about their wedding-trip and how he and Karen
had enjoyed this or that. When Barker brought in the tea-tray and set it
on a little table before Karen, she took up one of the cups--they were
of an old English ware with a wreath of roses inside and lines of half
obliterated gilt--and said--it was her first comment on the
background--"_Tiens, c'est joli._ Is this one of your presents, Karen?"

Karen told her that the tea-set was not a present; it had belonged to a
great-grandmother of Gregory's.

Madame von Marwitz continued to examine the cup and, as she set it down
among the others, with the deliberate nicety of gesture that gave at
once power and grace to her slightest movement, she said: "You were
fortunate in your great-grandmother, Mr. Jardine."

Her voice, her glance, her gestures, were already affecting Gregory
unpleasantly. There was in them a quality of considered control, as
though she recognised difficulty and were gently and warily evading it.
Seated on his chintz sofa in the bright, burnished room, all in white,
with a white lace head-dress, half veil, half turban, binding her hair
and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her
inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his
glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism
before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade
away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the
only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen.
To her husband's eye, newly aware of aesthetic discriminations, Karen
seemed to interpret and justify her surroundings, to show their
commonplace as part of their charm and to make the Bouddha and Madame
von Marwitz herself, in all their portentous distinction, look like
incidental ornaments.

Madame von Marwitz's silence in regard to the Bouddha had already become
a blight, but it was, perhaps, the growing crisp decision in Gregory's
manner that made Karen first aware of constraint. Her eyes then turned
from Tante to the shrine at the end of the room, and she said: "You
don't care for the way it looks here, Tante, do you--your present?"

Madame von Marwitz had finished her tea and she turned in the sofa so
that she could consider the Bouddha no longer incidentally but
decisively. "I am glad that it is yours, _ma cherie_," she said, after
the pause of her contemplation. "Some day you must place it more
happily. You don't inte