See Kreisler again! The result as regards the Lipmann circle! But this pleaded for Kreisler. It would be carrying out her story. It would be insisting on it, and destroying that subtle advantage, now possessed by her friends, in presenting them with somewhat the same uncompromising spectacle again. In deliberately exposing herself to criticism she would be effacing, in some sense, the extreme involuntariness of the boulevard incident. He asked her simply if he might see her again. The least pretentious request. Would the refusal to do this simple thing be a concession to Lipmann and the rest? Did she want to at all? But it was in a jump of deliberate defiance or “carelessness” that she concluded:
“Yes, of course, if you wish it.”
“You never go to cafés? Perhaps some day⸺”
“Good! Very well!” she answered very quickly, in her trenchant tone, imparting all sorts of particular unnecessary meanings to this simple acceptance. She had answered as men accept a bet or the Bretons clinch a bargain in the fist.
Kreisler was still leisurely. He appeared to regard her vehemence with amusement.
“I should like then to go with you to the Café de l’Observatoire to-morrow evening. I hope I shall be able to efface the rather unusual impression I must have made on you the other night!” (The tone of this remark did not ignore or condemn, however, the kisses.) “When can I meet you?”
“Will you come and fetch me at my house?”
But shivers went down her back as she said it.
She was now thoroughly committed to this new step. She was delighted, or rather excited, at each new further phase of it. Its horrors were scores off her friends. These details of meeting!—these had not been reckoned on. Of course they would have to meet. Kreisler seemed like a physician conducting a little unpleasant operation in a genial, ironical, unhurrying way.
“Well, it’s understood. We shall see each other to-morrow,” he said. And with a smile of half raillery at her rather upset expression, he left her. So much fuss about a little thing, such obstinacy in doing it! What was the terrible thing? Meeting him! His smiling was only natural. She showed without disguise in her face the hazardous quality, as she considered it, of this consent. She would wish him to feel the largeness of the motive that prompted her, and for him to participate too in the certain horror of meeting himself!