e had some
authority to come between you and me and between me and Tante. I am very
much displeased with her," said Karen, with her strangely mature
decision.

The moment had come, decisively, not to sacrifice Betty. "Betty sees
things more conventionally and perhaps more wisely," he said, "than you
or I--or Madame von Marwitz, even, perhaps. She feels a sense of
responsibility towards you--and towards me. Anything she said she meant
kindly, I'm sure."

Karen listened carefully as though mastering herself. "Responsibility
towards me? Why should she? I feel none towards her."

"But, my dear child, that wouldn't be in your place," he could not
control the ironic note. "You are a younger woman and a much more
inexperienced one. It's merely as if you'd married into a family where
there was an elder sister to look after you."

Karen's eyes dwelt on him and her face was cold, rocky. "Do you forget,
as she does, that I have still with me a person who, for years, has
looked after me, a person older still and more experienced still than
the little Betty? I don't need any guidance from your sister; for I have
my guardian to tell me, as she always has, what is best for me to do. It
is impertinent of Betty to imagine that she has any right to interfere.
And she was more than impertinent. I had not wished to tell you; but you
must understand that Betty has been insolent."

"Come, Karen; don't use such unsuitable words. Hasty perhaps; not
insolent. Betty herself has told me all about it."

A steely penetration came to Karen's eyes. "She has told you? She has
been here?"

"Yes."

"She complained of Tante to you?"

"She thinks her wrong."

"And you; you think her wrong?"

Gregory paused and looked at the young girl on the sofa, his wife. There
was that in her attitude, exhausted yet unappealing, in her face, weary
yet implacable, which, while it made her seem pitiful to him, made her
also almost a stranger; this armed hostility towards himself, who loved
her, this quickness of resentment, this cold assurance of right. He
could understand and pity; but he, too, was tired and overwrought. What
had he done to deserve such a look and such a tone from her except
endure, with unexampled patience, the pressure upon his life, soft,
unremitting, sinister, of something hateful to him and menacing to their
happiness? What, above all, was his place in this deep but narrow young
heart? It seemed filled with but one absorbing preoccup