securely with reality.

The look of London at this sunny hour of late afternoon and at this
autumnal season matched his consciousness of a tranquil metamorphosis.
Idle still and empty of its more vivid significance, one yet felt in it
the soft stirrings of a re-entering tide of life. Cabs passed, piled
with brightly badged luggage; the drowsily reminiscent shop-windows
showed here and there an adventurous forecast, and a house or two, among
the rows of dumb, sleeping faces, opened wide eyes at the leisurely
streets. The pale, high pinks of the sky drooped and melted into the
greys and whites and buffs below, and blurred the heavy greens of the
park with falling veils of rose. The scene seemed drawn in flat delicate
tones of pastel.

Karen sat beside him in the cab and, while she gazed before her, she had
slipped her hand into his. She had preserved much of the look of the
unmarried Karen in her dress. The difference was in the achievement of
an ideal rather than in a change. The line of her little grey travelling
hat above her brows was still unusual; with her grey gloves and long
grey silken coat she had an air, cool, competent, prepared for any
emergency of travel. She would have looked equally appropriate dozing
under the hooded light in a railway carriage, taking her place at a
_table d'hote_ in a provincial French town, or walking in the wind and
sun along a foreign _plage_. After looking at the London to which he
brought her, Gregory looked at her. Marriage had worked none of its even
superficial disenchantments in him. After three months of intimacy,
Karen still constantly arrested him with a sense of the undiscovered,
the unforeseen. What it consisted in he could not have defined; she was
simple, even guileless, still; she had no reticences; yet she seemed to
express so much of which she was unaware that he felt himself to be
continually making her acquaintance. That quiet slipping now of her hand
into his, while her gaze maintained its calm detachment, the charm of
her mingled tenderness and independence, had its vague sting for
Gregory. She accepted him and whatever he might mean with something of
the happy matter-of-fact with which she accepted all that was hers. She
loved him with a completeness and selflessness that had made the world
suddenly close round him with gentle arms; but Gregory often wondered if
she were in love with him. Rapture, restlessness and fear all seemed
alien to her, and to turn from t