Karen was somewhat disturbed by this suggestion. "I am sure that she, too, would like going very fast. I hope you will not tempt her." "Oh, but I'm afraid I do," Mr. Drew confessed. "What is the good of a motor unless you go too fast in it? A motor has no meaning unless it's a method of intoxication." Karen received the remark with inattention. She looked out over the sea, preoccupied with the thought of Tante's recklessness. "I do not think that going so fast can be good for her music," she said. "Oh, but yes," Mr. Drew assured her, "nothing is so good for art as intoxication. Art is rooted in intoxication. It's all a question of how to get it." "But with motoring you only get torpor, you say," Karen remarked. And, going on with her own train of thoughts, "So much shaking will be bad, perhaps, for the muscles. And there is always the danger to consider. I hope she will not go too fast. She is too important a person to take risks." There was no suggestion that Mr. Drew should not take them. "Don't you like going fast? Don't you like taking risks? Don't you like intoxication?" Mr. Drew inquired, and his eyes travelled from the blue bows on her breast to the blue bows on her elbow-sleeves. "I have never been intoxicated," said Karen calmly--she was quite accustomed to all manner of fantastic visitors in the temple--"I do not think that I should like it. And I prefer walking to any kind of driving. No, I do not like risks." "Ah yes, I can see that. Yes, that's altogether in character," said Mr. Drew. He turned, then, as Madame von Marwitz came in, but remained standing in the window while Karen went forward to greet her guardian. Madame von Marwitz, as she took her hands and kissed her, looked over Karen's shoulder at Mr. Drew. "Why did you not come to my room, _chérie_?" she asked. "I had hoped to see you alone before I came down." "I thought you might be tired and perhaps resting, Tante," said Karen, who had, indeed, paused before her guardian's door on her way down, and then passed on with a certain sense of shyness; she did not want in any way to force herself on Tante. "But you know that I like to have you with me when I am tired," Madame von Marwitz returned. "And I am not tired: no: it has been a day of wings." She walked down the long room, her arm around Karen, with a buoyancy of tread and demeanour in which, however, Karen, so deep an adept in her moods discovered excitement rather than gaiety. "Has it been a good day for my child?" she questioned; "a happy, peaceful day? Yes? You have been much with Tallie? I told Tallie that she must postpone the trip to Helston so that she might stay with you." Tante on the sofa encircled her and looked brightly at her; yet her eye swerved to the window where Mr. Drew remained looking at a paper. Karen said that she had been gardening and walking. "Good; bravo!" said Tante, and then, in a lower voice: "No news, I suppose?"