y. "I
should like to be in Paris with you again, Tante," she said, "but not to
go to that play. I agreed not to go to it when Gregory and I were there.
I should not care to go when he so much dislikes it." Her eyes met her
guardian's while she spoke. They were gentle and non-committal; they
gave Gregory no cause for triumph, nor Tante for humiliation; they
expressed merely her own recognition of a bond.

Madame von Marwitz rose to the occasion, but--oh, it was there, the soft
pressure, never more present to Gregory's consciousness than when it
seemed most absent--she rose too emphatically, as if to a need. Her eyes
mused on the girl's face, tenderly brooded and understood. And Karen's
voice and look had asked her not to understand.

"Ah, that is right; that is a wife," she murmured. "Though, believe me,
_cherie_, I did not know that I was so transgressing." And turning her
glance on Gregory, "_Je vous fais mes compliments_," she added.

Karen said that he must bring his cigar into the drawing-room, for Tante
would smoke her cigarette with him, and there, until bedtime, things
went as well as they had at dinner--or as badly; for part of their
badness, Gregory more and more resentfully became aware, was that they
were made to seem to go well, from her side, not from his.

She had a genius, veritably uncanny for, with all sweetness and
hesitancy, revealing him as stiff and unresponsively complacent. It was
impossible for him to talk freely with a person uncongenial to him of
the things he felt deeply; and, pertinaciously, over her coffee and
cigarettes, it was the deep things that she softly wooed him to share
with her.

He might be stiff and stupid, but he flattered himself that he wasn't
once short or sharp--as he would have been over and over again with any
other woman who so bothered him. And he was sincerely unaware that his
courtesy, in its dry evasiveness, was more repudiating than rudeness.

When Karen went with her guardian to her room that night, the little
room that looked so choked and overcrowded with the great woman's
multiplied necessities, Madame von Marwitz, sinking on the sofa, drew
her to her and looked closely at her, with an intentness almost tragic,
tenderly smoothing back her hair.

Karen looked back at her very firmly.

"Tell me, my child," Madame von Marwitz said, as if, suddenly, taking
refuge in the inessential from the pressure of her own thoughts, "how
did you find our Tallie? I have n