Tarr had come to talk to him about Bertha.
“I’m afraid I must have interrupted your work?” Tarr said with mock ceremony.
“No, it’s all right. I was just going to have a rest. I’m rather off colour.”
Tarr misunderstood him.
“Off colour? What is the matter with colour now?”
“No, I mean I’m seedy.”
“Oh, ah. Yes.”
His eyes still fixed on the ground, Lowndes pottered about, like a dog.
As with most educated people who “do” anything, and foresee analysis and fame, he was biographically minded. A poor man, he did his Boswelling himself. His self-characterization, proceeding whenever he was not alone, was as follows: “A fussy and exacting man, slightly avuncular, strangely, despite the fineness and amplitude of his character, minute, precious, and tidy.” (In this way he made a virtue of his fuss.) To show how the general illusion worked in a particular case: “He had been disturbed in his ‘work’ by Tarr, or had just emerged from that state of wonderful concentration he called ‘work.’ He could not at once bend himself to more general things. His nerves drove him from object to object. But he would soon be quiet.”
Tarr looked on with an ugly patience.