“I don’t at all agree with you,” Bernardine answered rather peevishly.  “I think I am getting on very well.”

“You are no judge,” he said.  “To begin with, you cannot focus properly.  You have a crooked eye.  I have told you that several times!”

“You certainly have,” she put in.  “You don’t let me forget that.”

“Your photograph of that horrid little danseuse whom you like so much,” he said, “is simply abominable.  She looks like a fury.  Well, she may be one for all I know, but in real life she has not the appearance of one.”

“I think that is the best photograph I have done,” Bernardine said, highly indignant.  She could tolerate his uppishness about subjects of which she knew far more than he did; but his masterfulness about a subject of which she really knew nothing was more than she could bear with patience.  He had not the tact to see that she was irritated.

“I don’t know about it being the best,” he said; “unless it is the best specimen of your inexperience.  Looked at from that point of view, it does stand first!”

She flushed crimson with temper.

“Nothing is easier than to make fun of others,” she said fiercely.  “It is the resource of the ignorant.”

Then, after the fashion of angry women, having said her say, she stalked away.  If there had been a door to bang, she would certainly have banged it.  However, she did what she could under the circumstances:  she pushed a curtain roughly aside, and passed into the concert-room, where every night of the season’s six months, a scratchy string orchestra entertained the Kurhaus guests.  She left the Disagreeable Man standing in the passage.

“Dear me,” he said thoughtfully.  And he stroked his chin.  Then he trudged slowly up to his room.

“Dear me,” he said once more.

Arrived in his bedroom, he began to read.  But after a few minutes he shut his book, took the lamp to the looking-glass and brushed his hair.  Then he put on a black coat and a white silk tie.  There was a speck of dust on the coat.  He carefully removed that, and then extinguished the lamp.

On his way downstairs he met Marie, who gazed at him in astonishment.  It was quite unusual for him to be seen again when he had once come up from table-d’hote.  She noticed the black coat and the white silk tie too, and reported on these eccentricities to her colleague Anna.

The Disagreeable Man meanwhile had reached the Concert Hall.  He glanced around, and saw where Bernardine was sitting, and then chose a place in the opposite direction, quite by himself.  He looked somewhat like a dog who has been well beaten.  Now and again he looked up to see whether she still kept her seat.  The bad music was a great irritation to him.  But he stayed on heroically.  There was no reason why he should stay.  Gradually, too, the audience began to thin.  Still he lingered, always looking like a dog in punishment.