Karen stooped to help unroll as if from a mummy, the multitudinous bandages of fine paper; the passive bronze visage of the idol was revealed, and by degrees, the seated figure, ludicrously prone. They moved the temple to the end of the room, where two pictures were taken down and a sofa pushed away to make room for it; the Bouddha was hoisted, with difficulty, on to its lotus, and there, dark on its glimmering background of gold, it sat and ambiguously blessed them. Karen had worked with them neatly and expeditionary, and in silence, and Gregory, glancing at her face from time to time, felt sure that she was adjusting herself to a mingled bewilderment and disappointment; to the wish also, that she might be worthy of her new possession. She stood now before the Bouddha and gazed at it. They had turned up the electric lights, but the curtains were not drawn and the scent, and light, and vague, diffused roar of London at this evening hour came in at the open windows. Barker, the porter and the housemaid were carrying away the litter of paper and straw. The bright cheerful room with its lovable banality and familiar comfort smiled its welcome; and there, in the midst, the majestic and alien presence sat, overpowering, and grotesque in its inappropriateness. Karen now turned her eyes on her husband and slightly smiled. "It is very wonderful," she said, "but I feel as if Tante expected a great deal of me in giving it to me--a great deal more than is in me. It ought to be a very deep and mystic person to have that Bouddha." "Yes, it's a wonderful thing; quite awesome. Perhaps she expects you to become deep and mystic," said Gregory. "Please don't." "There is no danger of that," said Karen. "Of course it is the beauty of it and the strangeness, that made Tante care for it. It is the sort of thing she would love to have herself." "Where on earth is he to go?" Gregory surmised. "Yes, he might look well in that big music-room at Les Solitudes, or in some vast hall where he would be more of an episode and less of a white elephant. I hardly think he'll fit anywhere into the passage," he ventured. Karen had been looking from him to the Bouddha. "But Gregory, of course he must stay here," she said, "in the room we live in. Tante, I am sure, meant that." Her voice had a tremor. "I am sure it would hurt her dreadfully if we put him out of the way." Barker was now gone and Gregory put his arm around her. "But it makes all the room wrong, doesn't it? It will make us all wrong--that's what I rather feel. We aren't _à la hauteur_." He remembered, after speaking them, that these were the words he had used of his one colloquy with Madame von Marwitz. "I don't think," said Karen after a moment, "that you are quite kind."