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 chèrie_," Monsieur Belot said to Karen of a famous person, now, after years of neglect, loudly acclaimed in London at the moment when, by fellow-artists, he was seen as defunct. "He no longer lives; he repeats himself. Ah, it is the peril," Monsieur Belot turned kindly including eyes on Gregory; "if one is not born anew, continually, the artist dies; it becomes machinery." Karen was at home among the Belot's standards. She talked with Belot, of processes, methods, technique, the talk of artists, not artistic talk. "_Et la grande Tante?_" he asked her, when they were all seated at a nondescript meal about a long table of uncovered oak, the children unpleasantly clamorous and Madame Belot dispensing, from one end, strange, tepid tea, but excellent chocolate, while Belot, from the other, sent round plates of fruit and buttered rolls. Karen was laughing with _la petite Margot_, whom she held in her lap. "She is coming," said Karen. "At last. In three weeks I shall see her now. She has been spending the summer in America, you know; among the mountains." One of the boys inquired whether there were not danger to Madame von Marwitz from _les Peaux-Rouges_, and when he was reassured and the question of buffaloes disposed of Madame Belot was able to make herself heard, informing Karen that the Lippheims, Franz, Frau Lippheim, Lotta, Minna and Elizabeth, were to give three concerts in Paris that winter. "You have not seen them yet, Karen?" she asked. "They have not yet met Monsieur Jardine?" And when Karen said no, not yet; but that she had heard from Frau Lippheim that they were to come to London after Paris, Madame Belot suggested that the young couple might have time now to travel up to Leipsig and take the Lippheims by surprise. "_Voilà de braves gens et de bons artistes_," said Monsieur Belot.