He felt the beloved creature to be at once inappropriate and inevitable. With all that was deepest and most instinctive in him her nature chimed; the surfaces, the prejudices, the principles of his life she contradicted and confused. She talked to him a great deal, in answer to his questions, about her past life, and what she told him was often disconcerting. The protective tenderness he had felt for her from the first was troubled by his realisation of the books she had placidly read--under Tante's guidance--the people whose queer relationships she placidly took for granted as in no need of condonation. When he intimated to her that he disapproved of such contacts and customs, she looked at him, puzzled, and then said, with an air of kindly maturity at once touching and vexatious: "But that is the morality of the Philistines." It was, of course, and Gregory considered it the very best of moralities; but remembering her mother he could not emphasize to her how decisively he held by it. It was in no vulgar or vicious world that her life, as the child of the unconventional sculptor, as the _protégée_ of the great pianist, had been passed. But it was a world without religion, without institutions, without order. Gregory, though his was not the religious temperament, had his reasoned beliefs in the spiritual realities expressed in institutions and he had his inherited instincts of reverence for the rituals that embodied the spiritual life of his race. He was impatient with dissent and with facile scepticisms. He did not expect a woman to have reasoned beliefs, nor did he ask a credulous, uncritical orthodoxy; but he did want the Christian colouring of mind, the Christian outlook; he did want his wife to be a woman who would teach her children to say their prayers at her knees. It was with something like dismay that he gathered from Karen that her conception of life was as untouched by any consciousness of creed as that of a noble young pagan. He was angry at himself for feeling it and when he found himself applying his rules and measures to her; for what had it been from the first but her spiritual strength and loveliness that had drawn him to her? Yet he longed to make her accept the implications of the formulated faiths that she lived by. "Oh, no, you're not," he said to her when, turning unperturbed eyes upon him, she assured him: "Oh yes, I am quite, quite a pagan." "I don't think you know what you mean when you say you're a pagan," Gregory continued. "But, yes," she returned. "I have no creed. I was brought up to think of beauty as the only religion. That is my guardian's religion. It is the religion, she says, of all free souls. And my father thought so, too." It was again the assurance of a wisdom, not her own, yet possessed by her, a wisdom that she did not dream of anybody challenging. Was it not Tante's? "Well," he remarked, "beauty is a large term. Perhaps it includes more than you think."