ey are rather _bornes_, aren't they, Gregory."

"I don't find them so," said Gregory, reasonably. "They aren't geniuses,
of course, or acrobats, or saints, or anything of that sort; but they
seem to me, on the whole, a very nice lot of people."

"Very nice indeed, Gregory. But I don't think it is saints and geniuses
that Tante misses here; she misses minds that are able to recognise
genius." Her quick ear had caught the involuntary irony of his
quotation.

"Ah, but, dear, you mustn't expect to find the average nice person able
to pay homage at a dinner-party. There is a time and a place for
everything, isn't there."

"It was not that I meant, Gregory, or that Tante meant. There is always
a place for intelligence. It wasn't an interesting dinner, you must have
felt that as well as I, not the sort of dinner Tante would naturally
expect. They were only interested in their own things, weren't they? And
quite apart from homage, there is such a thing as realisation. Mr.
Fraser talked to Tante--I saw it all quite well--as he might have talked
to the next dowager he met. Tante isn't used to being talked to as if
she were _toute comme une autre_; she isn't _toute comme une autre_."

"But one must pretend to be, at a dinner-party," Gregory returned. To
have to defend his friends when it was Tante who stood so lamentably in
need of defence had begun to work upon his nerves. "And some dowagers
are as interesting as anybody. There are all sorts of ways of being
interesting. Dowagers are as intelligent as geniuses sometimes." His
lightness was not unprovocative.

"It isn't funny, Gregory, to see Tante put into a false position."

"But, my dear, we did the best we could for her."

"I know that we did; and our best isn't good enough for her. That is all
that I ask you to realise," said Karen.

She was angry, and from the depths of his anger against Madame von
Marwitz Gregory felt a little gush of anger against Karen rise. "You are
telling me what she told me," he said; "that my best isn't good enough
for her. You may say it and think it, of course; but it's a thing that
Madame von Marwitz has no right to say."

Karen moved away from his arm. Something more than the old girlish
sternness was in the look with which she faced him, though that flashed
at him, a shield rather than a weapon. He recognised the hidden pain and
astonishment and his anger faded in tenderness. How could she but resent
and repell any hint that belittled