“Why to-night?”
“Any night.”
Kreisler certainly was a “new link”—too much. The chief cause of separation had become an element of insidious rapprochement.
He left her silently apprehensive, staring at him mournfully.
So that night, after his second visit to Fräulein Lipmann’s, he did not seek out Kreisler at his usual head-quarters with his first enthusiasm.
CHAPTER VI
Already before a considerable pile of saucers, representing his evening’s menu of drink, Kreisler sat quite still, his eyes very bright, smiling to himself. Tarr did not at once ask him “what Kreisler meant.” “Kreisler” looked as though it meant something a little different on that particular evening. He acknowledged Tarr’s arrival slightly, seeming to include him in his reverie. It was a sort of silent invitation to “come inside.” Then they sat without speaking, an unpleasant atmosphere of police-court romance for Tarr.
Tarr still kept his retrospective luxury before him, as it maintained the Kreisler side of the business in a desired perspective. Anastasya, whom he had seen that evening, had come as a diversion. He got back, with her, into the sphere of “real” things again, not fanciful retrospective ones.
This would be a reply to Kreisler (an Anastasya for your Otto) and restore the balance. At present they were existing on a sort of three-legged affair. This inclusion of the fourth party would make things solid and less precarious again.