The emotion with which Gregory heard her speak these words, deliberately, if in a hardened and controlled voice, expressed itself, as emotion did with him, in a slight, fixed smile. He could not pause to examine Karen's possible justice; that she should speak so, to him, was the overpowering fact. "I imagined that I behaved with courtesy," he said. "Yes, you were courteous," Karen replied. "You made me think of a painted piece of wood while he was like a growing tree." "Your simile is certainly very mortifying," said Gregory, continuing to smile. But he was not mortified. He was cruelly hurt. "I do not wish to mortify you. I have not mortified you, because you think yourself above it all. But I would like, if I could," said Karen, "to make you see the truth. I would like to make you see that in behaving as you have you show yourself not above it but below it." "And I would like to make you see the truth, too," Gregory returned, in the voice of his bitter hurt; "and I ask you, if your prejudice will permit of it, to make some allowance for my feeling when I found you surrounded by--this rabble." "Rabble? My guardian's friends?" Karen had grown ashen. "I hope they're not; but I'm not concerned with her friends; I'm concerned with you. She can take people in, on the artistic plane, whom it's not fit that you should meet. That horrible actress,--I wouldn't have her come within sight of you if I could help it. Your guardian knows my feeling about the parts she plays. She had no business to ask her here. As for Herr Lippheim, I have no doubt that he is an admirable person in his own walk of life, but he is a preposterous person, and it is preposterous that your guardian should have thought of him as a possible husband for you." Gregory imagined that he was speaking carefully and choosing his words, but he was aware that his anger coloured his voice. He had also been aware, some little time before, in a lower layer of consciousness, of the stir and rustle of steps and dresses in the passage outside--Madame von Marwitz conducting Eleanor Scrotton to the door. And now--had she actually been listening, or did his words coincide with the sudden opening of the door?--Madame von Marwitz herself appeared upon the threshold. Her face made the catastrophe all too evident. She had heard him. She had, he felt convinced, crept quietly back and stood to listen before entering. His memory reconstructed the long pause between the departing rustle and this apparition. Madame von Marwitz's face had its curious look of smothered heat. The whites of her eyes were suffused though her cheeks were pale. "I must apologise," she said. "I overheard you as I entered, Mr. Jardine, and what I heard I cannot ignore. What is it that you say to Karen? What is it that you say of the man I thought of as a possible husband for her?" She advanced into the room and laying her arm round Karen's shoulders she stood confronting him.