ed her breast. She murmured, while
Karen knelt enfolding her, "His dead face rises before me. The face that
we saw, Karen. And I know to the full again my unutterable woe." It was
rare with Madame von Marwitz to allude thus explicitly to the tragedy of
her life, the ambiguous, the dreadful death of her husband. Karen knelt
holding her, pale with the shared memory. They were so for a long time.
Then, sighing softly, "_Bon Dieu! bon Dieu!_" Madame von Marwitz rose
and, gently putting the girl aside, she went into her bedroom and closed
the door.

CHAPTER VII

It was a hard, chill morning and Gregory, sauntering up and down the
platform at Euston beside the open doors of the long steamer-train, felt
that the taste and smell of London was, as nowhere else, concentrated,
compressed, and presented to one in tabloid form, as it were, at a
London station on a winter morning. It was a taste and smell that he,
personally, rather liked, singularly compounded as it was, to his fancy,
of cold metals and warm sooty surfaces; of the savour of kippers cooking
over innumerable London grates and the aroma of mugs of beer served out
over innumerable London bars; something at once acrid yet genial,
suggesting sordidness and unlimited possibility. The vibration of
adventure was in it and the sentiment, oddly intermingled, of human
solidarity and personal detachment.

Gregory, as he strolled and waited for his old friend and whilom Oxford
tutor, Professor Blackburn, whom he had promised to see off, had often
to pause or to deviate in his course; for, though it was still early,
and the season not a favourite one for crossing, the platform was quite
sufficiently crowded, and crowded, evidently, with homeward-bound
Americans, mostly women. Gregory tended to think of America and its
people with the kindly lightness common to his type. Their samenesses
didn't interest him, and their differences were sometimes vexatious. He
had a vague feeling that they'd really better have been Colonials and be
done with it. Professor Blackburn last night had reproved this insular
levity. He was going over with an array of discriminations that Gregory
had likened to an explorer's charts and instruments. He intended to
investigate the most minute and measure the most immense, to lecture
continually, to dine out every evening and to write a book of some real
appropriateness when he came home. Gregory said that all that he asked
of America was that it sho