quently found on coming home tired for his
tea, and eager for the sight of his wife, a little note from her telling
him that she had been summoned to Mrs. Forrester's as Tante was "with
Fafner in his cave" and wanted her.

Fafner was the name that Madame von Marwitz gave to her moods of
sometimes tragic and sometimes petulant melancholy. Karen had told him
all about Fafner and how, in the cave, Tante would lie sometimes for
long hours, silent, her eyes closed, holding her hand; sometimes asking
her to read to her, English, French, German or Italian poetry; their
range of reading always astonished Gregory.

He gathered, too, from Karen's confidences, how little, until now, he
had gauged the variety of the great woman's resources, how little done
justice to her capacity for being merely delightful. She could be
whimsically gay in the midst of melancholy, and her jests and merriment
were the more touching, the more exquisite, from the fact that they
flowered upon the dark background of the cave. It was, he saw, with a
richer flavour that Karen tasted again the charm of old days, when,
after some great musical or social event, in which the girl had played
her part of contented observer, they had laughed together over follies
and appreciated qualities, in the familiar language of allusion evolved
from long community in experience.

Karen repeated to him Tante's sallies at the expense of this or that
person and the phrase with which she introduced these transformations of
human foolishness to the service of comedy. "Come, let us make
_meringues_ of them."

The dull or ludicrous creatures, so to be whipped up and baked crisp,
revealed, in the light of the analogy, the tempting vacuity of a bowl of
white of egg. When Tante introduced her wit into the colourless
substance she frothed it to a sparkling work of art.

Gregory was aware sometimes of a pang as he listened. He and Karen had,
indeed, their many little jokes, and their stock of common association
was growing; but there was nothing like the range of reference, nothing
like the variety of experience, that her life with Madame von Marwitz
had given her to draw upon. It was to her companionship, intermittent as
it had been, with the world-wandering genius that she owed the security
of judgment that often amused yet often disconcerted him, the
catholicity of taste beside which, though he would not acknowledge its
final validity, he felt his own taste to be sometimes nar