as it not
Tante's?

"Well," he remarked, "beauty is a large term. Perhaps it includes more
than you think."

Karen looked at him with approbation. "That is what Tante says; that it
includes everything." And she went on, pleased to reveal to him still
more of Tante's treasure, since he had proved himself thus
understanding; "Tante, you know, belongs to the Catholic Church; it is
the only church of beauty, she says. But she is not _pratiquante_; not
_croyante_ in any sense. Art is her refuge."

"I see," said Gregory. "And what is your refuge?"

Karen, at this, kept silence for a moment, and then said: "It is not
that; not art. I do not feel, perhaps, that I need refuges. And I am
happier than my dear guardian. I believe in immortality; oh yes,
indeed." She looked round gravely at him--they were sitting on the turf
of a headland above the sea. "I believe, that is, in everything that is
beautiful and loving going on for ever."

He felt abashed before her. The most dependent and child-like of
creatures where her trust and love were engaged, she was, as well, the
most serenely independent. Even Tante, he felt, could not touch her
faiths.

"You mustn't say that you are a pagan, you see," he said.

"But Plato believed in immortality," Karen returned, smiling. "And you
will not tell me that Plato was _pratiquant_ or _croyant_."

He could not claim Plato as a member of the Church of England, though he
felt quite ready to demonstrate, before a competent body of listeners,
that, as a nineteenth century Englishman, Plato would have been. Karen
was not likely to follow such an argument. She would smile at his
seeming sophistries.

No; he must accept it, and as a very part of her lovableness, that she
could not be made to fit into the plan of his life as he had imagined
it. She would not carry on its traditions, for she would not understand
them. To win her would be, in a sense, to relinquish something of that
orderly progression as a professional and social creature that he had
mapped out for himself, though he knew himself to be, through his
experience of her, already a creature more human, a creature enriched.
Karen, if she came to love him, would be, through love, infinitely
malleable, but in the many adjustments that would lie before them it
would be his part to foresee complications and to do the adjusting.
Change in her would be a gradual growth, and never towards mere
conformity.

He felt it to be the first step