“How do you do? I’ve just been buying my lunch.”