they would have eaten it without
comment and hardly been aware that it wasn't an everyday milk-pudding.

"Did you and Mrs. Lavington and Evelyn and Mrs. Haverfield find much to
talk of after lunch?" Gregory asked, as he motored Mrs. Talcott and
Karen back to Les Solitudes.

"Yes; we talked of a good many things," said Karen. "But I know about so
few of their things and they about so few of mine. Miss Lavington was
very much surprised to think that I had never been to a fox-hunt; and
I," Karen smiled, "was very much surprised to think that they had never
heard Tante play."

"They hardly ever get up to town, you see," said Gregory. "But surely
they knew about her?"

"Not much," said Karen. "Mrs. Lavington asked me about her--for
something pleasant to say--and they were such strange questions; as
though one should be asked whether Mr. Arthur Balfour were a Russian
nihilist or Metchnikoff an Italian poet." Karen spoke quite without
grievance or irony.

"And after your Sargent," said Gregory, "you must have been pained by
that portrait of Mrs. Haverfield in the drawing-room."

"Mrs. Lavington pointed it out to me specially," said Karen, laughing,
"and told me that it had been in the Academy. What a sad thing; with all
those eyelashes! And yet opposite to it hung the beautiful Gainsborough
of a great-grandmother. Mrs. Lavington saw no difference, I think."

"They haven't been trained to see differences," said Gregory, and he
summed up the Lavingtons in the aphorism to himself as well as to Karen;
"only to accept samenesses." He hoped indeed, by sacrificing the
aesthetic quality of the Lavingtons, to win some approbation of their
virtues; but Karen, though not inclined to proffer unasked criticism,
found, evidently, no occasion for commendation. Later on, when they were
back at Les Solitudes and walking in the garden, she returned to the
subject of his friends and said: "I was a little disturbed about Mrs.
Talcott; did you notice? no one talked to her at all, hardly. It was as
if they thought her my _dame de compagnie_. She isn't my _dame de
compagnie_; and if she were, I think that she should have been talked
to."

Gregory had observed this fact and had hoped that it might have escaped
Karen's notice. To the Lavingtons Mrs. Talcott's platter had been
unrecognizable and they had tended to let its contents alone.

"It's as I said, you know," he put forward a mitigation; "they've not
been trained to see differences;