row and
sometimes guileless. He saw that Karen had every ground for feeling her
own point of view a larger one than his. It was no personal complacency
that her assurance expressed, but the modest recognition of privilege.
Beyond their personal tie, so her whole demeanour showed him, he had
nothing to add to her highly dowered life.

Gregory had known that his world would mean nothing to Karen; yet when,
under Betty's guidance, she fulfilled her social duties, dined out, gave
dinners, received and returned visits, the very compliance of her
indifference, while always amusing, vexed him a little, and a little
alarmed him, too. He had known that he would have to make all the
adjustments, but how adjust oneself to a permanent separation between
one's private and one's social life? Old ties, lacking new elements of
growth, tended to become formalities. When Karen was not there, he did
not care to go without her to see people, and when she was with him the
very charm of her personality was a barrier between him and them. His
life became narrower as well as lonelier. There was nothing much to be
done with people to whom one's wife was indifferent.

It was very obvious to him that she found the sober, conventional people
who were his friends very flavourless, especially when she came to them
from Fafner's cave. He had always taken his friends for granted, as part
of the pleasant routine of life, like one's breakfast or one's bath; but
now, seeing them anew, through Karen's eyes, he was inclined more and
more to believe that they weren't as dull as she found them. She lacked
the fundamental experience of a rooted life. She was yet to learn--he
hoped, he determined, she should learn--that a social system of
harmonious people, significant perhaps more because of their places in
the system than as units, and bound together by a highly evolved code,
was, when all was said and done, a more satisfactory place in which to
spend one's life than an anarchic world of erratic, undisciplined,
independent individuals. Karen, however, did not understand the use of
the system and she saw its members with eyes as clear to their defects
as were Gregory's to the defects of Madame von Marwitz.

Gregory's friends belonged to that orderly and efficient section of the
nation that moves contentedly between the simply professional and the
ultra fashionable. They had a great many duties, social, political and
domestic, which they took with a pleasant