"Impressionist? No; Belot would not rank himself among the impressionists. And he would not like to hear his work called clever; I warn you of that. He has a horror of cleverness. It was not a clever picture, but sober, strange, beautiful. Well, I know Belot and his wife quite intimately. They are great friends of the Lippheims, too, and call themselves the Franco-Prussian alliance. Madame Belot is a dear little woman. You must have often seen his pictures of her and the children. He has numbers of children and adores them. _La petite_ Margot is my special pet and she always sends me a little present on my birthday. Madame Belot was once his model," Karen added, "and is quite _du peuple_, and I believe that some of his friends were sorry that he married her; but she makes him very happy. That beautiful nude in the Luxembourg by Chantefoy is of her--long before she married, of course. She does not sit for the _ensemble_ now, and indeed I fear it has lost all its beauty, for she is very fat. It would be nice to go to Paris on our wedding-tour and see the Belots," said Karen. Gregory made an evasive answer. He reflected that once he had married her it would probably be easy to detach Karen from these most undesirable associates. He hoped that she would take to Betty. Betty would be an excellent antidote. "And you think your sister-in-law will want me?" said Karen, when he brought her from the Belots back to Betty. "She doesn't know me." "She must begin to know you as soon as possible. You will have Mrs. Forrester at hand, you see, if my family should oppress you too much. Barring Betty, who hardly counts as one of them, they aren't interesting, I warn you." "I may oppress them," said Karen, with the shrewdness that often surprised him. "Who will they take refuge with?" "Oh, they have all London to fall back upon. They do nothing when they're up but go out. That's my plan; that they should leave you a good deal when they go out, and leave you to me." "That will be nice," said Karen. "But Mrs. Forrester, you know," she went on, "is not exactly an intimate of mine that I could fall back upon. I am, in her eyes, only a little appendage of Tante's." "Ah, but you have ceased, now, to be an appendage of Tante's. And Mrs. Forrester is an intimate, an old one, of mine." "She'll take me in as your appendage," Karen smiled. "Not at all. It's you, now, who are the person to whom the appendage belongs. I'm your appendage. That quite alters the situation. You will have to stand in the foreground and do all the conventional things."