Miss Scrotton, Karen felt, while she made these preparatory statements, had eyed her in a somewhat gaunt manner; but she was accustomed to a gaunt manner from Miss Scrotton, and Miss Scrotton's drawing-room, certainly, was not as nice as Gregory's. Karen had not cared at all for its quality of earnest effort. Miss Scrotton, not many years ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the æsthetics of South Kensington. Karen did not feel that Gregory's drawing-room required apologies and Tante had been so mild and sweet, if also a little absent, that she trusted her to show leniency. She had, as yet, to-day, said nothing about the Bouddha or the background on which she found him. She talked to Gregory, while they waited for tea, asking him a great many questions, not seeming, always, to listen to his answers. "Ah, yes. Well done. Bravo," she said at intervals, as he told her about their wedding-trip and how he and Karen had enjoyed this or that. When Barker brought in the tea-tray and set it on a little table before Karen, she took up one of the cups--they were of an old English ware with a wreath of roses inside and lines of half obliterated gilt--and said--it was her first comment on the background--"_Tiens, c'est joli._ Is this one of your presents, Karen?" Karen told her that the tea-set was not a present; it had belonged to a great-grandmother of Gregory's. Madame von Marwitz continued to examine the cup and, as she set it down among the others, with the deliberate nicety of gesture that gave at once power and grace to her slightest movement, she said: "You were fortunate in your great-grandmother, Mr. Jardine." Her voice, her glance, her gestures, were already affecting Gregory unpleasantly. There was in them a quality of considered control, as though she recognised difficulty and were gently and warily evading it. Seated on his chintz sofa in the bright, burnished room, all in white, with a white lace head-dress, half veil, half turban, binding her hair and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen. To her husband's eye, newly aware of æsthetic discriminations, Karen seemed to interpret and justify her surroundings, to show their commonplace as part of their charm and to make the Bouddha and Madame von Marwitz herself, in all their portentous distinction, look like incidental ornaments.