"It was not that I meant, Gregory, or that Tante meant. There is always a place for intelligence. It wasn't an interesting dinner, you must have felt that as well as I, not the sort of dinner Tante would naturally expect. They were only interested in their own things, weren't they? And quite apart from homage, there is such a thing as realisation. Mr. Fraser talked to Tante--I saw it all quite well--as he might have talked to the next dowager he met. Tante isn't used to being talked to as if she were _toute comme une autre_; she isn't _toute comme une autre_." "But one must pretend to be, at a dinner-party," Gregory returned. To have to defend his friends when it was Tante who stood so lamentably in need of defence had begun to work upon his nerves. "And some dowagers are as interesting as anybody. There are all sorts of ways of being interesting. Dowagers are as intelligent as geniuses sometimes." His lightness was not unprovocative. "It isn't funny, Gregory, to see Tante put into a false position." "But, my dear, we did the best we could for her." "I know that we did; and our best isn't good enough for her. That is all that I ask you to realise," said Karen. She was angry, and from the depths of his anger against Madame von Marwitz Gregory felt a little gush of anger against Karen rise. "You are telling me what she told me," he said; "that my best isn't good enough for her. You may say it and think it, of course; but it's a thing that Madame von Marwitz has no right to say." Karen moved away from his arm. Something more than the old girlish sternness was in the look with which she faced him, though that flashed at him, a shield rather than a weapon. He recognised the hidden pain and astonishment and his anger faded in tenderness. How could she but resent and repell any hint that belittled Tante's claims and justifications? how could she hear but with dismay the half threat of his last words, the intimation that from her he would accept what he would not accept from Tante? The sudden compunction of his comprehension almost brought the tears to his eyes. Karen saw that his resistance melted and the sternness fell from her look. "But Gregory," she said, her voice a little trembling, "Tante did not say that. Please don't make mistakes. It is so dreadful to misunderstand; nothing frightens me so much. I say it; that our best isn't good enough, and I am thinking of Tante; only of Tante; but she--too sweetly and mistakenly--was thinking of me. Tante doesn't care, for herself, about our world; why should she? And she is mistaken to care about it for me; because it makes no difference, none at all, to me, if it is _borné_. All that I care about, you know that, Gregory, is you and Tante." Gregory had his arms around her. "Do forgive me, darling," he said. "But was I horrid?" Karen asked. "No. It was I who was stupid," he said. "Do you know, I believe we were almost quarrelling, Karen."