towards adjustments when he motored
Karen and Mrs. Talcott to Guillian House to lunch with his friends the
Lavingtons. The occasion must mark for him the subtle altering of an old
tie. Karen and the Lavingtons could never be to each other what he and
the Lavingtons had been. It was part of her breadth that congeniality
could never for her be based on the half automatic affinities of caste
and occupation; and it was part of her narrowness, or, rather, of her
inexperience, that she could see people only as individuals and would
not recognize the real charm of the Lavingtons, which consisted in their
being, like their house and park, part of the landscape and of an
established order of things. Yet, once he had her there, he watched the
metamorphosis that her presence worked in his old associations with
pleasure rather than pain. It pleased him, intimately, that the
Lavingtons should see in him a lover as yet uncertain of his chances. It
pleased him that they should not find in Karen the type that they must
have expected the future Mrs. Jardine to be, the type of Constance
Armytage and the type of Evelyn Lavington, Colonel and Mrs. Lavington's
unmarried daughter, who, but for Karen, might well have become Mrs.
Jardine one day. He observed, with a lover's fond pride, that Karen, in
her shrunken white serge and white straw hat, Karen, with her pleasant
imperturbability, her mingled simplicity and sophistication, did, most
decisively, make the Lavingtons seem flavourless. Among them, while Mrs.
Lavington walked her round the garden and Evelyn elicited with kindly
concern that she played neither golf, hockey nor tennis, and had never
ridden to hounds, her demeanour was that of a little rustic princess
benignly doing her social duty. The only reason why she did not appear
like this to the Lavingtons was that, immutably unimaginative as they
were, they knew that she wasn't a princess, was, indeed, only the odd
appendage of an odd celebrity with whom their friend had chosen, oddly,
to fall in love. They weren't perplexed, because, since he had fallen in
love with her, she was placed. But they, in the complete contrast they
offered, had little recognition of individual values and judged a dish
by the platter it was served on. A princess was a princess, and an
appendage an appendage, and a future Mrs. Jardine a very recognizable
person; just as, had a subtle _charlotte russe_ been brought up to lunch
in company with the stewed rhubarb