back in time for
tea," he observed.

"I know," Karen returned, without aggressiveness. "And so, to-morrow,
you will find us if you come."

He got back at tea-time next day, expecting to make a fourth only of the
small group; but, on his way to the drawing-room, he paused, arrested,
in the hall, where a collection of the oddest looking hats and coats he
had ever seen were piled and hung.

One of the hats was a large, discoloured, cream-coloured felt, much
battered, with its brown band awry; one was of the type of flat-brimmed
silk, known in Paris as the _Latin Quartier_; another was an enormous
sombrero. Gregory stood frowning at these strange signs somewhat as if
they had been a drove of cockroaches. He had, as never yet before, the
sense of an alien and offensive invasion of his home, and an old, almost
forgotten disquiet smote upon him in the thought that what to him was
strange was to Karen normal. This was her life and she had never really
entered his.

In the drawing-room, he paused again at the door, and looked over the
company assembled under the Bouddha's smile. Madame von Marwitz was its
centre; pearl-wreathed, silken and silver, she leaned opulently on the
cushions of the sofa where she sat, and Karen at the tea-table seemed
curiously to have relapsed into the background place where he had first
found her. She was watching, with her old contented placidity, a scene
in which she had little part. No, mercifully, though in it she was not
of it. This was Gregory's relieving thought as his eye ran over them,
the women with powdered faces and extravagant clothes and the men with
the oddest collars and boots and hair. "Shoddy Bohemians," was his terse
definition of them; an inaccurate definition; for though, in the main,
Bohemians, they were not, in the main, shoddy.

Belot was there, with his massive head and sagacious eyes; and a famous
actress, ugly, thin, with a long, slightly crooked face, tinted hair,
and the melancholy, mysterious eyes of a llama. Claude Drew, at a little
table behind Madame von Marwitz, negligently turned the leaves of a
book. Lady Rose Harding, the only one of the company with whom Gregory
felt an affinity, though a dubious one, talked to the French actress and
to Madame von Marwitz. Lady Rose had ridden across deserts on camels,
and sketched strange Asiatic mountains, and paid a pilgrimage to
Tolstoi, and written books on all these exploits; and she had been to
the Adirondacks that su