"Only that she seemed depressed, very much depressed. I thought, I hoped that you and she were talking so nicely, so happily."
There was another little pause and then Gregory said: "She rather depressed me, I think."
"Depressed you? But how, Gregory?"
He must indeed be very careful. It was far too late, now, for simple frankness; simple frankness had, perhaps, from the beginning been impossible and in that fact lay the insecurity of his position, and the immense advantage of Madame von Marwitz's. And as he paused and sought his words it was as if, in the image of the Bouddha, looking down upon him and Karen, Madame von Marwitz were with them now, a tranquil and ironic witness of his discomfiture. "Well," he said, "she made me feel that I had only a very dingy sort of life to offer you and that my friends were all very tiresome—borné was the word she used. That did rather—well—dash my spirits."
Standing there within his arm, of her face, seen from above, only the brow, the eyelashes, the cheek visible, she was very still for a long moment. Then, gently, she said—and in the gentleness he felt that she put aside the too natural suspicion that he was complaining of Tante behind her back: "She doesn't realise that I don't care at all about people. And they are rather bornés, aren't they, Gregory."
"I don't find them so," said Gregory, reasonably. "They aren't geniuses, of course, or acrobats, or saints, or anything of that sort; but they seem to me, on the whole, a very nice lot of people."
"Very nice indeed, Gregory. But I don't think it is saints and geniuses that Tante misses here; she misses minds that are able to recognise genius." Her quick ear had caught the involuntary irony of his quotation.
"Ah, but, dear, you mustn't expect to find the average nice person able to pay homage at a dinner-party. There is a time and a place for everything, isn't there."
"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.