s he had felt for her from the
first was troubled by his realisation of the books she had placidly
read--under Tante's guidance--the people whose queer relationships she
placidly took for granted as in no need of condonation. When he
intimated to her that he disapproved of such contacts and customs, she
looked at him, puzzled, and then said, with an air of kindly maturity at
once touching and vexatious: "But that is the morality of the
Philistines."

It was, of course, and Gregory considered it the very best of
moralities; but remembering her mother he could not emphasize to her how
decisively he held by it.

It was in no vulgar or vicious world that her life, as the child of the
unconventional sculptor, as the _protegee_ of the great pianist, had
been passed. But it was a world without religion, without institutions,
without order. Gregory, though his was not the religious temperament,
had his reasoned beliefs in the spiritual realities expressed in
institutions and he had his inherited instincts of reverence for the
rituals that embodied the spiritual life of his race. He was impatient
with dissent and with facile scepticisms. He did not expect a woman to
have reasoned beliefs, nor did he ask a credulous, uncritical orthodoxy;
but he did want the Christian colouring of mind, the Christian outlook;
he did want his wife to be a woman who would teach her children to say
their prayers at her knees. It was with something like dismay that he
gathered from Karen that her conception of life was as untouched by any
consciousness of creed as that of a noble young pagan. He was angry at
himself for feeling it and when he found himself applying his rules and
measures to her; for what had it been from the first but her spiritual
strength and loveliness that had drawn him to her? Yet he longed to make
her accept the implications of the formulated faiths that she lived by.
"Oh, no, you're not," he said to her when, turning unperturbed eyes upon
him, she assured him: "Oh yes, I am quite, quite a pagan." "I don't
think you know what you mean when you say you're a pagan," Gregory
continued.

"But, yes," she returned. "I have no creed. I was brought up to think of
beauty as the only religion. That is my guardian's religion. It is the
religion, she says, of all free souls. And my father thought so, too."
It was again the assurance of a wisdom, not her own, yet possessed by
her, a wisdom that she did not dream of anybody challenging. W