know. They have given her a lovely little tiara."

"Dear me," said Miss Scrotton; "it is a case of Cinderella. No; I can't
rejoice over it, though, of course I wish them joy; I wired to them this
morning and I'm sending them a very handsome paper-cutter of dear
father's. Gregory will appreciate that, I think. But no; I shall always
be sorry that she didn't marry Franz Lippheim."

CHAPTER XVI

The Jardines did not come back to London till October. They had spent a
month in Scotland and a month in Italy and two weeks in France,
returning by way of Paris, where Gregory passed through the ordeal of
the Belots. He saw Madame Belot clasp Karen to her breast and the long
line of little Belots swarm up to be kissed successively, Monsieur
Belot, a short, stout, ruddy man, with outstanding grey hair and a
square grey beard, watching the scene benignantly, his palette on his
thumb. Madame Belot didn't any longer suggest Chantefoy's picture; she
suggested nothing artistic and everything domestic. From a wistful
Burne-Jones type with large eyes and a drooping mouth she had relapsed
to her plebeian origins and now, fat, kind, cheerful, she was nothing
but wife and mother, with a figure like a sack and cheap tortoiseshell
combs stuck, apparently at random, in the untidy _bandeaux_ of her hair.

Following Karen and Monsieur Belot about the big studio, among canvases
on easels and canvases leaned against the walls, Gregory felt himself
rather bewildered, and not quite as he had expected to be bewildered.
They might be impossible, Madame Belot of course was impossible; but
they were not vulgar and they were extremely intelligent, and their
intelligence displayed itself in realms to which he was almost
disconcertingly a stranger. Even Madame Belot, holding a stalwart,
brown-fisted baby on her arm, could comment on her husband's work with a
discerning aptness of phrase which made his own appreciation seem very
trite and tentative. He might be putting up with the Belots, but it was
quite as likely, he perceived, that they might be putting up with him.
He realized, in this world of the Belots, the significance, the
laboriousness, the high level of vitality, and he realized that to the
Belots his own world was probably seen as a dull, half useful, half
obstructive fact, significant mainly for its purchasing power. For its
power of appreciation they had no respect at all. "_Il radote, ma
cherie_," Monsieur Belot said to Karen of a