seriousness, and a great many
pleasures which they took seriously, too. They "came up" from the quiet
responsibilities of the country-side for a season and "did" the concerts
and exhibitions as they "did" their shopping and their balls. Art, to
most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for
sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like
the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of
them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the
world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild,
derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative
appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist
or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them
as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as
rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring
that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom
one wouldn't mind one's sons and daughters marrying; and they didn't
conceive of artists as entering that category.

Gregory, with all his acuteness, did not gauge the astonishment with
which Karen came to realize these standards of his world. Her cheerful
evenness of demeanour was a cloak, sometimes for indignation and
sometimes for mirth. She could only face the fact that this world must,
in a sense, be hers, by relegating it and all that it meant to the
merest background in their lives. Her real life consisted in Gregory; in
Tante. All that she had to do with these people--oh, so nice and kind
they were, she saw that well, but oh so stupid, most of them, so
inconceivably blind to everything of value in life--all that she had to
do was, from time to time, to open their box, their well-padded,
well-provendered box, and look at them pleasantly. She felt sure that
for Gregory's sake, if not for theirs, she should always be able to look
pleasantly; unless--she had been afraid of this sometimes--they should
say or do things that in their blindness struck at Tante and at the
realities that Tante stood for. But all had gone so well, so Karen
believed, that she felt no misgivings when Tante expressed a wish to
look into the box with her and said, "You must give a little
dinner-party for me, my Karen, so that I may see your new _milieu_."

Gregory controlled a dry little grimace when Karen reported this speech
to him