Neither of these guesses was right. It was really something absurder than that that had brought him there.
Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with “those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour of that life lived with Bertha about them!
But not only with them, but with Bertha herself he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted, as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her belongings.
On this particular second visit to Fräulein Lipmann’s he met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful these people in truth were.
He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak.
“How is Bertha?” they had asked him.
“She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before.—“How strange!” they thought.—“So he sees her still!”
“She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” Renée Lipmann said. “I’ve been so busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she?”
“Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr answered.
Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute? What could all this mean? Their first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant, eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme égoïste! Homme sensuel!” in Van Bencke’s famous words.