so strongly, Tante must have felt it," said
Karen, and to this, after another pause, Gregory found nothing further
to say than "I'm sorry."

"I hardly think," said Karen, holding the back of her chair tightly and
looking down again while she spoke, "that you can have realized that
Herr Lippheim is not only Tante's friend, but mine. I don't think you
can have realized how you treated him. I know that he is very simple and
unworldly; but he is good and kind and faithful; he is a true
artist--almost a great one, and he has the heart of a child. And beside
him, while you were hurting and bewildering him so to-day, you looked to
me--how shall I say it--petty, yes, and foolish, yes, and full of
self-conceit."

The emotion with which Gregory heard her speak these words,
deliberately, if in a hardened and controlled voice, expressed itself,
as emotion did with him, in a slight, fixed smile. He could not pause to
examine Karen's possible justice; that she should speak so, to him, was
the overpowering fact.

"I imagined that I behaved with courtesy," he said.

"Yes, you were courteous," Karen replied. "You made me think of a
painted piece of wood while he was like a growing tree."

"Your simile is certainly very mortifying," said Gregory, continuing to
smile. But he was not mortified. He was cruelly hurt.

"I do not wish to mortify you. I have not mortified you, because you
think yourself above it all. But I would like, if I could," said Karen,
"to make you see the truth. I would like to make you see that in
behaving as you have you show yourself not above it but below it."

"And I would like to make you see the truth, too," Gregory returned, in
the voice of his bitter hurt; "and I ask you, if your prejudice will
permit of it, to make some allowance for my feeling when I found you
surrounded by--this rabble."

"Rabble? My guardian's friends?" Karen had grown ashen.

"I hope they're not; but I'm not concerned with her friends; I'm
concerned with you. She can take people in, on the artistic plane, whom
it's not fit that you should meet. That horrible actress,--I wouldn't
have her come within sight of you if I could help it. Your guardian
knows my feeling about the parts she plays. She had no business to ask
her here. As for Herr Lippheim, I have no doubt that he is an admirable
person in his own walk of life, but he is a preposterous person, and it
is preposterous that your guardian should have thought of him as a
possib