ithout, by the same
gesture, upsetting himself as well.

CHAPTER XVIII

The unspoken, for the first month or so of Madame von Marwitz's return,
remained accepted. There were no declarations and no definitions, and
Gregory's immunity was founded on something more reassuring than the
mere fact that Madame von Marwitz frequently went away. When she was in
London, it became apparent, he was to see very little of her, and as
long as they did not meet too often he felt that he was, in so far,
safe. Madame von Marwitz was tremendously busy. She paid many week-end
visits; she sat to Belot--who had come to London to paint it--for a
great portrait; she was to give three concerts in London during the
winter and two in Paris, and it was natural enough that she had not
found time to come to the flat again.

But although Gregory saw so little of her, although she was not in his
life as a presence, he felt her in it as an influence. She might have
been the invisible but portentous comet moving majestically on the far
confines of his solar system; and one accounted for oddities of
behaviour in the visible planets by inferring that the comet was the
cause of them. If he saw very little of Madame von Marwitz, he saw, too,
much less of his twin planet, Karen. It was not so much that Karen's
course was odd as that it was altered. If Madame von Marwitz sent for
her very intermittently, she had, all the same, in all her life, as she
told Gregory, never seen so much of her guardian. She frankly displayed
to him the radiance of her state, wishing him, as he guessed, to share
to the full every detail of her privileges, and to realise to the full
her gratitude to him for proving so conclusively to Tante that there was
none of the selfishness of love in him. Tante must see that he made it
very easy for her to go to her, and Gregory derived his own secret
satisfaction from the thought that Karen's radiance was the best of
retorts to Madame von Marwitz's veiled intimations. As long as she made
Karen happy and let him alone, he seemed to himself to tell her, he
would get on very well; and he suspected that her clutch of Karen would
soon loosen when she found it unchallenged. In the meantime there was
not much satisfaction for him elsewhere. Karen's altered course left him
often lonely. Not only had the readings of Political Economy, begun with
so much ardour in in their spare evenings, almost lapsed for lack of
consecutiveness; but he fre