A man, an artist, let us call him T, realizes that his flirtation with B has gone too far, and feeling that he has already been guilty of deception he brings their sentimental dalliance to an end. A second man, K, also an artist, suffers a hopeless passion for a woman, A, who gives no sign of returning his desire. B and K, the one brooding over her former lover, the other absorbed with his futile yearning, are thrown together; through a series of awkward chances, they find themselves romantically entangled. T returns to discover how things now stand. In his maudlin wanderings through Paris, nostalgic for his past with B, he meets A and the two fall in love.

Cast in such formal terms, this situation might have furnished the kernel of a Jamesian novella in which the rigorous geometry of emotions, in particular the symmetric reversal of the original couplings, would have been submitted to the most exacting and delicate refinements. However, when we consider that T (that is, Tarr) indulges his moral weakness and dramatizes his cruelty; that Kreisler binds himself to Bertha by raping her during a portrait session; that he accidentally kills a man whom he meant to kill by design; that he commits suicide; that Tarr marries Bertha when she is pregnant with Kreisler's child; that he visits her punctiliously from four to seven, reserving the rest of the day for his continuing romance with Anastasya – then it is clear how far we are from Jamesian refinement.