It was very obvious to him that she found the sober, conventional people who were his friends very flavourless, especially when she came to them from Fafner's cave. He had always taken his friends for granted, as part of the pleasant routine of life, like one's breakfast or one's bath; but now, seeing them anew, through Karen's eyes, he was inclined more and more to believe that they weren't as dull as she found them. She lacked the fundamental experience of a rooted life. She was yet to learn--he hoped, he determined, she should learn--that a social system of harmonious people, significant perhaps more because of their places in the system than as units, and bound together by a highly evolved code, was, when all was said and done, a more satisfactory place in which to spend one's life than an anarchic world of erratic, undisciplined, independent individuals. Karen, however, did not understand the use of the system and she saw its members with eyes as clear to their defects as were Gregory's to the defects of Madame von Marwitz. Gregory's friends belonged to that orderly and efficient section of the nation that moves contentedly between the simply professional and the ultra fashionable. They had a great many duties, social, political and domestic, which they took with a pleasant seriousness, and a great many pleasures which they took seriously, too. They "came up" from the quiet responsibilities of the country-side for a season and "did" the concerts and exhibitions as they "did" their shopping and their balls. Art, to most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild, derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom one wouldn't mind one's sons and daughters marrying; and they didn't conceive of artists as entering that category.