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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Forsyte Saga, Complete, by John
+Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
+no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use
+it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Forsyte Saga, Awakening and To Let
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2596]
+Last Updated: February 22, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AWAKENING AND TO LET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
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+FORSYTE SAGA AWAKENING AND TO LET
+
+
+By John Galsworthy
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+TO LET
+
+PART I
+
+I.—ENCOUNTER
+
+II.—FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
+
+III.—AT ROBIN HILL
+
+IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM
+
+V.—THE NATIVE HEATH
+
+VI.—JON
+
+VII.—FLEUR
+
+VIII.—IDYLL ON GRASS
+
+IX. GOYA
+
+X.—TRIO
+
+XI.—DUET
+
+XII.—CAPRICE
+
+
+PART II
+
+I.—MOTHER AND SON
+
+II.—FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
+
+III.—MEETINGS
+
+IV.—IN GREEN STREET
+
+V.—PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
+
+VI.—SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE
+
+VII.—JUNE TAKES A HAND
+
+VIII.—THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
+
+IX.—THE FAT IN THE FIRE
+
+X.—DECISION
+
+XI.—TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
+
+
+PART III
+
+I.—OLD JOLYON WALKS
+
+II.—CONFESSION
+
+III.—IRENE
+
+IV.—SOAMES COGITATES
+
+V.—THE FIXED IDEA
+
+VI.—DESPERATE
+
+VII.—EMBASSY
+
+VIII.—THE DARK TUNE
+
+IX.—UNDER THE OAK-TREE
+
+X.—FLEUR'S WEDDING
+
+XI.—THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+THE FORSYTE SAGA—VOLUME III. By John Galsworthy
+
+
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+
+
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the
+July sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway turned;
+and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-linen-suited.
+His hair was shining, and his eyes, from beneath a frown, for he was
+considering how to go downstairs, this last of innumerable times, before
+the car brought his father and mother home. Four at a time, and five
+at the bottom? Stale! Down the banisters? But in which fashion? On his
+face, feet foremost? Very stale. On his stomach, sideways? Paltry! On
+his back, with his arms stretched down on both sides? Forbidden! Or on
+his face, head foremost, in a manner unknown as yet to any but himself?
+Such was the cause of the frown on the illuminated face of little
+Jon....
+
+In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to
+simplify the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of little
+Jon, or they would have claimed him for a disciple. But one can be too
+simple in this life, for his real name was Jolyon, and his living father
+and dead half-brother had usurped of old the other shortenings, Jo and
+Jolly. As a fact little Jon had done his best to conform to convention
+and spell himself first Jhon, then John; not till his father had
+explained the sheer necessity, had he spelled his name Jon.
+
+Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart by the
+groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse “Da,” who wore
+the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins in that
+private life lived at odd moments even by domestic servants. His mother
+had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling delicious,
+smoothing his forehead just before he fell asleep, and sometimes docking
+his hair, of a golden brown colour. When he cut his head open against
+the nursery fender she was there to be bled over; and when he had
+nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle his head against her neck.
+She was precious but remote, because “Da” was so near, and there is
+hardly room for more than one woman at a time in a man's heart. With his
+father, too, of course, he had special bonds of union; for little
+Jon also meant to be a painter when he grew up—with the one small
+difference, that his father painted pictures, and little Jon intended to
+paint ceilings and walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders,
+in a dirty-white apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash. His father also
+took him riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because
+it was so-coloured.
+
+Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was rather
+curly and large. He had never heard his father or his mother speak in an
+angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody else; the groom,
+Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other servants, even “Da,” who alone
+restrained him in his courses, had special voices when they talked to
+him. He was therefore of opinion that the world was a place of perfect
+and perpetual gentility and freedom.
+
+A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just
+over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing for
+the Liberal revival of 1906. Coercion was unpopular, parents had exalted
+notions of giving their offspring a good time. They spoiled their rods,
+spared their children, and anticipated the results with enthusiasm. In
+choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had
+already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight,
+whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely.
+What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little
+prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon
+could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played
+second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his
+mother's heart he knew not yet. As for “Auntie” June, his half-sister
+(but so old that she had grown out of the relationship) she loved him,
+of course, but was too sudden. His devoted “Da,” too, had a Spartan
+touch. His bath was cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged
+to be sorry for himself. As to the vexed question of his education,
+little Jon shared the theory of those who considered that children
+should not be forced. He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came for two
+hours every morning to teach him her language, together with history,
+geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave him
+disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune, never
+making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that he
+remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his
+father he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a
+highly educated little boy. Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed
+in his mouth without spoiling it, though “Da” sometimes said that other
+children would do him a “world of good.”
+
+It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held
+him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which she did
+not approve. This first interference with the free individualism of a
+Forsyte drove him almost frantic. There was something appalling in the
+utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to whether
+it would ever come to an end. Suppose she never let him get up any more!
+He suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds. Worse
+than anything was his perception that “Da” had taken all that time
+to realise the agony of fear he was enduring. Thus, dreadfully, was
+revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.
+
+When he was let up he remained convinced that “Da” had done a dreadful
+thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had been
+compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say: “Mum,
+don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again.”
+
+His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
+hair—“couleur de feuille morte,” as little Jon had not yet learned to
+call it—had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown velvet
+tunic, and answered:
+
+“No, darling, I won't.”
+
+She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
+especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
+happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his
+father:
+
+“Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's so devoted to him”;
+and his father's answer:
+
+“Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it feels like
+to be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it for a minute.”
+
+Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon
+was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed where
+he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
+
+Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence. Nothing
+much had been revealed to him after that, till one day, having gone down
+to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from the cow, after Garratt
+had finished milking, he had seen Clover's calf, dead. Inconsolable,
+and followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought “Da”; but suddenly
+aware that she was not the person he wanted, had rushed away to find his
+father, and had run into the arms of his mother.
+
+“Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!”
+
+His mother's clasp, and her:
+
+“Yes, darling, there, there!” had stayed his sobbing. But if Clover's
+calf could die, anything could—not only bees, flies, beetles and
+chickens—and look soft like that! This was appalling—and soon forgotten!
+
+The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant experience,
+which his mother had understood much better than “Da”; and nothing of
+vital importance had happened after that till the year turned; when,
+following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease composed
+of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine oranges.
+It was then that the world had flowered. To “Auntie” June he owed that
+flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than she came rushing
+down from London, bringing with her the books which had nurtured her
+own Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of 1869. Aged, and of many
+colours, they were stored with the most formidable happenings. Of
+these she read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to himself;
+whereupon she whisked back to London and left them with him in a heap.
+Those books cooked his fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but
+midshipmen and dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses,
+sharks, battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
+extravagant delights. The moment he was suffered to get up, he rigged
+his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath across green
+seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of its mahogany
+drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking tumbler screwed to
+his eye, in search of rescuing sails. He made a daily raft out of the
+towel stand, the tea tray, and his pillows. He saved the juice from his
+French plums, bottled it in an empty medicine bottle, and provisioned
+the raft with the rum that it became; also with pemmican made out of
+little saved-up bits of chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with
+lime juice against scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a
+little economised juice. He made a North Pole one morning from the whole
+of his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark
+canoe (in private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a
+polar bear fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up
+in “Da's” nightgown. After that, his father, seeking to steady his
+imagination, brought him Ivanhoe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur, and
+Tom Brown's Schooldays. He read the first, and for three days built,
+defended and stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every part in the
+piece except those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing cries of: “En
+avant, de Bracy!” and similar utterances. After reading the book about
+King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir Lamorac de Galis, because,
+though there was very little about him, he preferred his name to that of
+any other knight; and he rode his old rocking-horse to death, armed
+with a long bamboo. Bevis he found tame; besides, it required woods and
+animals, of which he had none in his nursery, except his two cats, Fitz
+and Puck Forsyte, who permitted no liberties. For Tom Brown he was as
+yet too young. There was relief in the house when, after the fourth
+week, he was permitted to go down and out.
+
+The month being March the trees were exceptionally like the masts of
+ships, and for little Jon that was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard
+on his knees, suits, and the patience of “Da,” who had the washing and
+reparation of his clothes. Every morning the moment his breakfast was
+over, he could be viewed by his mother and father, whose windows looked
+out that way, coming from the study, crossing the terrace, climbing the
+old oak tree, his face resolute and his hair bright. He began the day
+thus because there was not time to go far afield before his lessons. The
+old tree's variety never staled; it had mainmast, foremast, top-gallant
+mast, and he could always come down by the halyards—or ropes of the
+swing. After his lessons, completed by eleven, he would go to
+the kitchen for a thin piece of cheese, a biscuit and two French
+plums—provision enough for a jolly-boat at least—and eat it in some
+imaginative way; then, armed to the teeth with gun, pistols, and sword,
+he would begin the serious climbing of the morning, encountering by the
+way innumerable slavers, Indians, pirates, leopards, and bears. He was
+seldom seen at that hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like
+Dick Needham) amid the rapid explosion of copper caps. And many were the
+gardeners he brought down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun.
+He lived a life of the most violent action.
+
+“Jon,” said his father to his mother, under the oak tree, “is terrible.
+I'm afraid he's going to turn out a sailor, or something hopeless. Do
+you see any sign of his appreciating beauty?”
+
+“Not the faintest.”
+
+“Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines! I can bear
+anything but that. But I wish he'd take more interest in Nature.”
+
+“He's imaginative, Jolyon.”
+
+“Yes, in a sanguinary way. Does he love anyone just now?”
+
+“No; only everyone. There never was anyone born more loving or more
+lovable than Jon.”
+
+“Being your boy, Irene.”
+
+At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them, brought
+them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged, thick, in his
+small gizzard. Loving, lovable, imaginative, sanguinary!
+
+The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
+which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always memorable
+for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons, and ginger
+beer.
+
+Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he stood
+in the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several important
+things had happened.
+
+“Da,” worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious
+instinct which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the
+very day after his birthday in floods of tears “to be married”—of
+all things—“to a man.” Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was
+inconsolable for an afternoon. It ought not to have been kept from him!
+Two large boxes of soldiers and some artillery, together with The Young
+Buglers, which had been among his birthday presents, cooperated with
+his grief in a sort of conversion, and instead of seeking adventures in
+person and risking his own life, he began to play imaginative games, in
+which he risked the lives of countless tin soldiers, marbles, stones and
+beans. Of these forms of “chair a canon” he made collections, and, using
+them alternately, fought the Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty
+Years, and other wars, about which he had been reading of late in a big
+History of Europe which had been his grandfather's. He altered them to
+suit his genius, and fought them all over the floor in his day nursery,
+so that nobody could come in, for fearing of disturbing Gustavus
+Adolphus, King of Sweden, or treading on an army of Austrians. Because
+of the sound of the word he was passionately addicted to the Austrians,
+and finding there were so few battles in which they were successful
+he had to invent them in his games. His favourite generals were
+Prince Eugene, the Archduke Charles and Wallenstein. Tilly and Mack
+(“music-hall turns” he heard his father call them one day, whatever that
+might mean) one really could not love very much, Austrian though they
+were. For euphonic reasons, too, he doted on Turenne.
+
+This phase, which caused his parents anxiety, because it kept him
+indoors when he ought to have been out, lasted through May and half of
+June, till his father killed it by bringing home to him Tom Sawyer and
+Huckleberry Finn. When he read those books something happened in him,
+and he went out of doors again in passionate quest of a river. There
+being none on the premises at Robin Hill, he had to make one out of
+the pond, which fortunately had water lilies, dragonflies, gnats,
+bullrushes, and three small willow trees. On this pond, after his father
+and Garratt had ascertained by sounding that it had a reliable bottom
+and was nowhere more than two feet deep, he was allowed a little
+collapsible canoe, in which he spent hours and hours paddling, and lying
+down out of sight of Indian Joe and other enemies. On the shore of the
+pond, too, he built himself a wigwam about four feet square, of old
+biscuit tins, roofed in by boughs. In this he would make little fires,
+and cook the birds he had not shot with his gun, hunting in the coppice
+and fields, or the fish he did not catch in the pond because there were
+none. This occupied the rest of June and that July, when his father
+and mother were away in Ireland. He led a lonely life of “make believe”
+during those five weeks of summer weather, with gun, wigwam, water and
+canoe; and, however hard his active little brain tried to keep the
+sense of beauty away, she did creep in on him for a second now and then,
+perching on the wing of a dragon-fly, glistening on the water lilies, or
+brushing his eyes with her blue as he lay on his back in ambush.
+
+“Auntie” June, who had been left in charge, had a “grown-up” in the
+house, with a cough and a large piece of putty which he was making
+into a face; so she hardly ever came down to see him in the pond. Once,
+however, she brought with her two other “grown-ups.” Little Jon, who
+happened to have painted his naked self bright blue and yellow in
+stripes out of his father's water-colour box, and put some duck's
+feathers in his hair, saw them coming, and—ambushed himself among the
+willows. As he had foreseen, they came at once to his wigwam and knelt
+down to look inside, so that with a blood-curdling yell he was able to
+take the scalps of “Auntie” June and the woman “grown-up” in an almost
+complete manner before they kissed him. The names of the two grown-ups
+were “Auntie” Holly and “Uncle” Val, who had a brown face and a little
+limp, and laughed at him terribly. He took a fancy to “Auntie” Holly,
+who seemed to be a sister too; but they both went away the same
+afternoon and he did not see them again. Three days before his father
+and mother were to come home “Auntie” June also went off in a great
+hurry, taking the “grown-up” who coughed and his piece of putty; and
+Mademoiselle said: “Poor man, he was veree ill. I forbid you to go into
+his room, Jon.” Little Jon, who rarely did things merely because he was
+told not to, refrained from going, though he was bored and lonely. In
+truth the day of the pond was past, and he was filled to the brim of
+his soul with restlessness and the want of something—not a tree, not a
+gun—something soft. Those last two days had seemed months in spite of
+Cast Up by the Sea, wherein he was reading about Mother Lee and her
+terrible wrecking bonfire. He had gone up and down the stairs perhaps a
+hundred times in those two days, and often from the day nursery, where
+he slept now, had stolen into his mother's room, looked at everything,
+without touching, and on into the dressing-room; and standing on one leg
+beside the bath, like Slingsby, had whispered:
+
+“Ho, ho, ho! Dog my cats!” mysteriously, to bring luck. Then, stealing
+back, he had opened his mother's wardrobe, and taken a long sniff which
+seemed to bring him nearer to—he didn't know what.
+
+He had done this just before he stood in the streak of sunlight,
+debating in which of the several ways he should slide down the
+banisters. They all seemed silly, and in a sudden languor he began
+descending the steps one by one. During that descent he could remember
+his father quite distinctly—the short grey beard, the deep eyes
+twinkling, the furrow between them, the funny smile, the thin figure
+which always seemed so tall to little Jon; but his mother he couldn't
+see. All that represented her was something swaying with two dark eyes
+looking back at him; and the scent of her wardrobe.
+
+Bella was in the hall, drawing aside the big curtains, and opening the
+front door. Little Jon said, wheedling,
+
+“Bella!”
+
+“Yes, Master Jon.”
+
+“Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know they'd like
+it best.”
+
+“You mean you'd like it best.”
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+“No, they would, to please me.”
+
+Bella smiled. “Very well, I'll take it out if you'll stay quiet here and
+not get into mischief before they come.”
+
+Little Jon sat down on the bottom step, and nodded. Bella came close,
+and looked him over.
+
+“Get up!” she said.
+
+Little Jon got up. She scrutinized him behind; he was not green, and his
+knees seemed clean.
+
+“All right!” she said. “My! Aren't you brown? Give me a kiss!”
+
+And little Jon received a peck on his hair.
+
+“What jam?” he asked. “I'm so tired of waiting.”
+
+“Gooseberry and strawberry.”
+
+Num! They were his favourites!
+
+When she was gone he sat still for quite a minute. It was quiet in the
+big hall open to its East end so that he could see one of his trees,
+a brig sailing very slowly across the upper lawn. In the outer hall
+shadows were slanting from the pillars. Little Jon got up, jumped one of
+them, and walked round the clump of iris plants which filled the pool
+of grey-white marble in the centre. The flowers were pretty, but only
+smelled a very little. He stood in the open doorway and looked out.
+Suppose!—suppose they didn't come! He had waited so long that he felt he
+could not bear that, and his attention slid at once from such finality
+to the dust motes in the bluish sunlight coming in: Thrusting his hand
+up, he tried to catch some. Bella ought to have dusted that piece of
+air! But perhaps they weren't dust—only what sunlight was made of, and
+he looked to see whether the sunlight out of doors was the same. It was
+not. He had said he would stay quiet in the hall, but he simply couldn't
+any more; and crossing the gravel of the drive he lay down on the grass
+beyond. Pulling six daisies he named them carefully, Sir Lamorac, Sir
+Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Sir Palimedes, Sir Bors, Sir Gawain, and fought
+them in couples till only Sir Lamorac, whom he had selected for a
+specially stout stalk, had his head on, and even he, after three
+encounters, looked worn and waggly. A beetle was moving slowly in the
+grass, which almost wanted cutting. Every blade was a small tree,
+round whose trunk the beetle had to glide. Little Jon stretched out
+Sir Lamorac, feet foremost, and stirred the creature up. It scuttled
+painfully. Little Jon laughed, lost interest, and sighed. His heart felt
+empty. He turned over and lay on his back. There was a scent of honey
+from the lime trees in flower, and in the sky the blue was beautiful,
+with a few white clouds which looked and perhaps tasted like lemon ice.
+He could hear Bob playing: “Way down upon de Suwannee ribber” on his
+concertina, and it made him nice and sad. He turned over again and put
+his ear to the ground—Indians could hear things coming ever so far—but
+he could hear nothing—only the concertina! And almost instantly he did
+hear a grinding sound, a faint toot. Yes! it was a car—coming—coming!
+Up he jumped. Should he wait in the porch, or rush upstairs, and as
+they came in, shout: “Look!” and slide slowly down the banisters, head
+foremost? Should he? The car turned in at the drive. It was too late!
+And he only waited, jumping up and down in his excitement. The car came
+quickly, whirred, and stopped. His father got out, exactly like life. He
+bent down and little Jon bobbed up—they bumped. His father said,
+
+“Bless us! Well, old man, you are brown!” Just as he would; and the
+sense of expectation—of something wanted—bubbled unextinguished in
+little Jon. Then, with a long, shy look he saw his mother, in a blue
+dress, with a blue motor scarf over her cap and hair, smiling. He jumped
+as high as ever he could, twined his legs behind her back, and hugged.
+He heard her gasp, and felt her hugging back. His eyes, very dark blue
+just then, looked into hers, very dark brown, till her lips closed on
+his eyebrow, and, squeezing with all his might, he heard her creak and
+laugh, and say:
+
+“You are strong, Jon!”
+
+He slid down at that, and rushed into the hall, dragging her by the
+hand.
+
+While he was eating his jam beneath the oak tree, he noticed things
+about his mother that he had never seemed to see before, her cheeks for
+instance were creamy, there were silver threads in her dark goldy hair,
+her throat had no knob in it like Bella's, and she went in and out
+softly. He noticed, too, some little lines running away from the corners
+of her eyes, and a nice darkness under them. She was ever so beautiful,
+more beautiful than “Da” or Mademoiselle, or “Auntie” June or even
+“Auntie” Holly, to whom he had taken a fancy; even more beautiful than
+Bella, who had pink cheeks and came out too suddenly in places. This new
+beautifulness of his mother had a kind of particular importance, and he
+ate less than he had expected to.
+
+When tea was over his father wanted him to walk round the gardens.
+He had a long conversation with his father about things in general,
+avoiding his private life—Sir Lamorac, the Austrians, and the emptiness
+he had felt these last three days, now so suddenly filled up. His father
+told him of a place called Glensofantrim, where he and his mother had
+been; and of the little people who came out of the ground there when it
+was very quiet. Little Jon came to a halt, with his heels apart.
+
+“Do you really believe they do, Daddy?” “No, Jon, but I thought you
+might.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“You're younger than I; and they're fairies.” Little Jon squared the
+dimple in his chin.
+
+“I don't believe in fairies. I never see any.” “Ha!” said his father.
+
+“Does Mum?”
+
+His father smiled his funny smile.
+
+“No; she only sees Pan.”
+
+“What's Pan?”
+
+“The Goaty God who skips about in wild and beautiful places.”
+
+“Was he in Glensofantrim?”
+
+“Mum said so.”
+
+Little Jon took his heels up, and led on.
+
+“Did you see him?”
+
+“No; I only saw Venus Anadyomene.”
+
+Little Jon reflected; Venus was in his book about the Greeks and
+Trojans. Then Anna was her Christian and Dyomene her surname?
+
+But it appeared, on inquiry, that it was one word, which meant rising
+from the foam.
+
+“Did she rise from the foam in Glensofantrim?”
+
+“Yes; every day.”
+
+“What is she like, Daddy?”
+
+“Like Mum.”
+
+“Oh! Then she must be...” but he stopped at that, rushed at a wall,
+scrambled up, and promptly scrambled down again. The discovery that his
+mother was beautiful was one which he felt must absolutely be kept to
+himself. His father's cigar, however, took so long to smoke, that at
+last he was compelled to say:
+
+“I want to see what Mum's brought home. Do you mind, Daddy?”
+
+He pitched the motive low, to absolve him from unmanliness, and was a
+little disconcerted when his father looked at him right through, heaved
+an important sigh, and answered:
+
+“All right, old man, you go and love her.”
+
+He went, with a pretence of slowness, and then rushed, to make up. He
+entered her bedroom from his own, the door being open. She was still
+kneeling before a trunk, and he stood close to her, quite still.
+
+She knelt up straight, and said:
+
+“Well, Jon?”
+
+“I thought I'd just come and see.”
+
+Having given and received another hug, he mounted the window-seat, and
+tucking his legs up under him watched her unpack. He derived a pleasure
+from the operation such as he had not yet known, partly because she was
+taking out things which looked suspicious, and partly because he liked
+to look at her. She moved differently from anybody else, especially from
+Bella; she was certainly the refinedest-looking person he had ever seen.
+She finished the trunk at last, and knelt down in front of him.
+
+“Have you missed us, Jon?”
+
+Little Jon nodded, and having thus admitted his feelings, continued to
+nod.
+
+“But you had 'Auntie' June?”
+
+“Oh! she had a man with a cough.”
+
+His mother's face changed, and looked almost angry. He added hastily:
+
+“He was a poor man, Mum; he coughed awfully; I—I liked him.”
+
+His mother put her hands behind his waist.
+
+“You like everybody, Jon?”
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+“Up to a point,” he said: “Auntie June took me to church one Sunday.”
+
+“To church? Oh!”
+
+“She wanted to see how it would affect me.” “And did it?”
+
+“Yes. I came over all funny, so she took me home again very quick. I
+wasn't sick after all. I went to bed and had hot brandy and water, and
+read The Boys of Beechwood. It was scrumptious.”
+
+His mother bit her lip.
+
+“When was that?”
+
+“Oh! about—a long time ago—I wanted her to take me again, but she
+wouldn't. You and Daddy never go to church, do you?”
+
+“No, we don't.”
+
+“Why don't you?”
+
+His mother smiled.
+
+“Well, dear, we both of us went when we were little. Perhaps we went
+when we were too little.”
+
+“I see,” said little Jon, “it's dangerous.”
+
+“You shall judge for yourself about all those things as you grow up.”
+
+Little Jon replied in a calculating manner:
+
+“I don't want to grow up, much. I don't want to go to school.” A sudden
+overwhelming desire to say something more, to say what he really felt,
+turned him red. “I—I want to stay with you, and be your lover, Mum.”
+
+Then with an instinct to improve the situation, he added quickly “I
+don't want to go to bed to-night, either. I'm simply tired of going to
+bed, every night.”
+
+“Have you had any more nightmares?”
+
+“Only about one. May I leave the door open into your room to-night,
+Mum?”
+
+“Yes, just a little.” Little Jon heaved a sigh of satisfaction.
+
+“What did you see in Glensofantrim?”
+
+“Nothing but beauty, darling.”
+
+“What exactly is beauty?”
+
+“What exactly is—Oh! Jon, that's a poser.”
+
+“Can I see it, for instance?” His mother got up, and sat beside him.
+“You do, every day. The sky is beautiful, the stars, and moonlit nights,
+and then the birds, the flowers, the trees—they're all beautiful. Look
+out of the window—there's beauty for you, Jon.”
+
+“Oh! yes, that's the view. Is that all?”
+
+“All? no. The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with their
+foam flying back.”
+
+“Did you rise from it every day, Mum?”
+
+His mother smiled. “Well, we bathed.”
+
+Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.
+
+“I know,” he said mysteriously, “you're it, really, and all the rest is
+make-believe.”
+
+She sighed, laughed, said: “Oh! Jon!”
+
+Little Jon said critically:
+
+“Do you think Bella beautiful, for instance? I hardly do.”
+
+“Bella is young; that's something.”
+
+“But you look younger, Mum. If you bump against Bella she hurts.”
+
+“I don't believe 'Da' was beautiful, when I come to think of it; and
+Mademoiselle's almost ugly.”
+
+“Mademoiselle has a very nice face.” “Oh! yes; nice. I love your little
+rays, Mum.”
+
+“Rays?”
+
+Little Jon put his finger to the outer corner of her eye.
+
+“Oh! Those? But they're a sign of age.”
+
+“They come when you smile.”
+
+“But they usen't to.”
+
+“Oh! well, I like them. Do you love me, Mum?”
+
+“I do—I do love you, darling.”
+
+“Ever so?”
+
+“Ever so!”
+
+“More than I thought you did?”
+
+“Much—much more.”
+
+“Well, so do I; so that makes it even.”
+
+Conscious that he had never in his life so given himself away, he felt
+a sudden reaction to the manliness of Sir Lamorac, Dick Needham, Huck
+Finn, and other heroes.
+
+“Shall I show you a thing or two?” he said; and slipping out of her
+arms, he stood on his head. Then, fired by her obvious admiration, he
+mounted the bed, and threw himself head foremost from his feet on to
+his back, without touching anything with his hands. He did this several
+times.
+
+That evening, having inspected what they had brought, he stayed up to
+dinner, sitting between them at the little round table they used when
+they were alone. He was extremely excited. His mother wore a French-grey
+dress, with creamy lace made out of little scriggly roses, round her
+neck, which was browner than the lace. He kept looking at her, till at
+last his father's funny smile made him suddenly attentive to his slice
+of pineapple. It was later than he had ever stayed up, when he went to
+bed. His mother went up with him, and he undressed very slowly so as to
+keep her there. When at last he had nothing on but his pyjamas, he said:
+
+“Promise you won't go while I say my prayers!”
+
+“I promise.”
+
+Kneeling down and plunging his face into the bed, little Jon hurried
+up, under his breath, opening one eye now and then, to see her standing
+perfectly still with a smile on her face. “Our Father”—so went his last
+prayer, “which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mum, thy Kingdom Mum—on
+Earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily Mum and forgive us
+our trespasses on earth as it is in heaven and trespass against us, for
+thine is the evil the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amum! Look
+out!” He sprang, and for a long minute remained in her arms. Once in
+bed, he continued to hold her hand.
+
+“You won't shut the door any more than that, will you? Are you going to
+be long, Mum?”
+
+“I must go down and play to Daddy.”
+
+“Oh! well, I shall hear you.”
+
+“I hope not; you must go to sleep.”
+
+“I can sleep any night.”
+
+“Well, this is just a night like any other.”
+
+“Oh! no—it's extra special.”
+
+“On extra special nights one always sleeps soundest.”
+
+“But if I go to sleep, Mum, I shan't hear you come up.”
+
+“Well, when I do, I'll come in and give you a kiss, then if you're awake
+you'll know, and if you're not you'll still know you've had one.”
+
+Little Jon sighed, “All right!” he said: “I suppose I must put up with
+that. Mum?”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“What was her name that Daddy believes in? Venus Anna Diomedes?”
+
+“Oh! my angel! Anadyomene.”
+
+“Yes! but I like my name for you much better.”
+
+“What is yours, Jon?”
+
+Little Jon answered shyly:
+
+“Guinevere! it's out of the Round Table—I've only just thought of it,
+only of course her hair was down.”
+
+His mother's eyes, looking past him, seemed to float.
+
+“You won't forget to come, Mum?”
+
+“Not if you'll go to sleep.”
+
+“That's a bargain, then.” And little Jon screwed up his eyes.
+
+He felt her lips on his forehead, heard her footsteps; opened his eyes
+to see her gliding through the doorway, and, sighing, screwed them up
+again.
+
+Then Time began.
+
+For some ten minutes of it he tried loyally to sleep, counting a great
+number of thistles in a row, “Da's” old recipe for bringing slumber. He
+seemed to have been hours counting. It must, he thought, be nearly time
+for her to come up now. He threw the bedclothes back. “I'm hot!” he
+said, and his voice sounded funny in the darkness, like someone else's.
+Why didn't she come? He sat up. He must look! He got out of bed, went to
+the window and pulled the curtain a slice aside. It wasn't dark, but he
+couldn't tell whether because of daylight or the moon, which was very
+big. It had a funny, wicked face, as if laughing at him, and he did not
+want to look at it. Then, remembering that his mother had said moonlit
+nights were beautiful, he continued to stare out in a general way. The
+trees threw thick shadows, the lawn looked like spilt milk, and a long,
+long way he could see; oh! very far; right over the world, and it all
+looked different and swimmy. There was a lovely smell, too, in his open
+window.
+
+'I wish I had a dove like Noah!' he thought.
+
+“The moony moon was round and bright, It shone and shone and made it
+light.”
+
+After that rhyme, which came into his head all at once, he became
+conscious of music, very soft-lovely! Mum playing! He bethought himself
+of a macaroon he had, laid up in his chest of drawers, and, getting it,
+came back to the window. He leaned out, now munching, now holding his
+jaws to hear the music better. “Da” used to say that angels played on
+harps in heaven; but it wasn't half so lovely as Mum playing in the
+moony night, with him eating a macaroon. A cockchafer buzzed by, a moth
+flew in his face, the music stopped, and little Jon drew his head in.
+She must be coming! He didn't want to be found awake. He got back into
+bed and pulled the clothes nearly over his head; but he had left a
+streak of moonlight coming in. It fell across the floor, near the foot
+of the bed, and he watched it moving ever so slowly towards him, as if
+it were alive. The music began again, but he could only just hear it
+now; sleepy music, pretty—sleepy—music—sleepy—slee.....
+
+And time slipped by, the music rose, fell, ceased; the moonbeam crept
+towards his face. Little Jon turned in his sleep till he lay on his
+back, with one brown fist still grasping the bedclothes. The corners of
+his eyes twitched—he had begun to dream. He dreamed he was drinking milk
+out of a pan that was the moon, opposite a great black cat which watched
+him with a funny smile like his father's. He heard it whisper: “Don't
+drink too much!” It was the cat's milk, of course, and he put out his
+hand amicably to stroke the creature; but it was no longer there; the
+pan had become a bed, in which he was lying, and when he tried to get
+out he couldn't find the edge; he couldn't find it—he—he—couldn't get
+out! It was dreadful!
+
+He whimpered in his sleep. The bed had begun to go round too; it was
+outside him and inside him; going round and round, and getting fiery,
+and Mother Lee out of Cast up by the Sea was stirring it! Oh! so
+horrible she looked! Faster and faster!—till he and the bed and Mother
+Lee and the moon and the cat were all one wheel going round and round
+and up and up—awful—awful—awful!
+
+He shrieked.
+
+A voice saying: “Darling, darling!” got through the wheel, and he awoke,
+standing on his bed, with his eyes wide open.
+
+There was his mother, with her hair like Guinevere's, and, clutching
+her, he buried his face in it.
+
+“Oh! oh!”
+
+“It's all right, treasure. You're awake now. There! There! It's
+nothing!”
+
+But little Jon continued to say: “Oh! oh!”
+
+Her voice went on, velvety in his ear:
+
+“It was the moonlight, sweetheart, coming on your face.”
+
+Little Jon burbled into her nightgown
+
+“You said it was beautiful. Oh!”
+
+“Not to sleep in, Jon. Who let it in? Did you draw the curtains?”
+
+“I wanted to see the time; I—I looked out, I—I heard you playing, Mum;
+I—I ate my macaroon.” But he was growing slowly comforted; and the
+instinct to excuse his fear revived within him.
+
+“Mother Lee went round in me and got all fiery,” he mumbled.
+
+“Well, Jon, what can you expect if you eat macaroons after you've gone
+to bed?”
+
+“Only one, Mum; it made the music ever so more beautiful. I was waiting
+for you—I nearly thought it was to-morrow.”
+
+“My ducky, it's only just eleven now.”
+
+Little Jon was silent, rubbing his nose on her neck.
+
+“Mum, is Daddy in your room?”
+
+“Not to-night.”
+
+“Can I come?”
+
+“If you wish, my precious.”
+
+Half himself again, little Jon drew back.
+
+“You look different, Mum; ever so younger.”
+
+“It's my hair, darling.”
+
+Little Jon laid hold of it, thick, dark gold, with a few silver threads.
+
+“I like it,” he said: “I like you best of all like this.”
+
+Taking her hand, he had begun dragging her towards the door. He shut it
+as they passed, with a sigh of relief.
+
+“Which side of the bed do you like, Mum?”
+
+“The left side.”
+
+“All right.”
+
+Wasting no time, giving her no chance to change her mind, little Jon got
+into the bed, which seemed much softer than his own. He heaved another
+sigh, screwed his head into the pillow and lay examining the battle of
+chariots and swords and spears which always went on outside blankets,
+where the little hairs stood up against the light.
+
+“It wasn't anything, really, was it?” he said.
+
+From before her glass his mother answered:
+
+“Nothing but the moon and your imagination heated up. You mustn't get so
+excited, Jon.”
+
+But, still not quite in possession of his nerves, little Jon answered
+boastfully:
+
+“I wasn't afraid, really, of course!” And again he lay watching the
+spears and chariots. It all seemed very long.
+
+“Oh! Mum, do hurry up!”
+
+“Darling, I have to plait my hair.”
+
+“Oh! not to-night. You'll only have to unplait it again to-morrow. I'm
+sleepy now; if you don't come, I shan't be sleepy soon.”
+
+His mother stood up white and flowey before the winged mirror: he could
+see three of her, with her neck turned and her hair bright under the
+light, and her dark eyes smiling. It was unnecessary, and he said:
+
+“Do come, Mum; I'm waiting.”
+
+“Very well, my love, I'll come.”
+
+Little Jon closed his eyes. Everything was turning out most
+satisfactory, only she must hurry up! He felt the bed shake, she was
+getting in. And, still with his eyes closed, he said sleepily: “It's
+nice, isn't it?”
+
+He heard her voice say something, felt her lips touching his nose, and,
+snuggling up beside her who lay awake and loved him with her thoughts,
+he fell into the dreamless sleep, which rounded off his past.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO LET
+
+“From out the fatal loins of those two foes A pair of star-crossed
+lovers take their life.” —Romeo and Juliet.
+
+TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+
+I.—ENCOUNTER
+
+Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was
+staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the intention
+of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and
+looking into the Future. He walked. Since the War he never took a cab
+if he could help it. Their drivers were, in his view, an uncivil lot,
+though now that the War was over and supply beginning to exceed demand
+again, getting more civil in accordance with the custom of human nature.
+Still, he had not forgiven them, deeply identifying them with gloomy
+memories, and now, dimly, like all members, of their class, with
+revolution. The considerable anxiety he had passed through during the
+War, and the more considerable anxiety he had since undergone in the
+Peace, had produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature.
+He had, mentally, so frequently experienced ruin, that he had ceased to
+believe in its material probability. Paying away four thousand a year in
+income and super tax, one could not very well be worse off! A fortune of
+a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a wife and one daughter, and
+very diversely invested, afforded substantial guarantee even against
+that “wildcat notion” a levy on capital. And as to confiscation of war
+profits, he was entirely in favour of it, for he had none, and “serve
+the beggars right!” The price of pictures, moreover, had, if anything,
+gone up, and he had done better with his collection since the War began
+than ever before. Air-raids, also, had acted beneficially on a spirit
+congenitally cautious, and hardened a character already dogged. To be in
+danger of being entirely dispersed inclined one to be less apprehensive
+of the more partial dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while
+the habit of condemning the impudence of the Germans had led naturally
+to condemning that of Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of
+his soul.
+
+He walked. There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet him
+at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past two.
+It was good for him to walk—his liver was a little constricted, and his
+nerves rather on edge. His wife was always out when she was in Town, and
+his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all over the place like most young
+women since the War. Still, he must be thankful that she had been too
+young to do anything in that War itself. Not, of course, that he had
+not supported the War from its inception, with all his soul, but between
+that and supporting it with the bodies of his wife and daughter,
+there had been a gap fixed by something old-fashioned within him which
+abhorred emotional extravagance. He had, for instance, strongly objected
+to Annette, so attractive, and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her
+native France, her “chere patrie” as, under the stimulus of war, she had
+begun to call it, to nurse her “braves poilus,” forsooth! Ruining
+her health and her looks! As if she were really a nurse! He had put a
+stopper on it. Let her do needlework for them at home, or knit! She had
+not gone, therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since. A
+bad tendency of hers to mock at him, not openly, but in continual little
+ways, had grown. As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed problem
+whether or not she should go to school. She was better away from her
+mother in her war mood, from the chance of air-raids, and the impetus to
+do extravagant things; so he had placed her in a seminary as far West
+as had seemed to him compatible with excellence, and had missed her
+horribly. Fleur! He had never regretted the somewhat outlandish name
+by which at her birth he had decided so suddenly to call her—marked
+concession though it had been to the French. Fleur! A pretty name—a
+pretty child! But restless—too restless; and wilful! Knowing her power
+too over her father! Soames often reflected on the mistake it was to
+dote on his daughter. To get old and dote! Sixty-five! He was getting
+on; but he didn't feel it, for, fortunately perhaps, considering
+Annette's youth and good looks, his second marriage had turned out a
+cool affair. He had known but one real passion in his life—for that
+first wife of his—Irene. Yes, and that fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who
+had gone off with her, was looking very shaky, they said. No wonder, at
+seventy-two, after twenty years of a third marriage!
+
+Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the
+Row. A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house in
+Park Lane which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and the
+little house in Montpellier Square where thirty-five years ago he had
+enjoyed his first edition of matrimony. Now, after twenty years of
+his second edition, that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous
+existence—which had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he had
+hoped for. For many years he had ceased regretting, even vaguely, the
+son who had not been born; Fleur filled the bill in his heart. After
+all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward at all to the
+time when she would change it. Indeed, if he ever thought of such a
+calamity, it was seasoned by the vague feeling that he could make her
+rich enough to purchase perhaps and extinguish the name of the fellow
+who married her—why not, since, as it seemed, women were equal to men
+nowadays? And Soames, secretly convinced that they were not, passed his
+curved hand over his face vigorously, till it reached the comfort of his
+chin. Thanks to abstemious habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his
+nose was pale and thin, his grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight
+unimpaired. A slight stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to
+his face by the heightening of his forehead in the recession of his
+grey hair. Little change had Time wrought in the “warmest” of the young
+Forsytes, as the last of the old Forsytes—Timothy-now in his hundred and
+first year, would have phrased it.
+
+The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had
+given up top hats—it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days
+like these. Plane-trees! His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid—the
+Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that Goya
+picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his
+spot. The fellow had impressed him—great range, real genius! Highly as
+the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with
+him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first;
+oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had—as never
+before—commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called “La Vendimia,”
+wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded
+him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and
+rather poor it was—you couldn't copy Goya. He would still look at it,
+however, if his daughter were not there, for the sake of something
+irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the
+width between the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.
+Curious that Fleur should have dark eyes, when his own were grey—no
+pure Forsyte had brown eyes—and her mother's blue! But of course her
+grandmother Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!
+
+He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner. No greater change
+in all England than in the Row! Born almost within hail of it, he
+could remember it from 1860 on. Brought there as a child between the
+crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with
+a cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top
+hats; the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in
+a long red waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs
+on several strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles
+spaniels, Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline—you never
+saw them now. You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working
+people sitting in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young
+bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials
+charging up and down on dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there,
+little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their livers, or an
+orderly trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no
+grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no gossip—nothing; only the trees
+the same—the trees indifferent to the generations and declensions of
+mankind. A democratic England—dishevelled, hurried, noisy, and seemingly
+without an apex. And that something fastidious in the soul of Soames
+turned over within him. Gone forever, the close borough of rank and
+polish! Wealth there was—oh, yes! wealth—he himself was a richer man
+than his father had ever been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone,
+engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.
+Little half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and
+there, dispersed and chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever
+again firm and coherent to look up to. And into this new hurly-burly of
+bad manners and loose morals his daughter—flower of his life—was flung!
+And when those Labour chaps got power—if they ever did—the worst was yet
+to come.
+
+He passed out under the archway, at last no longer—thank
+goodness!—disfigured by the gungrey of its search-light. 'They'd better
+put a search-light on to where they're all going,' he thought, 'and
+light up their precious democracy!' And he directed his steps along the
+Club fronts of Piccadilly. George Forsyte, of course, would be sitting
+in the bay window of the Iseeum. The chap was so big now that he was
+there nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic, humorous
+eye noting the decline of men and things. And Soames hurried, ever
+constitutionally uneasy beneath his cousin's glance. George, who, as he
+had heard, had written a letter signed “Patriot” in the middle of the
+War, complaining of the Government's hysteria in docking the oats of
+race-horses. Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous, neat, clean-shaven,
+with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of the best
+hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand. Well, he didn't change! And
+for perhaps the first time in his life Soames felt a kind of sympathy
+tapping in his waistcoat for that sardonic kinsman. With his weight, his
+perfectly parted hair, and bull-like gaze, he was a guarantee that the
+old order would take some shifting yet. He saw George move the pink
+paper as if inviting him to ascend—the chap must want to ask something
+about his property. It was still under Soames' control; for in the
+adoption of a sleeping partnership at that painful period twenty
+years back when he had divorced Irene, Soames had found himself almost
+insensibly retaining control of all purely Forsyte affairs.
+
+Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in. Since the death
+of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite
+known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide—the
+Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames. George, too, he knew,
+had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the
+joys of the table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight
+down, and owning, as he said, “just one or two old screws to give me an
+interest in life.” He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window
+without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel
+up there. George put out a well-kept hand.
+
+“Haven't seen you since the War,” he said. “How's your wife?”
+
+“Thanks,” said Soames coldly, “well enough.”
+
+Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George's fleshy face, and gloated
+from his eye.
+
+“That Belgian chap, Profond,” he said, “is a member here now. He's a rum
+customer.”
+
+“Quite!” muttered Soames. “What did you want to see me about?”
+
+“Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment. I suppose he's
+made his Will.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up—last of the old lot;
+he's a hundred, you know. They say he's like a mummy. Where are you
+goin' to put him? He ought to have a pyramid by rights.”
+
+Soames shook his head. “Highgate, the family vault.”
+
+“Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere else.
+They say he still takes an interest in food. He might last on, you know.
+Don't we get anything for the old Forsytes? Ten of them—average age
+eighty-eight—I worked it out. That ought to be equal to triplets.”
+
+“Is that all?” said Soames, “I must be getting on.”
+
+'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer. “Yes, that's
+all: Look him up in his mausoleum—the old chap might want to prophesy.”
+The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he added: “Haven't you
+attorneys invented a way yet of dodging this damned income tax? It
+hits the fixed inherited income like the very deuce. I used to have two
+thousand five hundred a year; now I've got a beggarly fifteen hundred,
+and the price of living doubled.”
+
+“Ah!” murmured Soames, “the turf's in danger.”
+
+Over George's face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.
+
+“Well,” he said, “they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in the
+sear and yellow, getting poorer every day. These Labour chaps mean to
+have the lot before they've done. What are you going to do for a living
+when it comes? I shall work a six-hour day teaching politicians how to
+see a joke. Take my tip, Soames; go into Parliament, make sure of your
+four hundred—and employ me.”
+
+And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.
+
+Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his
+cousin's words. He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George
+always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began,
+it was he—the worker and the saver—who would be looted! That was the
+negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could
+civilization be built on any other? He did not think so. Well, they
+wouldn't confiscate his pictures, for they wouldn't know their worth.
+But what would they be worth, if these maniacs once began to milk
+capital? A drug on the market. 'I don't care about myself,' he thought;
+'I could live on five hundred a year, and never know the difference, at
+my age.' But Fleur! This fortune, so widely invested, these treasures
+so carefully chosen and amassed, were all for—her. And if it should
+turn out that he couldn't give or leave them to her—well, life had
+no meaning, and what was the use of going in to look at this crazy,
+futuristic stuff with the view of seeing whether it had any future?
+
+Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his shilling,
+picked up a catalogue, and entered. Some ten persons were prowling
+round. Soames took steps and came on what looked to him like a lamp-post
+bent by collision with a motor omnibus. It was advanced some three
+paces from the wall, and was described in his catalogue as “Jupiter.” He
+examined it with curiosity, having recently turned some of his attention
+to sculpture. 'If that's Jupiter,' he thought, 'I wonder what Juno's
+like.' And suddenly he saw her, opposite. She appeared to him like
+nothing so much as a pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow. He
+was still gazing at her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left.
+“Epatant!” he heard one say.
+
+“Jargon!” growled Soames to himself.
+
+The other's boyish voice replied
+
+“Missed it, old bean; he's pulling your leg. When Jove and Juno created
+he them, he was saying: 'I'll see how much these fools will swallow.'
+And they've lapped up the lot.”
+
+“You young duffer! Vospovitch is an innovator. Don't you see that he's
+brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic art, of music,
+painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was bound to.
+People are tired—the bottom's tumbled out of sentiment.”
+
+“Well, I'm quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty. I was
+through the War. You've dropped your handkerchief, sir.”
+
+Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him. He took it with
+some natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose. It had the right
+scent—of distant Eau de Cologne—and his initials in a corner. Slightly
+reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man's face. It had rather
+fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush growing out
+of it on each side, and small lively eyes, above a normally dressed
+appearance.
+
+“Thank you,” he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: “Glad to
+hear you like beauty; that's rare, nowadays.”
+
+“I dote on it,” said the young man; “but you and I are the last of the
+old guard, sir.”
+
+Soames smiled.
+
+“If you really care for pictures,” he said, “here's my card. I can show
+you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you're down the river and care
+to look in.”
+
+“Awfully nice of you, sir. I'll drop in like a bird. My name's
+Mont-Michael.” And he took off his hat.
+
+Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in
+response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had a
+purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look—as if
+he were a poet!
+
+It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went
+and sat down in an alcove. What had possessed him to give his card to a
+rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that? And Fleur,
+always at the back of his thoughts, started out like a filigree figure
+from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove
+was a large canvas with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on
+it, and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat.
+He looked at his catalogue: “No. 32 'The Future Town'—Paul Post.” 'I
+suppose that's satiric too,' he thought. 'What a thing!' But his second
+impulse was more cautious. It did not do to condemn hurriedly. There had
+been those stripey, streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out
+such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since
+the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be
+sneezed at. During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life,
+indeed, he had marked so many “movements,” seen the tides of taste and
+technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything
+except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion.
+This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial
+instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture,
+trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato
+blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said: “He's
+got the airplanes wonderfully, don't you think!” Below the tomato blobs
+was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could
+assign no meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring: “What
+expression he gets with his foreground!” Expression? Of what? Soames
+went back to his seat. The thing was “rich,” as his father would have
+said, and he wouldn't give a damn for it. Expression! Ah! they were all
+Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent. So it was coming
+here too, was it? He remembered the first wave of influenza in
+1887—or '8—hatched in China, so they said. He wondered where this—this
+Expressionism had been hatched. The thing was a regular disease!
+
+He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and
+the “Future Town.” Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames
+put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed
+through the slit between. No mistaking that back, elegant as ever though
+the hair above had gone grey. Irene! His divorced wife—Irene! And this,
+no doubt, was—her son—by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte—their boy, six
+months older than his own girl! And mumbling over in his mind the bitter
+days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat down
+again. She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was
+still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if
+fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor
+of them, had never seen them smile. Grudgingly he admitted her still
+beautiful and in figure almost as young as ever. And how that boy smiled
+back at her! Emotion squeezed Soames' heart. The sight infringed his
+sense of justice. He grudged her that boy's smile—it went beyond what
+Fleur gave him, and it was undeserved. Their son might have been his
+son; Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight! He
+lowered his catalogue. If she saw him, all the better! A reminder of
+her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing of it,
+would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis which surely
+must soon or late visit her! Then, half-conscious that such a thought
+was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took out his watch.
+Past four! Fleur was late. She had gone to his niece Imogen Cardigan's,
+and there they would keep her smoking cigarettes and gossiping, and
+that. He heard the boy laugh, and say eagerly: “I say, Mum, is this by
+one of Auntie June's lame ducks?”
+
+“Paul Post—I believe it is, darling.”
+
+The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her use
+it. And then she saw him. His eyes must have had in them something of
+George Forsyte's sardonic look; for her gloved hand crisped the folds of
+her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went stony. She moved on.
+
+“It is a caution,” said the boy, catching her arm again.
+
+Soames stared after them. That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte
+chin, and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a
+glass of old sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair.
+Better than they deserved—those two! They passed from his view into the
+next room, and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but saw it
+not. A little smile snarled up his lips. He was despising the vehemence
+of his own feelings after all these years. Ghosts! And yet as one grew
+old—was there anything but what was ghost-like left? Yes, there was
+Fleur! He fixed his eyes on the entrance. She was due; but she would
+keep him waiting, of course! And suddenly he became aware of a sort of
+human breeze—a short, slight form clad in a sea-green djibbah with a
+metal belt and a fillet binding unruly red-gold hair all streaked with
+grey. She was talking to the Gallery attendants, and something familiar
+riveted his gaze—in her eyes, her chin, her hair, her spirit—something
+which suggested a thin Skye terrier just before its dinner. Surely June
+Forsyte! His cousin June—and coming straight to his recess! She sat down
+beside him, deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil note.
+Soames sat unmoving. A confounded thing, cousinship! “Disgusting!” he
+heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of an overhearing
+stranger, she looked at him. The worst had happened.
+
+“Soames!”
+
+Soames turned his head a very little.
+
+“How are you?” he said. “Haven't seen you for twenty years.”
+
+“No. Whatever made you come here?”
+
+“My sins,” said Soames. “What stuff!”
+
+“Stuff? Oh, yes—of course; it hasn't arrived yet.
+
+“It never will,” said Soames; “it must be making a dead loss.”
+
+“Of course it is.”
+
+“How d'you know?”
+
+“It's my Gallery.”
+
+Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
+
+“Yours? What on earth makes you run a show like this?”
+
+“I don't treat Art as if it were grocery.”
+
+Soames pointed to the Future Town. “Look at that! Who's going to live in
+a town like that, or with it on his walls?”
+
+June contemplated the picture for a moment.
+
+“It's a vision,” she said.
+
+“The deuce!”
+
+There was silence, then June rose. 'Crazylooking creature!' he thought.
+
+“Well,” he said, “you'll find your young stepbrother here with a woman I
+used to know. If you take my advice, you'll close this exhibition.”
+
+June looked back at him. “Oh! You Forsyte!” she said, and moved on.
+About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a look
+of dangerous decisions. Forsyte! Of course, he was a Forsyte! And so was
+she! But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought Bosinney into
+his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June and never
+would! And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a Gallery!... And
+suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of his own family.
+The old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many years; there was
+no clearing-house for news. What had they all done in the War? Young
+Roger's boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's second son killed; young
+Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or whatever they gave them.
+They had all joined up somehow, he believed. That boy of Jolyon's and
+Irene's, he supposed, had been too young; his own generation, of course,
+too old, though Giles Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross—and
+Jesse Hayman been a special constable—those “Dromios” had always been
+of a sporting type! As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read
+the papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought
+no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he
+could have done at his age. Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him that
+he and his family had taken this war very differently to that affair
+with the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the resources of
+the Empire. In that old war, of course, his nephew Val Dartie had
+been wounded, that fellow Jolyon's first son had died of enteric, “the
+Dromios” had gone out on horses, and June had been a nurse; but all that
+had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in this war everybody had
+done “their bit,” so far as he could make out, as a matter of course. It
+seemed to show the growth of something or other—or perhaps the decline
+of something else. Had the Forsytes become less individual, or
+more Imperial, or less provincial? Or was it simply that one hated
+Germans?... Why didn't Fleur come, so that he could get away? He saw
+those three return together from the other room and pass back along the
+far side of the screen. The boy was standing before the Juno now.
+And, suddenly, on the other side of her, Soames saw—his daughter, with
+eyebrows raised, as well they might be. He could see her eyes glint
+sideways at the boy, and the boy look back at her. Then Irene slipped
+her hand through his arm, and drew him on. Soames saw him glancing
+round, and Fleur looking after them as the three went out.
+
+A voice said cheerfully: “Bit thick, isn't it, sir?”
+
+The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing.
+Soames nodded.
+
+“I don't know what we're coming to.”
+
+“Oh! That's all right, sir,” answered the young man cheerfully; “they
+don't either.”
+
+Fleur's voice said: “Hallo, Father! Here you are!” precisely as if he
+had been keeping her waiting.
+
+The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.
+
+“Well,” said Soames, looking her up and down, “you're a punctual sort of
+young woman!”
+
+This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and colour,
+with short, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes were set in
+whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and yet in repose
+were almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids, held over them
+in a sort of suspense. She had a charming profile, and nothing of her
+father in her face save a decided chin. Aware that his expression
+was softening as he looked at her, Soames frowned to preserve the
+unemotionalism proper to a Forsyte. He knew she was only too inclined to
+take advantage of his weakness.
+
+Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:
+
+“Who was that?”
+
+“He picked up my handkerchief. We talked about the pictures.”
+
+“You're not going to buy that, Father?”
+
+“No,” said Soames grimly; “nor that Juno you've been looking at.”
+
+Fleur dragged at his arm. “Oh! Let's go! It's a ghastly show.”
+
+In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner.
+But Soames had hung out a board marked “Trespassers will be prosecuted,”
+and he barely acknowledged the young fellow's salute.
+
+“Well,” he said in the street, “whom did you meet at Imogen's?”
+
+“Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond.”
+
+“Oh!” muttered Soames; “that chap! What does your aunt see in him?”
+
+“I don't know. He looks pretty deep—mother says she likes him.”
+
+Soames grunted.
+
+“Cousin Val and his wife were there, too.”
+
+“What!” said Soames. “I thought they were back in South Africa.”
+
+“Oh, no! They've sold their farm. Cousin Val is going to train
+race-horses on the Sussex Downs. They've got a jolly old manor-house;
+they asked me down there.”
+
+Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him. “What's his wife like
+now?”
+
+“Very quiet, but nice, I think.”
+
+Soames coughed again. “He's a rackety chap, your Cousin Val.”
+
+“Oh! no, Father; they're awfully devoted. I promised to go—Saturday to
+Wednesday next.”
+
+“Training race-horses!” said Soames. It was extravagant, but not the
+reason for his distaste. Why the deuce couldn't his nephew have stayed
+out in South Africa? His own divorce had been bad enough, without his
+nephew's marriage to the daughter of the co-respondent; a half-sister
+too of June, and of that boy whom Fleur had just been looking at from
+under the pump-handle. If he didn't look out, she would come to know
+all about that old disgrace! Unpleasant things! They were round him this
+afternoon like a swarm of bees!
+
+“I don't like it!” he said.
+
+“I want to see the race-horses,” murmured Fleur; “and they've promised
+I shall ride. Cousin Val can't walk much, you know; but he can ride
+perfectly. He's going to show me their gallops.”
+
+“Racing!” said Soames. “It's a pity the War didn't knock that on the
+head. He's taking after his father, I'm afraid.”
+
+“I don't know anything about his father.”
+
+“No,” said Soames, grimly. “He took an interest in horses and broke his
+neck in Paris, walking down-stairs. Good riddance for your aunt.”
+He frowned, recollecting the inquiry into those stairs which he had
+attended in Paris six years ago, because Montague Dartie could not
+attend it himself—perfectly normal stairs in a house where they played
+baccarat. Either his winnings or the way he had celebrated them had gone
+to his brother-in-law's head. The French procedure had been very loose;
+he had had a lot of trouble with it.
+
+A sound from Fleur distracted his attention. “Look! The people who were
+in the Gallery with us.”
+
+“What people?” muttered Soames, who knew perfectly well.
+
+“I think that woman's beautiful.”
+
+“Come into this pastry-cook's,” said Soames abruptly, and tightening
+his grip on her arm he turned into a confectioner's. It was—for him—a
+surprising thing to do, and he said rather anxiously: “What will you
+have?”
+
+“Oh! I don't want anything. I had a cocktail and a tremendous lunch.”
+
+“We must have something now we're here,” muttered Soames, keeping hold
+of her arm.
+
+“Two teas,” he said; “and two of those nougat things.”
+
+But no sooner was his body seated than his soul sprang up. Those
+three—those three were coming in! He heard Irene say something to her
+boy, and his answer:
+
+“Oh! no, Mum; this place is all right. My stunt.” And the three sat
+down.
+
+At that moment, most awkward of his existence, crowded with ghosts and
+shadows from his past, in presence of the only two women he had ever
+loved—his divorced wife and his daughter by her successor—Soames was not
+so much afraid of them as of his cousin June. She might make a scene—she
+might introduce those two children—she was capable of anything. He bit
+too hastily at the nougat, and it stuck to his plate. Working at it with
+his finger, he glanced at Fleur. She was masticating dreamily, but her
+eyes were on the boy. The Forsyte in him said: “Think, feel, and you're
+done for!” And he wiggled his finger desperately. Plate! Did Jolyon wear
+a plate? Did that woman wear a plate? Time had been when he had seen her
+wearing nothing! That was something, anyway, which had never been
+stolen from him. And she knew it, though she might sit there calm
+and self-possessed, as if she had never been his wife. An acid humour
+stirred in his Forsyte blood; a subtle pain divided by hair's breadth
+from pleasure. If only June did not suddenly bring her hornets about his
+ears! The boy was talking.
+
+“Of course, Auntie June”—so he called his half-sister “Auntie,” did
+he?—well, she must be fifty, if she was a day!—“it's jolly good of you
+to encourage them. Only—hang it all!” Soames stole a glance. Irene's
+startled eyes were bent watchfully on her boy. She—she had these
+devotions—for Bosinney—for that boy's father—for this boy! He touched
+Fleur's arm, and said:
+
+“Well, have you had enough?”
+
+“One more, Father, please.”
+
+She would be sick! He went to the counter to pay. When he turned round
+again he saw Fleur standing near the door, holding a handkerchief which
+the boy had evidently just handed to her.
+
+“F. F.,” he heard her say. “Fleur Forsyte—it's mine all right. Thank you
+ever so.”
+
+Good God! She had caught the trick from what he'd told her in the
+Gallery—monkey!
+
+“Forsyte? Why—that's my name too. Perhaps we're cousins.”
+
+“Really! We must be. There aren't any others. I live at Mapledurham;
+where do you?”
+
+“Robin Hill.”
+
+Question and answer had been so rapid that all was over before he could
+lift a finger. He saw Irene's face alive with startled feeling, gave the
+slightest shake of his head, and slipped his arm through Fleur's.
+
+“Come along!” he said.
+
+She did not move.
+
+“Didn't you hear, Father? Isn't it queer—our name's the same. Are we
+cousins?”
+
+“What's that?” he said. “Forsyte? Distant, perhaps.”
+
+“My name's Jolyon, sir. Jon, for short.”
+
+“Oh! Ah!” said Soames. “Yes. Distant. How are you? Very good of you.
+Good-bye!”
+
+He moved on.
+
+“Thanks awfully,” Fleur was saying. “Au revoir!”
+
+“Au revoir!” he heard the boy reply.
+
+
+
+
+
+II.—FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
+
+Emerging from the “pastry-cook's,” Soames' first impulse was to vent
+his nerves by saying to his daughter: 'Dropping your hand-kerchief!' to
+which her reply might well be: 'I picked that up from you!' His second
+impulse therefore was to let sleeping dogs lie. But she would surely
+question him. He gave her a sidelong look, and found she was giving him
+the same. She said softly:
+
+“Why don't you like those cousins, Father?” Soames lifted the corner of
+his lip.
+
+“What made you think that?”
+
+“Cela se voit.”
+
+'That sees itself!' What a way of putting it! After twenty years of
+a French wife Soames had still little sympathy with her language; a
+theatrical affair and connected in his mind with all the refinements of
+domestic irony.
+
+“How?” he asked.
+
+“You must know them; and you didn't make a sign. I saw them looking at
+you.”
+
+“I've never seen the boy in my life,” replied Soames with perfect truth.
+
+“No; but you've seen the others, dear.”
+
+Soames gave her another look. What had she picked up? Had her Aunt
+Winifred, or Imogen, or Val Dartie and his wife, been talking? Every
+breath of the old scandal had been carefully kept from her at home, and
+Winifred warned many times that he wouldn't have a whisper of it reach
+her for the world. So far as she ought to know, he had never been
+married before. But her dark eyes, whose southern glint and clearness
+often almost frightened him, met his with perfect innocence.
+
+“Well,” he said, “your grandfather and his brother had a quarrel. The
+two families don't know each other.”
+
+“How romantic!”
+
+'Now, what does she mean by that?' he thought. The word was to him
+extravagant and dangerous—it was as if she had said: “How jolly!”
+
+“And they'll continue not to know each, other,” he added, but instantly
+regretted the challenge in those words. Fleur was smiling. In this age,
+when young people prided themselves on going their own ways and paying
+no attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had said the very thing
+to excite her wilfulness. Then, recollecting the expression on Irene's
+face, he breathed again.
+
+“What sort of a quarrel?” he heard Fleur say.
+
+“About a house. It's ancient history for you. Your grandfather died the
+day you were born. He was ninety.”
+
+“Ninety? Are there many Forsytes besides those in the Red Book?”
+
+“I don't know,” said Soames. “They're all dispersed now. The old ones
+are dead, except Timothy.”
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.
+
+“Timothy? Isn't that delicious?”
+
+“Not at all,” said Soames. It offended him that she should think
+“Timothy” delicious—a kind of insult to his breed. This new generation
+mocked at anything solid and tenacious. “You go and see the old boy. He
+might want to prophesy.” Ah! If Timothy could see the disquiet England
+of his great-nephews and great-nieces, he would certainly give tongue.
+And involuntarily he glanced up at the Iseeum; yes—George was still in
+the window, with the same pink paper in his hand.
+
+“Where is Robin Hill, Father?”
+
+Robin Hill! Robin Hill, round which all that tragedy had centred! What
+did she want to know for?
+
+“In Surrey,” he muttered; “not far from Richmond. Why?”
+
+“Is the house there?”
+
+“What house?”
+
+“That they quarrelled about.”
+
+“Yes. But what's all that to do with you? We're going home
+to-morrow—you'd better be thinking about your frocks.”
+
+“Bless you! They're all thought about. A family feud? It's like the
+Bible, or Mark Twain—awfully exciting. What did you do in the feud,
+Father?”
+
+“Never you mind.”
+
+“Oh! But if I'm to keep it up?”
+
+“Who said you were to keep it up?”
+
+“You, darling.”
+
+“I? I said it had nothing to do with you.”
+
+“Just what I think, you know; so that's all right.”
+
+She was too sharp for him; fine, as Annette sometimes called her.
+Nothing for it but to distract her attention.
+
+“There's a bit of rosaline point in here,” he said, stopping before a
+shop, “that I thought you might like.”
+
+When he had paid for it and they had resumed their progress, Fleur said:
+
+“Don't you think that boy's mother is the most beautiful woman of her
+age you've ever seen?”
+
+Soames shivered. Uncanny, the way she stuck to it!
+
+“I don't know that I noticed her.”
+
+“Dear, I saw the corner of your eye.”
+
+“You see everything—and a great deal more, it seems to me!”
+
+“What's her husband like? He must be your first cousin, if your fathers
+were brothers.”
+
+“Dead, for all I know,” said Soames, with sudden vehemence. “I haven't
+seen him for twenty years.”
+
+“What was he?”
+
+“A painter.”
+
+“That's quite jolly.”
+
+The words: “If you want to please me you'll put those people out of your
+head,” sprang to Soames' lips, but he choked them back—he must not let
+her see his feelings.
+
+“He once insulted me,” he said.
+
+Her quick eyes rested on his face.
+
+“I see! You didn't avenge it, and it rankles. Poor Father! You let me
+have a go!”
+
+It was really like lying in the dark with a mosquito hovering above his
+face. Such pertinacity in Fleur was new to him, and, as they reached the
+hotel, he said grimly:
+
+“I did my best. And that's enough about these people. I'm going up till
+dinner.”
+
+“I shall sit here.”
+
+With a parting look at her extended in a chair—a look half-resentful,
+half-adoring—Soames moved into the lift and was transported to their
+suite on the fourth floor. He stood by the window of the sitting-room
+which gave view over Hyde Park, and drummed a finger on its pane. His
+feelings were confused, tetchy, troubled. The throb of that old wound,
+scarred over by Time and new interests, was mingled with displeasure
+and anxiety, and a slight pain in his chest where that nougat stuff had
+disagreed. Had Annette come in? Not that she was any good to him in such
+a difficulty. Whenever she had questioned him about his first marriage,
+he had always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it had
+been the great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself
+but domestic makeshift. She had always kept the grudge of that up her
+sleeve, as it were, and used it commercially. He listened. A sound—the
+vague murmur of a woman's movements—was coming through the door. She was
+in. He tapped.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“I,” said Soames.
+
+She had been changing her frock, and was still imperfectly clothed; a
+striking figure before her glass. There was a certain magnificence about
+her arms, shoulders, hair, which had darkened since he first knew
+her, about the turn of her neck, the silkiness of her garments, her
+dark-lashed, greyblue eyes—she was certainly as handsome at forty as she
+had ever been. A fine possession, an excellent housekeeper, a sensible
+and affectionate enough mother. If only she weren't always so frankly
+cynical about the relations between them! Soames, who had no more real
+affection for her than she had for him, suffered from a kind of English
+grievance in that she had never dropped even the thinnest veil of
+sentiment over their partnership. Like most of his countrymen and women,
+he held the view that marriage should be based on mutual love, but that
+when from a marriage love had disappeared, or, been found never to have
+really existed—so that it was manifestly not based on love—you must not
+admit it. There it was, and the love was not—but there you were, and
+must continue to be! Thus you had it both ways, and were not tarred
+with cynicism, realism, and immorality like the French. Moreover, it was
+necessary in the interests of property. He knew that she knew that they
+both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not
+to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand
+what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English. He said:
+
+“Whom have you got at 'The Shelter' next week?”
+
+Annette went on touching her lips delicately with salve—he always wished
+she wouldn't do that.
+
+“Your sister Winifred, and the Car-r-digans”—she took up a tiny stick of
+black—“and Prosper Profond.”
+
+“That Belgian chap? Why him?”
+
+Annette turned her neck lazily, touched one eyelash, and said:
+
+“He amuses Winifred.”
+
+“I want some one to amuse Fleur; she's restive.”
+
+“R-restive?” repeated Annette. “Is it the first time you see that, my
+friend? She was born r-restive, as you call it.”
+
+Would she never get that affected roll out of her r's?
+
+He touched the dress she had taken off, and asked:
+
+“What have you been doing?”
+
+Annette looked at him, reflected in her glass. Her just-brightened lips
+smiled, rather full, rather ironical.
+
+“Enjoying myself,” she said.
+
+“Oh!” answered Soames glumly. “Ribbandry, I suppose.”
+
+It was his word for all that incomprehensible running in and out of
+shops that women went in for. “Has Fleur got her summer dresses?”
+
+“You don't ask if I have mine.”
+
+“You don't care whether I do or not.”
+
+“Quite right. Well, she has; and I have mine—terribly expensive.”
+
+“H'm!” said Soames. “What does that chap Profond do in England?”
+
+Annette raised the eyebrows she had just finished.
+
+“He yachts.”
+
+“Ah!” said Soames; “he's a sleepy chap.”
+
+“Sometimes,” answered Annette, and her face had a sort of quiet
+enjoyment. “But sometimes very amusing.”
+
+“He's got a touch of the tar-brush about him.”
+
+Annette stretched herself.
+
+“Tar-brush?” she said. “What is that? His mother was Armenienne.”
+
+“That's it, then,” muttered Soames. “Does he know anything about
+pictures?”
+
+“He knows about everything—a man of the world.”
+
+“Well, get some one for Fleur. I want to distract her. She's going off
+on Saturday to Val Dartie and his wife; I don't like it.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+Since the reason could not be explained without going into family
+history, Soames merely answered:
+
+“Racketing about. There's too much of it.”
+
+“I like that little Mrs. Val; she is very quiet and clever.”
+
+“I know nothing of her except—This thing's new.” And Soames took up a
+creation from the bed.
+
+Annette received it from him.
+
+“Would you hook me?” she said.
+
+Soames hooked. Glancing once over her shoulder into the glass, he saw
+the expression on her face, faintly amused, faintly contemptuous, as
+much as to say: “Thanks! You will never learn!” No, thank God, he wasn't
+a Frenchman! He finished with a jerk, and the words: “It's too low
+here.” And he went to the door, with the wish to get away from her and
+go down to Fleur again.
+
+Annette stayed a powder-puff, and said with startling suddenness
+
+“Que tu es grossier!”
+
+He knew the expression—he had reason to. The first time she had used
+it he had thought it meant “What a grocer you are!” and had not known
+whether to be relieved or not when better informed. He resented the
+word—he was not coarse! If he was coarse, what was that chap in the
+room beyond his, who made those horrible noises in the morning when
+he cleared his throat, or those people in the Lounge who thought it
+well-bred to say nothing but what the whole world could hear at the top
+of their voices—quacking inanity! Coarse, because he had said her dress
+was low! Well, so it was! He went out without reply.
+
+Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where he
+had left her. She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot in
+silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming. Her eyes
+showed it too—they went off like that sometimes. And then, in a moment,
+she would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a monkey. And
+she knew so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen. What was that
+odious word? Flapper! Dreadful young creatures—squealing and squawking
+and showing their legs! The worst of them bad dreams, the best of them
+powdered angels! Fleur was not a flapper, not one of those slangy,
+ill-bred young females. And yet she was frighteningly self-willed, and
+full of life, and determined to enjoy it. Enjoy! The word brought
+no puritan terror to Soames; but it brought the terror suited to his
+temperament. He had always been afraid to enjoy to-day for fear he
+might not enjoy tomorrow so much. And it was terrifying to feel that his
+daughter was divested of that safeguard. The very way she sat in that
+chair showed it—lost in her dream. He had never been lost in a dream
+himself—there was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it from
+he did not know! Certainly not from Annette! And yet Annette, as a young
+girl, when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look. Well,
+she had lost it now!
+
+Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down at
+a writing-table. Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to write as
+if she had not time to breathe before she got her letter written. And
+suddenly she saw him. The air of desperate absorption vanished, she
+smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were a little puzzled
+and a little bored.
+
+Ah! She was “fine”—“fine!”
+
+
+
+
+
+III.—AT ROBIN HILL
+
+Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill,
+quietly going into his affairs. He did everything quietly now, because
+his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked the
+idea of dying. He had never realised how much till one day, two years
+ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms, and been told:
+
+“At any moment, on any overstrain.”
+
+He had taken it with a smile—the natural Forsyte reaction against an
+unpleasant truth. But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the
+way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over him.
+To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work—though he did little enough
+work now! To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable
+state, for such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind
+stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.
+Of such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he
+never could, and must still hover on the hope that he might see again
+those he loved! To realise this was to endure very poignant spiritual
+anguish. Before he reached home that day he had determined to keep it
+from Irene. He would have to be more careful than man had ever been, for
+the least thing would give it away and make her as wretched as himself,
+almost. His doctor had passed him sound in other respects, and seventy
+was nothing of an age—he would last a long time yet, if he could.
+
+Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the
+full the subtler side of character. Naturally not abrupt, except when
+nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate. The sad patience
+of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a smile which
+his lips preserved even in private. He devised continually all manner of
+cover to conceal his enforced lack of exertion.
+
+Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the Simple
+Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no
+coffee in it. In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in
+his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony. Secure from
+discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had spent the
+fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow
+without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final polish to his
+terrestrial state. Having docketed and enclosed it in his father's
+old Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words
+outside: “Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the exact
+state of me, J. F.,” and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be
+always about him, in case of accident. Then, ringing for tea, he went
+out to have it under the old oak-tree.
+
+All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little
+more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought
+habitually, like other people, of other things. He thought of his son
+now.
+
+Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
+Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his dead
+half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed to
+avoid the evil and contain the good of the Public School system, may
+or may not contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in April
+perfectly ignorant of what he wanted to become. The War, which had
+promised to go on for ever, had ended just as he was about to join the
+Army, six months before his time. It had taken him ever since to get
+used to the idea that he could now choose for himself. He had held with
+his father several discussions, from which, under a cheery show of being
+ready for anything—except, of course, the Church, Army, Law, Stage,
+Stock Exchange, Medicine, Business, and Engineering—Jolyon had gathered
+rather clearly that Jon wanted to go in for nothing. He himself had felt
+exactly like that at the same age. With him that pleasant vacuity had
+soon been ended by an early marriage, and its unhappy consequences.
+Forced to become an underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity
+before his artistic talent had outcropped. But having—as the simple
+say—“learned” his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that
+Jon would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his
+aversion from everything else meant that he was going to be a writer.
+Holding, however, the view that experience was necessary even for that
+profession, there seemed to Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for Jon, but
+University, travel, and perhaps the eating of dinners for the Bar. After
+that one would see, or more probably one would not. In face of these
+proffered allurements, however, Jon had remained undecided.
+
+Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether
+the world had really changed. People said that it was a new age. With
+the profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived that
+under slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it had
+been. Mankind was still divided into two species: The few who had
+“speculation” in their souls, and the many who had none, with a belt of
+hybrids like himself in the middle. Jon appeared to have speculation; it
+seemed to his father a bad lookout.
+
+With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard
+the boy say, a fortnight ago: “I should like to try farming, Dad; if it
+won't cost you too much. It seems to be about the only sort of life
+that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and of course that's out of the
+question for me.”
+
+Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:
+
+“All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first Jolyon
+in 1760. It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no doubt, you
+may grow a better turnip than he did.”
+
+A little dashed, Jon had answered:
+
+“But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?”
+
+“'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it, you'll do
+more good than most men, which is little enough.”
+
+To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it. I give him
+four years. Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'
+
+After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to his
+daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near them on
+the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice. Holly's answer had been
+enthusiastic. There was an excellent man quite close; she and Val would
+love Jon to live with them.
+
+The boy was due to go to-morrow.
+
+Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of
+the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
+thirty-two years. The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day
+older! So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the
+whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk. A tree of memories, which
+would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut it
+down—would see old England out at the pace things were going! He
+remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
+with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
+hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree. Next day they had found a
+bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm. That was before he knew that he
+was under sentence of death. He could almost have wished the bomb had
+finished him. It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours
+of cold fear in the pit of his stomach. He had counted on living to the
+normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.
+As it was, she would miss him. Still there was Jon, more important in
+her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.
+
+Under that tree, where old Jolyon—waiting for Irene to come to him
+across the lawn—had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
+whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better
+close his own eyes and drift away. There was something undignified in
+parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein
+he regretted two things only—the long division between his father and
+himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union with Irene.
+
+From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
+Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and
+his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.
+Spring! Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was
+still young enough to love beauty! Blackbirds sang recklessly in the
+shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened;
+and over the fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage,
+burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the distant “smoke-bush”
+blue was trailed along the horizon. Irene's flowers in their narrow beds
+had startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of
+gay life. Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had
+known how to get that startling little ego into each painted flower, and
+bird, and beast—the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of
+life as well. They were the fellows! 'I've made nothing that will live!'
+thought Jolyon; 'I've been an amateur—a mere lover, not a creator.
+Still, I shall leave Jon behind me when I go.' What luck that the boy
+had not been caught by that ghastly war! He might so easily have been
+killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal. Jon would
+do something some day—if the Age didn't spoil him—an imaginative chap!
+His whim to take up farming was but a bit of sentiment, and about as
+likely to last. And just then he saw them coming up the field: Irene and
+the boy; walking from the station, with their arms linked. And getting
+up, he strolled down through the new rose garden to meet them....
+
+Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window. She sat
+there without speaking till he said:
+
+“What is it, my love?”
+
+“We had an encounter to-day.”
+
+“With whom?”
+
+“Soames.”
+
+Soames! He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two years;
+conscious that it was bad for him. And, now, his heart moved in a
+disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within his chest.
+
+Irene went on quietly:
+
+“He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
+confectioner's where we had tea.”
+
+Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.
+
+“How did he look?”
+
+“Grey; but otherwise much the same.”
+
+“And the daughter?”
+
+“Pretty. At least, Jon thought so.”
+
+Jolyon's heart side-slipped again. His wife's face had a strained and
+puzzled look.
+
+“You didn't-?” he began.
+
+“No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief and he
+picked it up.”
+
+Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance!
+
+“June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?”
+
+“No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it was.”
+
+Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
+
+“I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from him. He'll
+find out some day.”
+
+“The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard judgment.
+When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your mother if she
+had done what I have?”
+
+Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of the
+tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the prisoned
+grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or passion—knew
+nothing at all, as yet!
+
+“What have you told him?” he said at last.
+
+“That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had never
+cared much for your family, or they for you. I expect he will be asking
+you.”
+
+Jolyon smiled. “This promises to take the place of air-raids,” he said.
+“After all, one misses them.”
+
+Irene looked up at him.
+
+“We've known it would come some day.”
+
+He answered her with sudden energy:
+
+“I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan't do that, even in
+thought. He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's put to
+him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
+otherwise.”
+
+“Not yet, Jolyon.”
+
+That was like her—she had no foresight, and never went to meet trouble.
+Still—who knew?—she might be right. It was ill going against a mother's
+instinct. It might be well to let the boy go on, if possible, till
+experience had given him some touchstone by which he could judge the
+values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing, had deepened
+his charity. All the same, one must take precautions—every precaution
+possible! And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over
+those precautions. He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew
+nothing as yet of family history. Holly was discreet, she would make
+sure of her husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter with
+him when he went to-morrow.
+
+And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate
+died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for
+Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so
+rounded off and polished....
+
+But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the
+prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, “love at
+first sight!” He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of those
+dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno—a conviction that this was
+his 'dream'. so that what followed had seemed to him at once natural
+and miraculous. Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for one who was
+terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when
+boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was
+almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
+took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy
+friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore, been inoculated
+against the germs of love by small doses of the poison. And now in the
+dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay awake, featuring Fleur—as
+they called it—recalling her words, especially that “Au revoir!” so soft
+and sprightly.
+
+He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
+shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out
+through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass.
+'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously white out of doors,
+with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go
+down into the coppice,' he thought. He ran down through the fields,
+reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice.
+Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was
+mystery—the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon
+sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening
+light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapleduram—a jolly
+name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas
+presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh! She must.
+She had said “Au revoir!” Not good-bye! What luck that she had dropped
+her handkerchief! He would never have known her but for that. And the
+more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.
+Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged his head; words
+jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.
+
+Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned
+to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out
+of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open,
+he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate
+all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to
+mortal soul-even-to his mother.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM
+
+There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving
+their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of
+“Timothy's” on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot
+in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging,
+of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air
+it twice a day.
+
+To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box,
+a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy. One did not reach
+him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of old-time
+habit or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon and ask
+after their surviving uncle. Such were Francie, now quite emancipated
+from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old
+Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her “man of the world.” But, after
+all, everybody was emancipated now, or said they were—perhaps not quite
+the same thing!
+
+When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on
+the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of
+seeing Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a faint demonstration within
+him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep
+of that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one
+dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and
+out of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened
+with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the “old people” of another
+century, another age.
+
+The sight of Smither—still corseted up to the armpits because the new
+fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been
+considered “nice” by Aunts Juley and Hester—brought a pale friendliness
+to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to old pattern in
+every detail, an invaluable servant—none such left—smiling back at him,
+with the words: “Why! it's Mr. Soames, after all this time! And how are
+you, sir? Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to know you've been.”
+
+“How is he?”
+
+“Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's a
+wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It
+would please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how he
+relishes a baked apple still. But he's quite deaf. And a mercy, I always
+think. For what we should have done with him in the air-raids, I don't
+know.”
+
+“Ah!” said Soames. “What did you do with him?”
+
+“We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the cellar,
+so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would never have done
+to let him know there was a war on. As I said to Cook, 'If Mr. Timothy
+rings, they may do what they like—I'm going up. My dear mistresses would
+have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody going to him.' But
+he slept through them all beautiful. And the one in the daytime he
+was having his bath. It was a mercy, because he might have noticed the
+people in the street all looking up—he often looks out of the window.”
+
+“Quite!” murmured Soames. Smither was getting garrulous! “I just want to
+look round and see if there's anything to be done.”
+
+“Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice in the
+dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of. It's funny they should
+be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not coming down,
+just before the War. But they're nasty little things; you never know
+where they'll take you next.”
+
+“Does he leave his bed?”—
+
+“Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window in
+the morning, not to risk a change of air. And he's quite comfortable in
+himself; has his Will out every day regular. It's a great consolation to
+him—that.”
+
+“Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything to
+say to me.”
+
+Smither coloured up above her corsets.
+
+“It will be an occasion!” she said. “Shall I take you round the house,
+sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?”
+
+“No, you go to him,” said Soames. “I can go round the house by myself.”
+
+One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt that
+he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so saturated
+with the past. When Smither, creaking with excitement, had left him,
+Soames entered the dining-room and sniffed. In his opinion it wasn't
+mice, but incipient wood-rot, and he examined the panelling. Whether it
+was worth a coat of paint, at Timothy's age, he was not sure. The room
+had always been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile
+curled Soames' lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted
+the oak dado; a heavy metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling
+divided by imitation beams. The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a
+bargain, one day at Jobson's sixty years ago—three Snyder “still lifes,”
+two faintly coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather charming,
+which bore the initials “J. R.”—Timothy had always believed they might
+turn out to be Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who admired them, had
+discovered that they were only John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of
+a white pony being shod. Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed
+dark mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and
+a mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
+apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body since
+he was four years old. He looked especially at the two drawings, and
+thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'
+
+From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study. He did not remember
+ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor to ceiling with
+volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity. One wall seemed devoted
+to educational books, which Timothy's firm had published two generations
+back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book. Soames read their
+titles and shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as
+used to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane, from which
+he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out
+together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The third wall
+he approached with more excitement. Here, surely, Timothy's own taste
+would be found. It was. The books were dummies. The fourth wall was all
+heavily curtained window. And turned toward it was a large chair with a
+mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy
+of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come
+down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still.
+In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy,
+deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and
+permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday
+afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with
+Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who
+was always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had
+been sick too. Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty
+times at least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe,
+and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch,
+bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in
+latitude 44.
+
+'Mausoleum!' he thought. 'George was right!' And he went out and up
+the stairs. On the half-landing he stopped before the case of stuffed
+humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They looked not a day
+older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If the case were opened
+the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing would crumble, he
+suspected. It wouldn't be worth putting that into the sale! And suddenly
+he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann—dear old Aunt Ann—holding him by
+the hand in front of that case and saying: “Look, Soamey! Aren't they
+bright and pretty, dear little humming-birds!” Soames remembered his
+own answer: “They don't hum, Auntie.” He must have been six, in a black
+velveteen suit with a light-blue collar-he remembered that suit well!
+Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave
+old aquiline smile—a fine old lady, Aunt Ann! He moved on up to
+the drawing-room door. There on each side of it were the groups of
+miniatures. Those he would certainly buy in! The miniatures of his
+four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and one of his Uncle
+Nicholas as a boy. They had all been painted by a young lady friend of
+the family at a time, 1830, about, when miniatures were considered very
+genteel, and lasting too, painted as they were on ivory. Many a time had
+he heard the tale of that young lady: “Very talented, my dear; she
+had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went into a
+consumption and died: so like Keats—we often spoke of it.”
+
+Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan—quite a small
+child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
+waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on heaven.
+Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been rather like
+that—a wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must have had talent, and
+miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet of their own, little
+subject to the currents of competition on aesthetic Change. Soames
+opened the drawing-room door. The room was dusted, the furniture
+uncovered, the curtains drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still
+dwelt there patiently waiting. And a thought came to him: When Timothy
+died—why not? Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this house—like
+Carlyle's—and put up a tablet, and show it? “Specimen of mid-Victorian
+abode—entrance, one shilling, with catalogue.” After all, it was the
+completest thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of to-day.
+Perfect in its special taste and culture, if, that is, he took down and
+carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon pictures he had
+given them. The still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned
+with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the
+cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of
+little knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey,
+Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian
+poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red
+plush, full of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their
+mother's father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow
+elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who
+had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery
+writing on it, recording God knew what! And the pictures crowding on
+the walls—all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like the
+foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that—pictures bright and
+illustrative, “Telling the Bees,” “Hey for the Ferry!” and two in the
+style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin.
+Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed a thousand times in
+supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt
+frames.
+
+And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed
+as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it. And the
+gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one side of the
+fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
+Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on
+the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light,
+for Aunt Hester. Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them
+sitting there. Ah! and the atmosphere—even now, of too many stuffs and
+washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
+thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.' And,
+by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life
+never departed from, for fastidiousness of skin and eye and nose and
+feeling, it beat to-day hollow—to-day with its Tubes and cars, its
+perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the
+knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the
+satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
+feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and
+their “So longs,” and their “Old Beans,” and their laughter—girls who
+gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them;
+and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him
+the shudders too. No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds,
+their eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a
+standard, and reverence for past and future.
+
+With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
+upstairs. He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order of
+the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls. At the
+top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors. Which of them was
+Timothy's? And he listened. A sound, as of a child slowly dragging a
+hobby-horse about, came to his ears. That must be Timothy! He tapped,
+and a door was opened by Smither, very red in the face.
+
+Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him
+to attend. If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see him
+through the door.
+
+Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.
+
+The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
+impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
+affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the
+window, a distance of some twelve feet. The lower part of his square
+face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as
+short as it could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where the
+hair was also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a good
+yellow. One hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the skirt of
+his Jaeger dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked
+ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers. The expression on his face
+was that of a crossed child, intent on something that he has not got.
+Each time he turned he stumped the stick, and then dragged it, as if to
+show that he could do without it:
+
+“He still looks strong,” said Soames under his breath.
+
+“Oh! yes, sir. You should see him take his bath—it's wonderful; he does
+enjoy it so.”
+
+Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight. Timothy had resumed his
+babyhood.
+
+“Does he take any interest in things generally?” he said, also loud.
+
+“Oh! yes, sir; his food and his Will. It's quite a sight to see him turn
+it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every now and then he
+asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a slate for him—very large.
+Of course, I always write the same, what they were when he last took
+notice, in 1914. We got the doctor to forbid him to read the paper when
+the War broke out. Oh! he did take on about that at first. But he soon
+came round, because he knew it tired him; and he's a wonder to conserve
+energy as he used to call it when my dear mistresses were alive, bless
+their hearts! How he did go on at them about that; they were always so
+active, if you remember, Mr. Soames.”
+
+“What would happen if I were to go in?” asked Soames: “Would he remember
+me? I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in 1907.”
+
+“Oh! that, sir,” replied Smither doubtfully, “I couldn't take on me to
+say. I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his age.”
+
+Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn, said in
+a loud voice: “Uncle Timothy!”
+
+Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.
+
+“Eh?” he said.
+
+“Soames,” cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out his hand,
+“Soames Forsyte!”
+
+“No!” said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the floor, he
+continued his walk.
+
+“It doesn't seem to work,” said Soames.
+
+“No, sir,” replied Smither, rather crestfallen; “you see, he hasn't
+finished his walk. It always was one thing at a time with him. I expect
+he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the gas, and a pretty job
+I shall have to make him understand.”
+
+“Do you think he ought to have a man about him?”
+
+Smither held up her hands. “A man! Oh! no. Cook and me can manage
+perfectly. A strange man about would send him crazy in no time. And my
+mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house. Besides, we're
+so—proud of him.”
+
+“I suppose the doctor comes?”
+
+“Every morning. He makes special terms for such a quantity, and Mr.
+Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to put out
+his tongue.”
+
+“Well,” said Soames, turning away, “it's rather sad and painful to me.”
+
+“Oh! sir,” returned Smither anxiously, “you mustn't think that. Now that
+he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life, really he does.
+As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man than he ever was. You
+see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his bath, he's eatin', and when
+he's not eatin', he's sleepin'. and there it is. There isn't an ache or
+a care about him anywhere.”
+
+“Well,” said Soames, “there's something in that. I'll go down. By the
+way, let me see his Will.”
+
+“I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under his
+pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active.”
+
+“I only want to know if it's the one I made,” said Soames; “you take a
+look at its date some time, and let me know.”
+
+“Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and Cook witnessed,
+you remember, and there's our names on it still, and we've only done it
+once.”
+
+“Quite,” said Soames. He did remember. Smither and Jane had been proper
+witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they might have
+no interest in Timothy's death. It had been—he fully admitted—an almost
+improper precaution, but Timothy had wished it, and, after all, Aunt
+Hester had provided for them amply.
+
+“Very well,” he said; “good-bye, Smither. Look after him, and if he
+should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me know.”
+
+“Oh! yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that. It's been such a pleasant
+change to see you. Cook will be quite excited when I tell her.”
+
+Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs. He stood for fully two
+minutes by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many times.
+'So it all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins again. Poor old
+chap!' And he listened, if perchance the sound of Timothy trailing his
+hobby-horse might come down the well of the stairs; or some ghost of an
+old face show over the bannisters, and an old voice say: 'Why, it's dear
+Soames, and we were only saying that we hadn't seen him for a week!'
+
+Nothing—nothing! Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a sunbeam
+through the fanlight over the door. The little old house! A mausoleum!
+And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his train.
+
+
+
+
+
+V.—THE NATIVE HEATH
+
+“His foot's upon his native heath, His name's—Val Dartie.”
+
+
+With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his age,
+set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old manor-house
+he had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs. His destination was
+Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn of 1899, when he
+stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire. He paused at the door to
+give his wife a kiss, and put a flask of port into his pocket.
+
+“Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much.”
+
+With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes looking
+into his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe. He should be moderate;
+Holly was always right—she had a natural aptitude. It did not seem so
+remarkable to him, perhaps, as it might to others, that—half Dartie as
+he was—he should have been perfectly faithful to his young first cousin
+during the twenty years since he married her romantically out in the
+Boer War; and faithful without any feeling of sacrifice or boredom—she
+was so quick, so slyly always a little in front of his mood. Being first
+cousins they had decided, rather needlessly, to have no children; and,
+though a little sallower, she had kept her looks, her slimness, and the
+colour of her dark hair. Val particularly admired the life of her own
+she carried on, besides carrying on his, and riding better every year.
+She kept up her music, she read an awful lot—novels, poetry, all sorts
+of stuff. Out on their farm in Cape colony she had looked after all
+the “nigger” babies and women in a miraculous manner. She was, in
+fact, clever; yet made no fuss about it, and had no “side.” Though not
+remarkable for humility, Val had come to have the feeling that she was
+his superior, and he did not grudge it—a great tribute. It might be
+noted that he never looked at Holly without her knowing of it, but that
+she looked at him sometimes unawares.
+
+He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so on the
+platform, though she was going to the station with him, to drive the car
+back. Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles inseparable
+from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened in the Boer War,
+had probably saved his life in the War just past, Val was still much
+as he had been in the days of his courtship; his smile as wide and
+charming, his eyelashes, if anything, thicker and darker, his eyes
+screwed up under them, as bright a grey, his freckles rather deeper, his
+hair a little grizzled at the sides. He gave the impression of one who
+has lived actively with horses in a sunny climate.
+
+Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:
+
+“When is young Jon coming?”
+
+“To-day.”
+
+“Is there anything you want for him? I could bring it down on Saturday.”
+
+“No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur—one-forty.”
+
+Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new country
+on bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects heaven at every
+hole.
+
+“That's a young woman who knows her way about,” he said. “I say, has it
+struck you?”
+
+“Yes,” said Holly.
+
+“Uncle Soames and your Dad—bit awkward, isn't it?”
+
+“She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be said, of course.
+It's only for five days, Val.”
+
+“Stable secret! Righto!” If Holly thought it safe, it was. Glancing
+slyly round at him, she said: “Did you notice how beautifully she asked
+herself?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Well, she did. What do you think of her, Val?”
+
+“Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she got her
+monkey up, I should say.”
+
+“I'm wondering,” Holly murmured, “whether she is the modern young woman.
+One feels at sea coming home into all this.”
+
+“You? You get the hang of things so quick.”
+
+Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.
+
+“You keep one in the know,” said Val encouraged. “What do you think of
+that Belgian fellow, Profond?”
+
+“I think he's rather 'a good devil.'”
+
+Val grinned.
+
+“He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family. In fact,
+our family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying a
+Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first. Our grandfathers
+would have had fits!”
+
+“So would anybody's, my dear.”
+
+“This car,” Val said suddenly, “wants rousing; she doesn't get her hind
+legs under her uphill. I shall have to give her her head on the slope if
+I'm to catch that train.”
+
+There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really
+sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his guidance
+compared with its running under that of Holly was always noticeable. He
+caught the train.
+
+“Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can. Good-bye,
+darling.”
+
+“Good-bye,” called Holly, and kissed her hand.
+
+In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between thoughts of
+Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim memory
+of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square book,
+all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and shape
+of horses. The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a certain
+strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie
+hankering for a Nutter. On getting back to England, after the profitable
+sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun
+seldom shone, Val had said to himself: “I've absolutely got to have an
+interest in life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting's
+not enough, I'll breed and I'll train.” With just that extra pinch of
+shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val
+had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They were all hypnotised by
+fashion and high price. He should buy for looks, and let names go hang!
+And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain
+of blood! Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in this
+damned climate which makes one go round in a ring. All the same, I must
+have a strain of Mayfly blood.'
+
+In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of those
+quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather
+than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His
+twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he
+had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman,
+and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called “the
+silly haw-haw” of some Englishmen, the “flapping cockatoory” of some
+English-women—Holly had none of that and Holly was his model. Observant,
+quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a transaction, a
+horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a Mayfly filly,
+when a slow voice said at his elbow:
+
+“Mr. Val Dartie? How's Mrs. Val Dartie? She's well, I hope.” And he saw
+beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.
+
+“Prosper Profond—I met you at lunch,” said the voice.
+
+“How are you?” murmured Val.
+
+“I'm very well,” replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
+inimitable slowness. “A good devil,” Holly had called him. Well! He
+looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard;
+a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly
+intelligent.
+
+“Here's a gentleman wants to know you—cousin of yours—Mr. George
+Forsyde.”
+
+Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
+lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
+remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at
+the Iseeum Club.
+
+“I used to go racing with your father,” George was saying: “How's the
+stud? Like to buy one of my screws?”
+
+Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen out
+of breeding. They believed in nothing over here, not even in horses.
+George Forsyte, Prosper Profond! The devil himself was not more
+disillusioned than those two.
+
+“Didn't know you were a racing man,” he said to Monsieur Profond.
+
+“I'm not. I don't care for it. I'm a yachtin' man. I don't care for
+yachtin' either, but I like to see my friends. I've got some lunch,
+Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you'd like to 'ave some; not
+much—just a small one—in my car.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Val; “very good of you. I'll come along in about quarter
+of an hour.”
+
+“Over there. Mr. Forsyde's comin',” and Monsieur Profond “poinded” with
+a yellow-gloved finger; “small car, with a small lunch”; he moved on,
+groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte following, neat, huge, and
+with his jesting air.
+
+Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly. George Forsyte, of course,
+was an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val felt
+extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which those two
+had laughed. The animal had lost reality.
+
+“That 'small' mare”—he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur
+Profond—“what do you see in her?—we must all die!”
+
+And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still! The Mayfly
+strain—was it any better than any other? He might just as well have a
+flutter with his money instead.
+
+“No, by gum!” he muttered suddenly, “if it's no good breeding horses,
+it's no good doing anything. What did I come for? I'll buy her.”
+
+He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the
+stand. Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers looking
+as if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their lives; tall,
+flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women; young men with an
+air as if trying to take it seriously—two or three of them with only one
+arm.
+
+'Life over here's a game!' thought Val. 'Muffin bell rings, horses run,
+money changes hands; ring again, run again, money changes back.'
+
+But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to watch
+the Mayfly filly canter down. She moved well; and he made his way over
+to the “small” car. The “small” lunch was the sort a man dreams of but
+seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond walked back with
+him to the paddock.
+
+“Your wife's a nice woman,” was his surprising remark.
+
+“Nicest woman I know,” returned Val dryly.
+
+“Yes,” said Monsieur Profond; “she has a nice face. I admire nice
+women.”
+
+Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct in the
+heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the moment.
+
+“Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small cruise.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Val, in arms again, “she hates the sea.”
+
+“So do I,” said Monsieur Profond.
+
+“Then why do you yacht?”
+
+The Belgian's eyes smiled. “Oh! I don't know. I've done everything; it's
+the last thing I'm doin'.”
+
+“It must be d-d expensive. I should want more reason than that.”
+
+Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a heavy
+lower lip.
+
+“I'm an easy-goin' man,” he said.
+
+“Were you in the War?” asked Val.
+
+“Ye-es. I've done that too. I was gassed; it was a small bit
+unpleasant.” He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity, as if
+he had caught it from his name.
+
+Whether his saying “small” when he ought to have said “little” was
+genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
+evidently capable of anything.
+
+Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
+Monsieur Profond said:
+
+“You goin' to bid?”
+
+Val nodded. With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of
+faith. Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the
+forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year
+to which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her
+grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could touch, having
+spent most of what he had realised from his South African farm on his
+establishment in Sussex. And very soon he was thinking: 'Dash it! she's
+going beyond me!' His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he dropped out of
+the bidding. The Mayfly filly passed under the hammer at seven hundred
+and fifty guineas. He was turning away vexed when the slow voice of
+Monsieur Profond said in his ear:
+
+“Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you take her
+and give her to your wife.”
+
+Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour in
+his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.
+
+“I made a small lot of money in the War,” began Monsieur Profond in
+answer to that look. “I 'ad armament shares. I like to give it away. I'm
+always makin' money. I want very small lot myself. I like my friends to
+'ave it.”
+
+“I'll buy her of you at the price you gave,” said Val with sudden
+resolution.
+
+“No,” said Monsieur Profond. “You take her. I don' want her.”
+
+“Hang it! one doesn't—”
+
+“Why not?” smiled Monsieur Profond. “I'm a friend of your family.”
+
+“Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars,” said Val
+impatiently.
+
+“All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you like
+with her.”
+
+“So long as she's yours,” said Val. “I don't mind that.”
+
+“That's all right,” murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.
+
+Val watched; he might be “a good devil,” but then again he might not. He
+saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no more.
+
+He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
+Street.
+
+Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering the
+three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague Dartie,
+till almost happily released by a French staircase. It was to her a
+vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from South Africa
+after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and to have taken
+a fancy to his wife. Winifred, who in the late seventies, before her
+marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom, pleasure, and fashion,
+confessed her youth outclassed by the donzellas of the day. They seemed,
+for instance, to regard marriage as an incident, and Winifred sometimes
+regretted that she had not done the same; a second, third, fourth
+incident might have secured her a partner of less dazzling inebriety;
+though, after all, he had left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a
+colonel and unharmed by the War)—none of whom had been divorced as yet.
+The steadiness of her children often amazed one who remembered their
+father; but, as she was fond of believing, they were really all
+Forsytes, favouring herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen. Her
+brother's “little girl” Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred. The child was
+as restless as any of these modern young women—“She's a small flame in a
+draught,” Prosper Profond had said one day after dinner—but she did
+not flap, or talk at the top of her voice. The steady Forsyteism in
+Winifred's own character instinctively resented the feeling in the
+air, the modern girl's habits and her motto: “All's much of a muchness!
+Spend, to-morrow we shall be poor!” She found it a saving grace in Fleur
+that, having set her heart on a thing, she had no change of heart until
+she got it—though—what happened after, Fleur was, of course, too young
+to have made evident. The child was a “very pretty little thing,” too,
+and quite a credit to take about, with her mother's French taste and
+gift for wearing clothes; everybody turned to look at Fleur—great
+consideration to Winifred, a lover of the style and distinction which
+had so cruelly deceived her in the case of Montague Dartie.
+
+In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning, Winifred
+dwelt on the family skeleton.
+
+“That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene, Val—it's
+old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing about it—making
+a fuss. Your Uncle Soames is very particular about that. So you'll be
+careful.”
+
+“Yes! But it's dashed awkward—Holly's young half-brother is coming to
+live with us while he learns farming. He's there already.”
+
+“Oh!” said Winifred. “That is a gaff! What is he like?”
+
+“Only saw him once—at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909; he was
+naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes—a jolly little chap.”
+
+Winifred thought that “rather nice,” and added comfortably: “Well,
+Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with it. I shan't tell your
+uncle. It'll only bother him. It's a great comfort to have you back, my
+dear boy, now that I'm getting on.”
+
+“Getting on! Why! you're as young as ever. That chap Profond, Mother, is
+he all right?”
+
+“Prosper Profond! Oh! the most amusing man I know.”
+
+Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.
+
+“That's so like him,” murmured Winifred. “He does all sorts of things.”
+
+“Well,” said Val shrewdly, “our family haven't been too lucky with that
+kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted for us.”
+
+It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute before she
+answered:
+
+“Oh! well! He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances.”
+
+“All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow.”
+
+And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and left her
+for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria station.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI.—JON
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen deeply
+in love, fortunately with something of her own, for the object of her
+passion was the prospect in front of her windows, the cool clear
+light on the green Downs. It was England again, at last! England more
+beautiful than she had dreamed. Chance had, in fact, guided the Val
+Darties to a spot where the South Downs had real charm when the sun
+shone. Holly had enough of her father's eye to apprehend the rare
+quality of their outlines and chalky radiance; to go up there by the
+ravine-like lane and wander along toward Chanctonbury or Amberley, was
+still a delight which she hardly attempted to share with Val, whose
+admiration of Nature was confused by a Forsyte's instinct for getting
+something out of it, such as the condition of the turf for his horses'
+exercise.
+
+Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she promised
+herself that the first use she would make of Jon would be to take him up
+there, and show him “the view” under this May-day sky.
+
+She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a motherliness
+not exhausted by Val. A three-day visit to Robin Hill, soon after their
+arrival home, had yielded no sight of him—he was still at school; so
+that her recollection, like Val's, was of a little sunny-haired boy,
+striped blue and yellow, down by the pond.
+
+Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad, embarrassing.
+Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's courtship; the ageing of
+her father, not seen for twenty years, something funereal in his ironic
+gentleness which did not escape one who had much subtle instinct;
+above all, the presence of her stepmother, whom she could still
+vaguely remember as the “lady in grey” of days when she was little and
+grandfather alive and Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because that intruder
+gave her music lessons—all these confused and tantalised a spirit which
+had longed to find Robin Hill untroubled. But Holly was adept at keeping
+things to herself, and all had seemed to go quite well.
+
+Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she was
+sure had trembled.
+
+“Well, my dear,” he said, “the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has it?
+If only you could have brought Jolly back with you! I say, can you
+stand this spiritualistic racket? When the oak-tree dies, it dies, I'm
+afraid.”
+
+From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had let the
+cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.
+
+“Spiritualism—queer word, when the more they manifest the more they
+prove that they've got hold of matter.”
+
+“How?” said Holly.
+
+“Why! Look at their photographs of auric presences. You must have
+something material for light and shade to fall on before you can take
+a photograph. No, it'll end in our calling all matter spirit, or all
+spirit matter—I don't know which.”
+
+“But don't you believe in survival, Dad?”
+
+Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face impressed
+her deeply.
+
+“Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death. I've been
+looking into it a bit. But for the life of me I can't find anything that
+telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from the storehouse of
+this world can't account for just as well. Wish I could! Wishes father
+thought but they don't breed evidence.” Holly had pressed her lips again
+to his forehead with the feeling that it confirmed his theory that all
+matter was becoming spirit—his brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.
+
+But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been watching,
+unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter from Jon. It
+was—she decided—the prettiest sight she had ever seen. Irene, lost as it
+were in the letter of her boy, stood at a window where the light fell on
+her face and her fine grey hair; her lips were moving, smiling, her dark
+eyes laughing, dancing, and the hand which did not hold the letter was
+pressed against her breast. Holly withdrew as from a vision of perfect
+love, convinced that Jon must be nice.
+
+When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in either
+hand, she was confirmed in her predisposition. He was a little like
+Jolly, that long-lost idol of her childhood, but eager-looking and less
+formal, with deeper eyes and brighter-coloured hair, for he wore no hat;
+altogether a very interesting “little” brother!
+
+His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance in
+the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him home,
+instead of his driving her. Shouldn't he have a shot? They hadn't a car
+at Robin Hill since the War, of course, and he had only driven once, and
+landed up a bank, so she oughtn't to mind his trying. His laugh, soft
+and infectious, was very attractive, though that word, she had heard,
+was now quite old-fashioned. When they reached the house he pulled out
+a crumpled letter which she read while he was washing—a quite short
+letter, which must have cost her father many a pang to write.
+
+“MY DEAR,
+
+“You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of family
+history. His mother and I think he is too young at present. The boy is
+very dear, and the apple of her eye. Verbum sapientibus,
+
+“Your loving father,
+
+“J. F.”
+
+That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur was
+coming.
+
+After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up the
+hill. They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit grown over
+with brambles and goosepenny. Milkwort and liverwort starred the green
+slope, the larks sang, and thrushes in the brake, and now and then a
+gull flighting inland would wheel very white against the paling sky,
+where the vague moon was coming up. Delicious fragrance came to them, as
+if little invisible creatures were running and treading scent out of the
+blades of grass.
+
+Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:
+
+“I say, this is wonderful! There's no fat on it at all. Gull's flight
+and sheep-bells.”
+
+“'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'. You're a poet, my dear!”
+
+Jon sighed.
+
+“Oh, Golly! No go!”
+
+“Try! I used to at your age.”
+
+“Did you? Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so rotten. Have you any of
+yours for me to see?”
+
+“My dear,” Holly murmured, “I've been married nineteen years. I only
+wrote verses when I wanted to be.”
+
+“Oh!” said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she could see
+was a charming colour. Was Jon “touched in the wind,” then, as Val would
+have called it? Already? But, if so, all the better, he would take no
+notice of young Fleur. Besides, on Monday he would begin his farming.
+And she smiled. Was it Burns who followed the plough, or only Piers
+Plowman? Nearly every young man and most young women seemed to be poets
+now, judging from the number of their books she had read out in South
+Africa, importing them from Hatchus and Bumphards; and quite good—oh!
+quite; much better than she had been herself! But then poetry had only
+really come in since her day—with motor-cars. Another long talk after
+dinner over a wood fire in the low hall, and there seemed little left to
+know about Jon except anything of real importance. Holly parted from him
+at his bedroom door, having seen twice over that he had everything, with
+the conviction that she would love him, and Val would like him. He
+was eager, but did not gush; he was a splendid listener, sympathetic,
+reticent about himself. He evidently loved their father, and adored his
+mother. He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games. He saved
+moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them out of doors
+in screws of paper sooner than kill them. In a word, he was amiable. She
+went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer horribly if anybody hurt
+him; but who would hurt him?
+
+Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of paper and
+a pencil, writing his first “real poem” by the light of a candle because
+there was not enough moon to see by, only enough to make the night seem
+fluttery and as if engraved on silver. Just the night for Fleur to walk,
+and turn her eyes, and lead on-over the hills and far away. And Jon,
+deeply furrowed in his ingenuous brow, made marks on the paper and
+rubbed them out and wrote them in again, and did all that was necessary
+for the completion of a work of art; and he had a feeling such as the
+winds of Spring must have, trying their first songs among the coming
+blossom. Jon was one of those boys (not many) in whom a home-trained
+love of beauty had survived school life. He had had to keep it to
+himself, of course, so that not even the drawing-master knew of it; but
+it was there, fastidious and clear within him. And his poem seemed to
+him as lame and stilted as the night was winged. But he kept it, all the
+same. It was a “beast,” but better than nothing as an expression of the
+inexpressible. And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be
+able to show it to Mother.' He slept terribly well, when he did sleep,
+overwhelmed by novelty.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.—FLEUR
+
+To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered, all
+that had been told Jon was:
+
+“There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end.”
+
+For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: “We've got a
+youngster staying with us.”
+
+The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore in
+a manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired. They were
+thus introduced by Holly:
+
+“This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon.”
+
+Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong sunlight,
+was so confounded by the providential nature of this miracle, that he
+had time to hear Fleur say calmly: “Oh, how do you do?” as if he had
+never seen her, and to understand dimly from the quickest imaginable
+little movement of her head that he never had seen her. He bowed
+therefore over her hand in an intoxicated manner, and became more silent
+than the grave. He knew better than to speak. Once in his early life,
+surprised reading by a nightlight, he had said fatuously “I was just
+turning over the leaves, Mum,” and his mother had replied: “Jon, never
+tell stories, because of your face nobody will ever believe them.”
+
+The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
+success of spoken untruth. He listened therefore to Fleur's swift and
+rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with scones and
+jam, and got away as soon as might be. They say that in delirium tremens
+you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which suddenly changes shape
+and position. Jon saw the fixed object; it had dark eyes and passably
+dark hair, and changed its position, but never its shape. The
+knowledge that between him and that object there was already a secret
+understanding (however impossible to understand) thrilled him so that
+he waited feverishly, and began to copy out his poem—which of course he
+would never dare to—show her—till the sound of horses' hoofs roused him,
+and, leaning from his window, he saw her riding forth with Val. It was
+clear that she wasted no time, but the sight filled him with grief. He
+wasted his. If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy, he might
+have been asked to go too. And from his window he sat and watched them
+disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge
+once more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down. 'Silly brute!'
+he thought; 'I always miss my chances.'
+
+Why couldn't he be self-confident and ready? And, leaning his chin on
+his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her. A week-end
+was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it. Did he know any
+one except himself who would have been such a flat? He did not.
+
+He dressed for dinner early, and was first down. He would miss no more.
+But he missed Fleur, who came down last. He sat opposite her at dinner,
+and it was terrible—impossible to say anything for fear of saying
+the wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her in the only
+natural way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one with whom in fancy
+he had already been over the hills and far away; conscious, too, all the
+time, that he must seem to her, to all of them, a dumb gawk. Yes, it was
+terrible! And she was talking so well—swooping with swift wing this
+way and that. Wonderful how she had learned an art which he found so
+disgustingly difficult. She must think him hopeless indeed!
+
+His sister's eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged him
+at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and eager,
+seeming to say, “Oh! for goodness' sake!” obliged him to look at Val,
+where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet—that, at least, had no
+eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.
+
+“Jon is going to be a farmer,” he heard Holly say; “a farmer and a
+poet.”
+
+He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow just
+like their father's, laughed, and felt better.
+
+Val recounted the incident of Monsieur Prosper Profond; nothing could
+have been more favourable, for, in relating it, he regarded Holly, who
+in turn regarded him, while Fleur seemed to be regarding with a slight
+frown some thought of her own, and Jon was really free to look at her at
+last. She had on a white frock, very simple and well made; her arms were
+bare, and her hair had a white rose in it. In just that swift moment of
+free vision, after such intense discomfort, Jon saw her sublimated, as
+one sees in the dark a slender white fruit-tree; caught her like a verse
+of poetry flashed before the eyes of the mind, or a tune which floats
+out in the distance and dies. He wondered giddily how old she was—she
+seemed so much more self-possessed and experienced than himself. Why
+mustn't he say they had met? He remembered suddenly his mother's face;
+puzzled, hurt-looking, when she answered: “Yes, they're relations,
+but we don't know them.” Impossible that his mother, who loved beauty,
+should not admire Fleur if she did know her.
+
+Alone with Val after dinner, he sipped port deferentially and answered
+the advances of this new-found brother-in-law. As to riding (always the
+first consideration with Val) he could have the young chestnut, saddle
+and unsaddle it himself, and generally look after it when he brought it
+in. Jon said he was accustomed to all that at home, and saw that he had
+gone up one in his host's estimation.
+
+“Fleur,” said Val, “can't ride much yet, but she's keen. Of course, her
+father doesn't know a horse from a cart-wheel. Does your Dad ride?”
+
+“He used to; but now he's—you know, he's—” He stopped, so hating the
+word “old.” His father was old, and yet not old; no—never!
+
+“Quite,” muttered Val. “I used to know your brother up at Oxford, ages
+ago, the one who died in the Boer War. We had a fight in New College
+Gardens. That was a queer business,” he added, musing; “a good deal came
+out of it.”
+
+Jon's eyes opened wide; all was pushing him toward historical research,
+when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:
+
+“Come along, you two,” and he rose, his heart pushing him toward
+something far more modern.
+
+Fleur having declared that it was “simply too wonderful to stay
+indoors,” they all went out. Moonlight was frosting the dew, and an old
+sundial threw a long shadow. Two box hedges at right angles, dark
+and square, barred off the orchard. Fleur turned through that angled
+opening.
+
+“Come on!” she called. Jon glanced at the others, and followed. She was
+running among the trees like a ghost. All was lovely and foamlike above
+her, and there was a scent of old trunks, and of nettles. She vanished.
+He thought he had lost her, then almost ran into her standing quite
+still.
+
+“Isn't it jolly?” she cried, and Jon answered:
+
+“Rather!”
+
+She reached up, twisted off a blossom and, twirling it in her fingers,
+said:
+
+“I suppose I can call you Jon?”
+
+“I should think so just.”
+
+“All right! But you know there's a feud between our families?”
+
+Jon stammered: “Feud? Why?”
+
+“It's ever so romantic and silly. That's why I pretended we hadn't
+met. Shall we get up early to-morrow morning and go for a walk before
+breakfast and have it out? I hate being slow about things, don't you?”
+
+Jon murmured a rapturous assent.
+
+“Six o'clock, then. I think your mother's beautiful”
+
+Jon said fervently: “Yes, she is.”
+
+“I love all kinds of beauty,” went on Fleur, “when it's exciting. I
+don't like Greek things a bit.”
+
+“What! Not Euripides?”
+
+“Euripides? Oh! no, I can't bear Greek plays; they're so long. I think
+beauty's always swift. I like to look at one picture, for instance, and
+then run off. I can't bear a lot of things together. Look!” She held
+up her blossom in the moonlight. “That's better than all the orchard, I
+think.”
+
+And, suddenly, with her other hand she caught Jon's.
+
+“Of all things in the world, don't you think caution's the most awful?
+Smell the moonlight!”
+
+She thrust the blossom against his face; Jon agreed giddily that of all
+things in the world caution was the worst, and bending over, kissed the
+hand which held his.
+
+“That's nice and old-fashioned,” said Fleur calmly. “You're frightfully
+silent, Jon. Still I like silence when it's swift.” She let go his hand.
+“Did you think I dropped my handkerchief on purpose?”
+
+“No!” cried Jon, intensely shocked.
+
+“Well, I did, of course. Let's get back, or they'll think we're doing
+this on purpose too.” And again she ran like a ghost among the trees.
+Jon followed, with love in his heart, Spring in his heart, and over all
+the moonlit white unearthly blossom. They came out where they had gone
+in, Fleur walking demurely.
+
+“It's quite wonderful in there,” she said dreamily to Holly.
+
+Jon preserved silence, hoping against hope that she might be thinking it
+swift.
+
+She bade him a casual and demure good-night, which made him think he had
+been dreaming....
+
+In her bedroom Fleur had flung off her gown, and, wrapped in a shapeless
+garment, with the white flower still in her hair, she looked like a
+mousme, sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing by candlelight.
+
+“DEAREST CHERRY,
+
+“I believe I'm in love. I've got it in the neck, only the feeling is
+really lower down. He's a second cousin-such a child, about six months
+older and ten years younger than I am. Boys always fall in love with
+their seniors, and girls with their juniors or with old men of forty.
+Don't laugh, but his eyes are the truest things I ever saw; and he's
+quite divinely silent! We had a most romantic first meeting in London
+under the Vospovitch Juno. And now he's sleeping in the next room and
+the moonlight's on the blossom; and to-morrow morning, before anybody's
+awake, we're going to walk off into Down fairyland. There's a feud
+between our families, which makes it really exciting. Yes! and I may
+have to use subterfuge and come on you for invitations—if so, you'll
+know why! My father doesn't want us to know each other, but I can't help
+that. Life's too short. He's got the most beautiful mother, with lovely
+silvery hair and a young face with dark eyes. I'm staying with his
+sister—who married my cousin; it's all mixed up, but I mean to pump
+her to-morrow. We've often talked about love being a spoil-sport; well,
+that's all tosh, it's the beginning of sport, and the sooner you feel
+it, my dear, the better for you.
+
+“Jon (not simplified spelling, but short for Jolyon, which is a name in
+my family, they say) is the sort that lights up and goes out; about five
+feet ten, still growing, and I believe he's going to be a poet. If
+you laugh at me I've done with you forever. I perceive all sorts of
+difficulties, but you know when I really want a thing I get it. One of
+the chief effects of love is that you see the air sort of inhabited,
+like seeing a face in the moon; and you feel—you feel dancey and soft
+at the same time, with a funny sensation—like a continual first sniff of
+orange—blossom—Just above your stays. This is my first, and I feel as if
+it were going to be my last, which is absurd, of course, by all the laws
+of Nature and morality. If you mock me I will smite you, and if you tell
+anybody I will never forgive you. So much so, that I almost don't think
+I'll send this letter. Anyway, I'll sleep over it. So good-night, my
+Cherry—oh!
+
+“Your,
+
+“FLEUR.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII.—IDYLL ON GRASS
+
+When those two young Forsytes emerged from the chine lane, and set their
+faces east toward the sun, there was not a cloud in heaven, and the
+Downs were dewy. They had come at a good bat up the slope and were a
+little out of breath; if they had anything to say they did not say it,
+but marched in the early awkwardness of unbreakfasted morning under the
+songs of the larks. The stealing out had been fun, but with the freedom
+of the tops the sense of conspiracy ceased, and gave place to dumbness.
+
+“We've made one blooming error,” said Fleur, when they had gone half a
+mile. “I'm hungry.”
+
+Jon produced a stick of chocolate. They shared it and their tongues
+were loosened. They discussed the nature of their homes and previous
+existences, which had a kind of fascinating unreality up on that lonely
+height. There remained but one thing solid in Jon's past—his mother; but
+one thing solid in Fleur's—her father; and of these figures, as though
+seen in the distance with disapproving faces, they spoke little.
+
+The Down dipped and rose again toward Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of
+far sea came into view, a sparrow-hawk hovered in the sun's eye so that
+the blood-nourished brown of his wings gleamed nearly red. Jon had a
+passion for birds, and an aptitude for sitting very still to watch them;
+keen-sighted, and with a memory for what interested him, on birds he was
+almost worth listening to. But in Chanctonbury Ring there were none—its
+great beech temple was empty of life, and almost chilly at this early
+hour; they came out willingly again into the sun on the far side. It was
+Fleur's turn now. She spoke of dogs, and the way people treated them. It
+was wicked to keep them on chains! She would like to flog people who did
+that. Jon was astonished to find her so humanitarian. She knew a dog,
+it seemed, which some farmer near her home kept chained up at the end of
+his chicken run, in all weathers, till it had almost lost its voice from
+barking!
+
+“And the misery is,” she said vehemently, “that if the poor thing didn't
+bark at every one who passes it wouldn't be kept there. I do think men
+are cunning brutes. I've let it go twice, on the sly; it's nearly bitten
+me both times, and then it goes simply mad with joy; but it always runs
+back home at last, and they chain it up again. If I had my way, I'd
+chain that man up.” Jon saw her teeth and her eyes gleam. “I'd brand him
+on his forehead with the word 'Brute'. that would teach him!”
+
+Jon agreed that it would be a good remedy.
+
+“It's their sense of property,” he said, “which makes people chain
+things. The last generation thought of nothing but property; and that's
+why there was the War.”
+
+“Oh!” said Fleur, “I never thought of that. Your people and mine
+quarrelled about property. And anyway we've all got it—at least, I
+suppose your people have.”
+
+“Oh! yes, luckily; I don't suppose I shall be any good at making money.”
+
+“If you were, I don't believe I should like you.”
+
+Jon slipped his hand tremulously under her arm. Fleur looked straight
+before her and chanted:
+
+“Jon, Jon, the farmer's son, Stole a pig, and away he run!”
+
+Jon's arm crept round her waist.
+
+“This is rather sudden,” said Fleur calmly; “do you often do it?”
+
+Jon dropped his arm. But when she laughed his arm stole back again; and
+Fleur began to sing:
+
+“O who will oer the downs so free, O who will with me ride? O who will
+up and follow me—-”
+
+“Sing, Jon!”
+
+Jon sang. The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning church
+far away over in Steyning. They went on from tune to tune, till Fleur
+said:
+
+“My God! I am hungry now!”
+
+“Oh! I am sorry!”
+
+She looked round into his face.
+
+“Jon, you're rather a darling.”
+
+And she pressed his hand against her waist. Jon almost reeled from
+happiness. A yellow-and-white dog coursing a hare startled them apart.
+They watched the two vanish down the slope, till Fleur said with a sigh:
+“He'll never catch it, thank goodness! What's the time? Mine's stopped.
+I never wound it.”
+
+Jon looked at his watch. “By Jove!” he said, “mine's stopped; too.”
+
+They walked on again, but only hand in hand.
+
+“If the grass is dry,” said Fleur, “let's sit down for half a minute.”
+
+Jon took off his coat, and they shared it.
+
+“Smell! Actually wild thyme!”
+
+With his arm round her waist again, they sat some minutes in silence.
+
+“We are goats!” cried Fleur, jumping up; “we shall be most fearfully
+late, and look so silly, and put them on their guard. Look here, Jon We
+only came out to get an appetite for breakfast, and lost our way. See?”
+
+“Yes,” said Jon.
+
+“It's serious; there'll be a stopper put on us. Are you a good liar?”
+
+“I believe not very; but I can try.”
+
+Fleur frowned.
+
+“You know,” she said, “I realize that they don't mean us to be friends.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“I told you why.”
+
+“But that's silly.”
+
+“Yes; but you don't know my father!”
+
+“I suppose he's fearfully fond of you.”
+
+“You see, I'm an only child. And so are you—of your mother. Isn't it
+a bore? There's so much expected of one. By the time they've done
+expecting, one's as good as dead.”
+
+“Yes,” muttered Jon, “life's beastly short. One wants to live forever,
+and know everything.”
+
+“And love everybody?”
+
+“No,” cried Jon; “I only want to love once—you.”
+
+“Indeed! You're coming on! Oh! Look! There's the chalk-pit; we can't be
+very far now. Let's run.”
+
+Jon followed, wondering fearfully if he had offended her.
+
+The chalk-pit was full of sunshine and the murmuration of bees. Fleur
+flung back her hair.
+
+“Well,” she said, “in case of accidents, you may give me one kiss, Jon,”
+and she pushed her cheek forward. With ecstasy he kissed that hot soft
+cheek.
+
+“Now, remember! We lost our way; and leave it to me as much as you can.
+I'm going to be rather beastly to you; it's safer; try and be beastly to
+me!”
+
+Jon shook his head. “That's impossible.”
+
+“Just to please me; till five o'clock, at all events.”
+
+“Anybody will be able to see through it,” said Jon gloomily.
+
+“Well, do your best. Look! There they are! Wave your hat! Oh! you
+haven't got one. Well, I'll cooee! Get a little away from me, and look
+sulky.”
+
+Five minutes later, entering the house and doing his utmost to look
+sulky, Jon heard her clear voice in the dining-room:
+
+“Oh! I'm simply ravenous! He's going to be a farmer—and he loses his
+way! The boy's an idiot!”
+
+
+
+
+
+IX. GOYA
+
+Lunch was over and Soames mounted to the picture-gallery in his house
+near Mapleduram. He had what Annette called “a grief.” Fleur was not
+yet home. She had been expected on Wednesday; had wired that it would be
+Friday; and again on Friday that it would be Sunday afternoon; and here
+were her aunt, and her cousins the Cardigans, and this fellow Profond,
+and everything flat as a pancake for the want of her. He stood before
+his Gauguin—sorest point of his collection. He had bought the ugly great
+thing with two early Matisses before the War, because there was such
+a fuss about those Post-Impressionist chaps. He was wondering whether
+Profond would take them off his hands—the fellow seemed not to know
+what to do with his money—when he heard his sister's voice say: “I think
+that's a horrid thing, Soames,” and saw that Winifred had followed him
+up.
+
+“Oh! you do?” he said dryly; “I gave five hundred for it.”
+
+“Fancy! Women aren't made like that even if they are black.”
+
+Soames uttered a glum laugh. “You didn't come up to tell me that.”
+
+“No. Do you know that Jolyon's boy is staying with Val and his wife?”
+
+Soames spun round.
+
+“What?”
+
+“Yes,” drawled Winifred; “he's gone to live with them there while he
+learns farming.”
+
+Soames had turned away, but her voice pursued him as he walked up and
+down. “I warned Val that neither of them was to be spoken to about old
+matters.”
+
+“Why didn't you tell me before?”
+
+Winifred shrugged her substantial shoulders.
+
+“Fleur does what she likes. You've always spoiled her. Besides, my dear
+boy, what's the harm?”
+
+“The harm!” muttered Soames. “Why, she—” he checked himself. The Juno,
+the handkerchief, Fleur's eyes, her questions, and now this delay in
+her return—the symptoms seemed to him so sinister that, faithful to his
+nature, he could not part with them.
+
+“I think you take too much care,” said Winifred. “If I were you, I
+should tell her of that old matter. It's no good thinking that girls in
+these days are as they used to be. Where they pick up their knowledge I
+can't tell, but they seem to know everything.”
+
+Over Soames' face, closely composed, passed a sort of spasm, and
+Winifred added hastily:
+
+“If you don't like to speak of it, I could for you.”
+
+Soames shook his head. Unless there was absolute necessity the thought
+that his adored daughter should learn of that old scandal hurt his pride
+too much.
+
+“No,” he said, “not yet. Never if I can help it.
+
+“Nonsense, my dear. Think what people are!”
+
+“Twenty years is a long time,” muttered Soames. “Outside our family,
+who's likely to remember?”
+
+Winifred was silenced. She inclined more and more to that peace and
+quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in her youth. And,
+since pictures always depressed her, she soon went down again.
+
+Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya
+and the copy of the fresco “La Vendimia.” His acquisition of the real
+Goya rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested interests and
+passions which mesh the bright-winged fly of human life. The real
+Goya's noble owner's ancestor had come into possession of it during
+some Spanish war—it was in a word loot. The noble owner had remained
+in ignorance of its value until in the nineties an enterprising critic
+discovered that a Spanish painter named Goya was a genius. It was only
+a fair Goya, but almost unique in England, and the noble owner became a
+marked man. Having many possessions and that aristocratic culture
+which, independent of mere sensuous enjoyment, is founded on the sounder
+principle that one must know everything and be fearfully interested in
+life, he had fully intended to keep an article which contributed to his
+reputation while he was alive, and to leave it to the nation after
+he was dead. Fortunately for Soames, the House of Lords was violently
+attacked in 1909, and the noble owner became alarmed and angry. 'If,'
+he said to himself, 'they think they can have it both ways they are very
+much mistaken. So long as they leave me in quiet enjoyment the nation
+can have some of my pictures at my death. But if the nation is going to
+bait me, and rob me like this, I'm damned if I won't sell the lot. They
+can't have my private property and my public spirit-both.' He brooded
+in this fashion for several months till one morning, after reading the
+speech of a certain statesman, he telegraphed to his agent to come
+down and bring Bodkin. On going over the collection Bodkin, than whose
+opinion on market values none was more sought, pronounced that with a
+free hand to sell to America, Germany, and other places where there was
+an interest in art, a lot more money could be made than by selling in
+England. The noble owner's public spirit—he said—was well known but the
+pictures were unique. The noble owner put this opinion in his pipe and
+smoked it for a year. At the end of that time he read another speech by
+the same statesman, and telegraphed to his agents: “Give Bodkin a free
+hand.” It was at this juncture that Bodkin conceived the idea which
+saved the Goya and two other unique pictures for the native country
+of the noble owner. With one hand Bodkin proffered the pictures to
+the foreign market, with the other he formed a list of private British
+collectors. Having obtained what he considered the highest possible
+bids from across the seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the private
+British collectors, and invited them, of their public spirit, to
+outbid. In three instances (including the Goya) out of twenty-one he was
+successful. And why? One of the private collectors made buttons—he
+had made so many that he desired that his wife should be called Lady
+“Buttons.” He therefore bought a unique picture at great cost, and
+gave it to the nation. It was “part,” his friends said, “of his general
+game.” The second of the private collectors was an Americophobe, and
+bought an unique picture to “spite the damned Yanks.” The third of
+the private collectors was Soames, who—more sober than either of the,
+others—bought after a visit to Madrid, because he was certain that Goya
+was still on the up grade. Goya was not booming at the moment, but he
+would come again; and, looking at that portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque
+in its directness, but with its own queer sharp beauty of paint, he was
+perfectly satisfied still that he had made no error, heavy though the
+price had been—heaviest he had ever paid. And next to it was hanging the
+copy of “La Vendimia.” There she was—the little wretch—looking back at
+him in her dreamy mood, the mood he loved best because he felt so much
+safer when she looked like that.
+
+He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his nostrils,
+and a voice said:
+
+“Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?”
+
+That Belgian chap, whose mother—as if Flemish blood were not enough—had
+been Armenian! Subduing a natural irritation, he said:
+
+“Are you a judge of pictures?”
+
+“Well, I've got a few myself.”
+
+“Any Post-Impressionists?”
+
+“Ye-es, I rather like them.”
+
+“What do you think of this?” said Soames, pointing to the Gauguin.
+
+Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard.
+
+“Rather fine, I think,” he said; “do you want to sell it?”
+
+Soames checked his instinctive “Not particularly”—he would not chaffer
+with this alien.
+
+“Yes,” he said.
+
+“What do you want for it?”
+
+“What I gave.”
+
+“All right,” said Monsieur Profond. “I'll be glad to take that small
+picture. Post-Impressionists—they're awful dead, but they're amusin'. I
+don' care for pictures much, but I've got some, just a small lot.”
+
+“What do you care for?”
+
+Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty nuts.”
+
+“You're young,” said Soames. If the fellow must make a generalization,
+he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked solidity!
+
+“I don' worry,” replied Monsieur Profond smiling; “we're born, and we
+die. Half the world's starvin'. I feed a small lot of babies out in my
+mother's country; but what's the use? Might as well throw my money in
+the river.”
+
+Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya. He didn't know
+what the fellow wanted.
+
+“What shall I make my cheque for?” pursued Monsieur Profond.
+
+“Five hundred,” said Soames shortly; “but I don't want you to take it if
+you don't care for it more than that.”
+
+“That's all right,” said Monsieur Profond; “I'll be 'appy to 'ave that
+picture.”
+
+He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold. Soames
+watched the process uneasily. How on earth had the fellow known that he
+wanted to sell that picture? Monsieur Profond held out the cheque.
+
+“The English are awful funny about pictures,” he said. “So are the
+French, so are my people. They're all awful funny.”
+
+“I don't understand you,” said Soames stiffly.
+
+“It's like hats,” said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, “small or large,
+turnin' up or down—just the fashion. Awful funny.” And, smiling, he
+drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the smoke of his
+excellent cigar.
+
+Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
+ownership had been called in question. 'He's a cosmopolitan,' he
+thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette,
+and saunter down the lawn toward the river. What his wife saw in the
+fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak her language;
+and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have called a
+“small doubt” whether Annette was not too handsome to be walking with
+any one so “cosmopolitan.” Even at that distance he could see the blue
+fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet sunlight; and his
+grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat—the fellow was a dandy! And he
+could see the quick turn of his wife's head, so very straight on her
+desirable neck and shoulders. That turn of her neck always seemed to him
+a little too showy, and in the “Queen of all I survey” manner—not quite
+distinguished. He watched them walk along the path at the bottom of the
+garden. A young man in flannels joined them down there—a Sunday caller
+no doubt, from up the river. He went back to his Goya. He was still
+staring at that replica of Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news,
+when his wife's voice said:
+
+“Mr. Michael Mont, Soames. You invited him to see your pictures.”
+
+There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!
+
+“Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne. Jolly
+day, isn't it?”
+
+Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his
+visitor. The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly—he seemed
+always grinning. Why didn't he grow the rest of those idiotic little
+moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon? What on
+earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with these
+tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers? Ugh! Affected young idiots! In
+other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very clean.
+
+“Happy to see you!” he said.
+
+The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became
+transfixed. “I say!” he said, “'some' picture!”
+
+Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to
+the Goya copy.
+
+“Yes,” he said dryly, “that's not a Goya. It's a copy. I had it painted
+because it reminded me of my daughter.”
+
+“By Jove! I thought I knew the face, sir. Is she here?”
+
+The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.
+
+“She'll be in after tea,” he said. “Shall we go round the pictures?”
+
+And Soames began that round which never tired him. He had not
+anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an
+original, but as they passed from section to section, period to period,
+he was startled by the young man's frank and relevant remarks. Natively
+shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his mask, Soames had not spent
+thirty-eight years over his one hobby without knowing something more
+about pictures than their market values. He was, as it were, the missing
+link between the artist and the commercial public. Art for art's sake
+and all that, of course, was cant. But aesthetics and good taste were
+necessary. The appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what
+gave a work of art its permanent market value, or in other words made
+it “a work of art.” There was no real cleavage. And he was sufficiently
+accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by one
+who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: “Good old haystacks!” or of James
+Maris: “Didn't he just paint and paper 'em! Mathew was the real swell,
+sir; you could dig into his surfaces!” It was after the young man had
+whistled before a Whistler, with the words, “D'you think he ever really
+saw a naked woman, sir?” that Soames remarked:
+
+“What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?”
+
+“I, sir? I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that. Then in
+the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock Exchange, snug and
+warm and just noisy enough. But the Peace knocked that, shares seem off,
+don't they? I've only been demobbed about a year. What do you recommend,
+sir?”
+
+“Have you got money?”
+
+“Well,” answered the young man, “I've got a father; I kept him alive
+during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now. Though, of course,
+there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang on to his
+property. What do you think about that, sir?”
+
+Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.
+
+“The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet. He's got
+land, you know; it's a fatal disease.”
+
+“This is my real Goya,” said Soames dryly.
+
+“By George! He was a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled me
+middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace.
+He made no compromise with the public taste. That old boy was 'some'
+explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day.
+Couldn't he just paint! He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you think?”
+
+“I have no Velasquez,” said Soames.
+
+The young man stared. “No,” he said; “only nations or profiteers can
+afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations
+sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers by
+force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an
+Old Master—see schedule—must hang it in a public gallery? There seems
+something in that.”
+
+“Shall we go down to tea?” said Soames.
+
+The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull. 'He's not dense,'
+thought Soames, following him off the premises.
+
+Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original “line,”
+and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to
+admiration the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the inglenook
+below. He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice to the
+sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of
+brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea;
+justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the
+fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that
+rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired, corseted solidity; to Soames, of
+a certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the vivacious Michael
+Mont, pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance,
+growing a little stout; to Prosper Profond, with his expression as
+who should say, “Well, Mr. Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small
+party?” finally, to Jack Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned
+sanguinity betraying the moving principle: “I'm English, and I live to
+be fit.”
+
+Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly
+one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man—they were so
+dull—should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so destroyed
+all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to rest with ten
+thousand other Englishmen without knowing the difference from the one
+she had chosen to repose beside. “Oh!” she would say of him, in her
+“amusing” way, “Jack keeps himself so fearfully fit; he's never had
+a day's illness in his life. He went right through the War without a
+finger-ache. You really can't imagine how fit he is!” Indeed, he was
+so “fit” that he couldn't see when she was flirting, which was such a
+comfort in a way. All the same she was quite fond of him, so far as one
+could be of a sports-machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after
+his pattern. Her eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with
+Prosper Profond. There was no “small” sport or game which Monsieur
+Profond had not played at too, it seemed, from skittles to
+tarpon-fishing, and worn out every one. Imogen would sometimes wish that
+they had worn out Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them
+with the simple zeal of a school-girl learning hockey; at the age of
+Great-uncle Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing carpet golf
+in her bedroom, and “wiping somebody's eye.”
+
+He was telling them now how he had “pipped the pro—a charmin' fellow,
+playin' a very good game,” at the last hole this morning; and how he
+had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying to incite Prosper
+Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea—do him good—“keep him fit.
+
+“But what's the use of keepin' fit?” said Monsieur Profond.
+
+“Yes, sir,” murmured Michael Mont, “what do you keep fit for?”
+
+“Jack,” cried Imogen, enchanted, “what do you keep fit for?”
+
+Jack Cardigan stared with all his health. The questions were like the
+buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away. During the
+War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that it was over
+he either did not know, or shrank in delicacy from explanation of his
+moving principle.
+
+“But he's right,” said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, “there's nothin'
+left but keepin' fit.”
+
+The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed unanswered,
+but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.
+
+“Good!” he cried. “That's the great discovery of the War. We all thought
+we were progressing—now we know we're only changing.”
+
+“For the worse,” said Monsieur Profond genially.
+
+“How you are cheerful, Prosper!” murmured Annette.
+
+“You come and play tennis!” said Jack Cardigan; “you've got the hump.
+We'll soon take that down. D'you play, Mr. Mont?”
+
+“I hit the ball about, sir.”
+
+At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of
+preparation for the future which guided his existence.
+
+“When Fleur comes—” he heard Jack Cardigan say.
+
+Ah! and why didn't she come? He passed through drawing-room, hall, and
+porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car. All
+was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the air.
+There were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by the
+sunlight. Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had waited in
+such agony with her life and her mother's balanced in his hands, came
+to him sharply. He had saved her then, to be the flower of his life. And
+now! was she going to give him trouble—pain—give him trouble? He did
+not like the look of things! A blackbird broke in on his reverie with an
+evening song—a great big fellow up in that acacia-tree. Soames had taken
+quite an interest in his birds of late years; he and Fleur would walk
+round and watch them; her eyes were sharp as needles, and she knew every
+nest. He saw her dog, a retriever, lying on the drive in a patch of
+sunlight, and called to him. “Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!”
+The dog came slowly with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid
+a pat on his head. The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur
+for him; no more, no less. 'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too fond!' He
+was like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea. Uninsured again—as in
+that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and jealous
+in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman—his first wife—the
+mother of this infernal boy. Ah! There was the car at last! It drew up,
+it had luggage, but no Fleur.
+
+“Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path.”
+
+Walking all those miles? Soames stared. The man's face had the beginning
+of a smile on it. What was he grinning at? And very quickly he turned,
+saying, “All right, Sims!” and went into the house. He mounted to the
+picture-gallery once more. He had from there a view of the river bank,
+and stood with his eyes fixed on it, oblivious of the fact that it would
+be an hour at least before her figure showed there. Walking up! And that
+fellow's grin! The boy—! He turned abruptly from the window. He couldn't
+spy on her. If she wanted to keep things from him—she must; he could not
+spy on her. His heart felt empty, and bitterness mounted from it into
+his very mouth. The staccato shouts of Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball,
+the laugh of young Mont rose in the stillness and came in. He hoped they
+were making that chap Profond run. And the girl in “La Vendimia” stood
+with her arm akimbo and her dreamy eyes looking past him. 'I've done all
+I could for you,' he thought, 'since you were no higher than my knee.
+You aren't going to—to—hurt me, are you?'
+
+But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to
+tone down. 'There's no real life in it,' thought Soames. 'Why doesn't
+she come?'
+
+
+
+
+
+X.—TRIO
+
+Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth
+generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end prolonged unto the
+ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to
+snapping-point. Never had Fleur been so “fine,” Holly so watchful, Val
+so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed. What he learned of
+farming in that week might have been balanced on the point of a penknife
+and puffed off. He, whose nature was essentially averse from intrigue,
+and whose adoration of Fleur disposed him to think that any need for
+concealing it was “skittles,” chafed and fretted, yet obeyed, taking
+what relief he could in the few moments when they were alone.
+On Thursday, while they were standing in the bay window of the
+drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:
+
+“Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if you were
+to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me down, and
+just get back here by the last train, after. You were going home anyway,
+weren't you?”
+
+Jon nodded.
+
+“Anything to be with you,” he said; “only why need I pretend—”
+
+Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:
+
+“You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me. It's serious
+about our people. We've simply got to be secret at present, if we want
+to be together.” The door was opened, and she added loudly: “You are a
+duffer, Jon.”
+
+Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge
+about a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.
+
+On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning out
+of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of Paddington
+station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger-nail tapping on his
+door. He rushed to it and listened. Again the sound. It was a nail. He
+opened. Oh! What a lovely thing came in!
+
+“I wanted to show you my fancy dress,” it said, and struck an attitude
+at the foot of his bed.
+
+Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door. The apparition
+wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a
+wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist.
+
+It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a
+fan which touched its head.
+
+“This ought to be a basket of grapes,” it whispered, “but I haven't got
+it here. It's my Goya dress. And this is the attitude in the picture. Do
+you like it?”
+
+“It's a dream.”
+
+The apparition pirouetted. “Touch it, and see.”
+
+Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.
+
+“Grape colour,” came the whisper, “all grapes—La Vendimia—the vintage.”
+
+Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up,
+with adoring eyes.
+
+“Oh! Jon,” it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again,
+and, gliding out, was gone.
+
+Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed.
+How long he stayed like that he did not know. The little noises—of the
+tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling—as in a dream—went on
+about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled and
+whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air. And his
+forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place between the
+brows, like the imprint of a flower. Love filled his soul, that love of
+boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the
+down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory—a
+searing passion—a humdrum mateship—or, once in many times, vintage full
+and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.
+
+Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to show
+what long marches lay between him and his great-great-grandfather, the
+first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea. Jon was sensitive as a girl,
+more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the day; imaginative as one
+of his half-sister June's “lame duck” painters; affectionate as a son
+of his father and his mother naturally would be. And yet, in his inner
+tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret
+tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not
+to know when he was beaten. Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys
+get a bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature
+dark, and been but normally unhappy there. Only with his mother had he,
+up till then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home
+to Robin Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said
+that he must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never
+yet kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met again,
+unless he found that she knew already. So intolerable did this seem to
+him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in
+London. And the first thing his mother said to him was:
+
+“So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon. What
+is she like on second thoughts?”
+
+With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:
+
+“Oh! awfully jolly, Mum.”
+
+Her arm pressed his.
+
+Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to
+falsify Fleur's fears and to release his soul. He turned to look at her,
+but something in her smiling face—something which only he perhaps would
+have caught—stopped the words bubbling up in him. Could fear go with a
+smile? If so, there was fear in her face. And out of Jon tumbled quite
+other words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs. Talking fast, he
+waited for her to come back to Fleur. But she did not. Nor did
+his father mention her, though of course he, too, must know. What
+deprivation, and killing of reality was in his silence about Fleur—when
+he was so full of her; when his mother was so full of Jon, and his
+father so full of his mother! And so the trio spent the evening of that
+Saturday.
+
+After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
+liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up
+where his fingers had run through it. He gazed at his mother while she
+played, but he saw Fleur—Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the
+sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering,
+stooping, kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot
+himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was
+Dad looking like that for? The expression on his face was so sad and
+puzzling. It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and
+went and sat on the arm of his father's chair. From there he could not
+see his face; and again he saw Fleur—in his mother's hands, slim and
+white on the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair;
+and down the long room in the open window where the May night walked
+outside.
+
+When he went up to bed his mother came into his room. She stood at the
+window, and said:
+
+“Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
+wonderfully. I always think they look beautiful under a dropping moon. I
+wish you had known your grandfather, Jon.”
+
+“Were you married to father when he was alive?” asked Jon suddenly.
+
+“No, dear; he died in '92—very old—eighty-five, I think.”
+
+“Is Father like him?”
+
+“A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid.”
+
+“I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?”
+
+“One of June's 'lame ducks.' But it's quite good.”
+
+Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm. “Tell me about the family
+quarrel, Mum.”
+
+He felt her arm quivering. “No, dear; that's for your Father some day,
+if he thinks fit.”
+
+“Then it was serious,” said Jon, with a catch in his breath.
+
+“Yes.” And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether the
+arm or the hand within it were quivering most.
+
+“Some people,” said Irene softly, “think the moon on her back is evil;
+to me she's always lovely. Look at those cypress shadows! Jon, Father
+says we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months. Would you like?”
+
+Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp and
+so confused. Italy with his mother! A fortnight ago it would have been
+perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that the sudden
+suggestion had to do with Fleur. He stammered out:
+
+“Oh! yes; only—I don't know. Ought I—now I've just begun? I'd like to
+think it over.”
+
+Her voice answered, cool and gentle:
+
+“Yes, dear; think it over. But better now than when you've begun farming
+seriously. Italy with you! It would be nice!”
+
+Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.
+
+“Do you think you ought to leave Father?” he said feebly, feeling very
+mean.
+
+“Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least before
+you settle down to anything.”
+
+The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes—he knew—that his father
+and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he himself. They
+wanted to keep him from Fleur. His heart hardened. And, as if she felt
+that process going on, his mother said:
+
+“Good-night, darling. Have a good sleep and think it over. But it would
+be lovely!”
+
+She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face. Jon
+stood feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty little boy;
+sore because he was not loving, and because he was justified in his own
+eyes.
+
+But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed through
+the dressing-room between it and her husband's.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“He will think it over, Jolyon.”
+
+Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said quietly:
+
+“You had better let me tell him, and have done with it. After all, Jon
+has the instincts of a gentleman. He has only to understand—”
+
+“Only! He can't understand; that's impossible.”
+
+“I believe I could have at his age.”
+
+Irene caught his hand. “You were always more of a realist than Jon; and
+never so innocent.”
+
+“That's true,” said Jolyon. “It's queer, isn't it? You and I would tell
+our stories to the world without a particle of shame; but our own boy
+stumps us.”
+
+“We've never cared whether the world approves or not.”
+
+“Jon would not disapprove of us!”
+
+“Oh! Jolyon, yes. He's in love, I feel he's in love. And he'd say: 'My
+mother once married without love! How could she have!' It'll seem to him
+a crime! And so it was!”
+
+Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:
+
+“Ah! why on earth are we born young? Now, if only we were born old and
+grew younger year by year, we should understand how things happen, and
+drop all our cursed intolerance. But you know if the boy is really
+in love, he won't forget, even if he goes to Italy. We're a tenacious
+breed; and he'll know by instinct why he's being sent. Nothing will
+really cure him but the shock of being told.”
+
+“Let me try, anyway.”
+
+Jolyon stood a moment without speaking. Between this devil and this deep
+sea—the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of losing his wife
+for two months—he secretly hoped for the devil; yet if she wished for
+the deep sea he must put up with it. After all, it would be training for
+that departure from which there would be no return. And, taking her in
+his arms, he kissed her eyes, and said:
+
+“As you will, my love.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XI.—DUET
+
+That “small” emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with
+extinction. Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his time
+and a full week after, as it seemed to him. He stood at the appointed
+bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris tweed suit
+exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart. He read the
+names of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at last, to avoid
+being regarded with suspicion by the book-stall clerk. It was called
+“The Heart of the Trail!” which must mean something, though it did not
+seem to. He also bought “The Lady's Mirror” and “The Landsman.” Every
+minute was an hour long, and full of horrid imaginings. After nineteen
+had passed, he saw her with a bag and a porter wheeling her luggage. She
+came swiftly; she came cool. She greeted him as if he were a brother.
+
+“First class,” she said to the porter, “corner seats; opposite.”
+
+Jon admired her frightful self-possession.
+
+“Can't we get a carriage to ourselves,” he whispered.
+
+“No good; it's a stopping train. After Maidenhead perhaps. Look natural,
+Jon.”
+
+Jon screwed his features into a scowl. They got in—with two other
+beasts!—oh! heaven! He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his confusion.
+The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there, and looking as if
+he knew all about it into the bargain.
+
+Fleur hid herself behind “The Lady's Mirror.” Jon imitated her behind
+“The Landsman.” The train started. Fleur let “The Lady's Mirror” fall
+and leaned forward.
+
+“Well?” she said.
+
+“It's seemed about fifteen days.”
+
+She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.
+
+“Look natural,” murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of laughter.
+It hurt him. How could he look natural with Italy hanging over him? He
+had meant to break it to her gently, but now he blurted it out.
+
+“They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months.”
+
+Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her lips. “Oh!”
+she said. It was all, but it was much.
+
+That “Oh!” was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing ready for
+riposte. It came.
+
+“You must go!”
+
+“Go?” said Jon in a strangled voice.
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“But—two months—it's ghastly.”
+
+“No,” said Fleur, “six weeks. You'll have forgotten me by then. We'll
+meet in the National Gallery the day after you get back.”
+
+Jon laughed.
+
+“But suppose you've forgotten me,” he muttered into the noise of the
+train.
+
+Fleur shook her head.
+
+“Some other beast—” murmured Jon.
+
+Her foot touched his.
+
+“No other beast,” she said, lifting “The Lady's Mirror.”
+
+The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.
+
+'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at all.'
+
+The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.
+
+“I never let go,” she said; “do you?”
+
+Jon shook his head vehemently.
+
+“Never!” he said. “Will you write to me?”
+
+“No; but you can—to my Club.”
+
+She had a Club; she was wonderful!
+
+“Did you pump Holly?” he muttered.
+
+“Yes, but I got nothing. I didn't dare pump hard.”
+
+“What can it be?” cried Jon.
+
+“I shall find out all right.”
+
+A long silence followed till Fleur said: “This is Maidenhead; stand by,
+Jon!”
+
+The train stopped. The remaining passenger got out. Fleur drew down her
+blind.
+
+“Quick!” she cried. “Hang out! Look as much of a beast as you can.”
+
+Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he scowled
+like that! An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the handle. It
+turned, but the door would not open. The train moved, the young lady
+darted to another carriage.
+
+“What luck!” cried Jon. “It Jammed.”
+
+“Yes,” said Fleur; “I was holding it.”
+
+The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.
+
+“Look out for the corridor,” she whispered; “and—quick!”
+
+Her lips met his. And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten seconds,
+Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond, that, when he was again
+sitting opposite that demure figure, he was pale as death. He heard her
+sigh, and the sound seemed to him the most precious he had ever heard—an
+exquisite declaration that he meant something to her.
+
+“Six weeks isn't really long,” she said; “and you can easily make it six
+if you keep your head out there, and never seem to think of me.”
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+“This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't
+you see? If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop being
+ridiculous about it. Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain; there's a girl in a
+Goya picture at Madrid who's like me, Father says. Only she isn't—we've
+got a copy of her.”
+
+It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog. “I'll make
+it Spain,” he said, “Mother won't mind; she's never been there. And my
+Father thinks a lot of Goya.”
+
+“Oh! yes, he's a painter—isn't he?”
+
+“Only water-colour,” said Jon, with honesty.
+
+“When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to Caversham
+lock and wait for me. I'll send the car home and we'll walk by the
+towing-path.”
+
+Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the world
+well lost, and one eye on the corridor. But the train seemed to run
+twice as fast now, and its sound was almost lost in that of Jon's
+sighing.
+
+“We're getting near,” said Fleur; “the towing-path's awfully exposed.
+One more! Oh! Jon, don't forget me.”
+
+Jon answered with his kiss. And very soon, a flushed, distracted-looking
+youth could have been seen—as they say—leaping from the train and
+hurrying along the platform, searching his pockets for his ticket.
+
+When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond
+Caversham lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure of
+equanimity. If they had to part, he would not make a scene! A breeze by
+the bright river threw the white side of the willow leaves up into the
+sunlight, and followed those two with its faint rustle.
+
+“I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy,” said Fleur. “Did you look
+pretty natural as you went out?”
+
+“I don't know. What is natural?”
+
+“It's natural to you to look seriously happy. When I first saw you I
+thought you weren't a bit like other people.”
+
+“Exactly what I thought when I saw you. I knew at once I should never
+love anybody else.”
+
+Fleur laughed.
+
+“We're absurdly young. And love's young dream is out of date, Jon.
+Besides, it's awfully wasteful. Think of all the fun you might have. You
+haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really. And there's me. I wonder!”
+
+Confusion came on Jon's spirit. How could she say such things just as
+they were going to part?
+
+“If you feel like that,” he said, “I can't go. I shall tell Mother that
+I ought to try and work. There's always the condition of the world!”
+
+“The condition of the world!”
+
+Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
+
+“But there is,” he said; “think of the people starving!”
+
+Fleur shook her head. “No, no, I never, never will make myself miserable
+for nothing.”
+
+“Nothing! But there's an awful state of things, and of course one ought
+to help.”
+
+“Oh! yes, I know all that. But you can't help people, Jon; they're
+hopeless. When you pull them out they only get into another hole. Look
+at them, still fighting and plotting and struggling, though they're
+dying in heaps all the time. Idiots!”
+
+“Aren't you sorry for them?”
+
+“Oh! sorry—yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy about it;
+that's no good.”
+
+And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each other's
+natures.
+
+“I think people are brutes and idiots,” said Fleur stubbornly.
+
+“I think they're poor wretches,” said Jon. It was as if they had
+quarrelled—and at this supreme and awful moment, with parting visible
+out there in that last gap of the willows!
+
+“Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me.”
+
+Jon stood still. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs
+trembled. Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.
+
+“I must believe in things,” said Jon with a sort of agony; “we're all
+meant to enjoy life.”
+
+Fleur laughed. “Yes; and that's what you won't do, if you don't take
+care. But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself wretched.
+There are lots of people like that, of course.”
+
+She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned. Was it Fleur
+thus staring at the water? Jon had an unreal feeling as if he were
+passing through the scene in a book where the lover has to choose
+between love and duty. But just then she looked round at him. Never was
+anything so intoxicating as that vivacious look. It acted on him exactly
+as the tug of a chain acts on a dog—brought him up to her with his tail
+wagging and his tongue out.
+
+“Don't let's be silly,” she said, “time's too short. Look, Jon, you can
+just see where I've got to cross the river. There, round the bend, where
+the woods begin.”
+
+Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the trees—and
+felt his heart sink.
+
+“I mustn't dawdle any more. It's no good going beyond the next hedge, it
+gets all open. Let's get on to it and say good-bye.”
+
+They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge, where
+the may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.
+
+“My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street, Piccadilly. Letters there
+will be quite safe, and I'm almost always up once a week.”
+
+Jon nodded. His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared straight
+before him.
+
+“To-day's the twenty-third of May,” said Fleur; “on the ninth of July
+I shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne' at three o'clock; will
+you?”
+
+“I will.”
+
+“If you feel as bad as I it's all right. Let those people pass!”
+
+A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday
+fashion.
+
+The last of them passed the wicket gate.
+
+“Domesticity!” said Fleur, and blotted herself against the hawthorn
+hedge. The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink cluster
+brushed her cheek. Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.
+
+“Good-bye, Jon.” For a second they stood with hands hard clasped. Then
+their lips met for the third time, and when they parted Fleur broke away
+and fled through the wicket gate. Jon stood where she had left him, with
+his forehead against that pink cluster. Gone! For an eternity—for seven
+weeks all but two days! And here he was, wasting the last sight of
+her! He rushed to the gate. She was walking swiftly on the heels of the
+straggling children. She turned her head, he saw her hand make a little
+flitting gesture; then she sped on, and the trailing family blotted her
+out from his view.
+
+The words of a comic song—
+
+“Paddington groan-worst ever known He gave a sepulchral Paddington
+groan—”
+
+
+came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading station.
+All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with “The Heart
+of the Trail” open on his knee, knitting in his head a poem so full of
+feeling that it would not rhyme.
+
+
+
+
+
+XII.—CAPRICE
+
+Fleur sped on. She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and wanted
+all her wits about her when she got in. She passed the islands, the
+station, and hotel, and was about to take the ferry, when she saw a
+skiff with a young man standing up in it, and holding to the bushes.
+
+“Miss Forsyte,” he said; “let me put you across. I've come on purpose.”
+
+She looked at him in blank amazement.
+
+“It's all right, I've been having tea with your people. I thought I'd
+save you the last bit. It's on my way, I'm just off back to Pangbourne.
+My name's Mont. I saw you at the picture-gallery—you remember—when your
+father invited me to see his pictures.”
+
+“Oh!” said Fleur; “yes—the handkerchief.”
+
+To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped down
+into the skiff. Still emotional, and a little out of breath, she sat
+silent; not so the young man. She had never heard any one say so much in
+so short a time. He told her his age, twenty-four; his weight, ten stone
+eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his sensations
+under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticized the Juno,
+mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on the Goya
+copy, said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the
+condition of England; spoke of Monsieur Profond—or whatever his name
+was—as “an awful sport”; thought her father had some “ripping” pictures
+and some rather “dug-up”; hoped he might row down again and take her
+on the river because he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of
+Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet
+together some time—considered the name Fleur Forsyte simply topping;
+cursed his people for giving him the name of Michael on the top of Mont;
+outlined his father, and said that if she wanted a good book she should
+read “Job”; his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.
+
+“But Job didn't have land,” Fleur murmured; “he only had flocks and
+herds and moved on.”
+
+“Ah!” answered Michael Mont, “I wish my gov'nor would move on. Not that
+I want his land. Land's an awful bore in these days, don't you think?”
+
+“We never have it in my family,” said Fleur. “We have everything else.
+I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental farm in Dorset,
+because we came from there originally, but it cost him more than it made
+him happy.”
+
+“Did he sell it?”
+
+“No; he kept it.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because nobody would buy it.”
+
+“Good for the old boy!”
+
+“No, it wasn't good for him. Father says it soured him. His name was
+Swithin.”
+
+“What a corking name!”
+
+“Do you know that we're getting farther off, not nearer? This river
+flows.”
+
+“Splendid!” cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; “it's good to meet a
+girl who's got wit.”
+
+“But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural.”
+
+Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.
+
+“Look out!” cried Fleur. “Your scull!”
+
+“All right! It's thick enough to bear a scratch.”
+
+“Do you mind sculling?” said Fleur severely. “I want to get in.”
+
+“Ah!” said Mont; “but when you get in, you see, I shan't see you any
+more to-day. Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on her bed
+after saying her prayers. Don't you bless the day that gave you a French
+mother, and a name like yours?”
+
+“I like my name, but Father gave it me. Mother wanted me called
+Marguerite.”
+
+“Which is absurd. Do you mind calling me M. M. and letting me call you
+F. F.? It's in the spirit of the age.”
+
+“I don't mind anything, so long as I get in.”
+
+Mont caught a little crab, and answered: “That was a nasty one!”
+
+“Please row.”
+
+“I am.” And he did for several strokes, looking at her with rueful
+eagerness. “Of course, you know,” he ejaculated, pausing, “that I came
+to see you, not your father's pictures.”
+
+Fleur rose.
+
+“If you don't row, I shall get out and swim.”
+
+“Really and truly? Then I could come in after you.”
+
+“Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once.”
+
+When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and
+grasping his hair with both hands, looked at her.
+
+Fleur smiled.
+
+“Don't!” cried the irrepressible Mont. “I know you're going to say:
+'Out, damned hair!'”
+
+Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand. “Good-bye, Mr.
+M.M.!” she called, and was gone among the rose-trees. She looked at her
+wrist-watch and the windows of the house. It struck her as curiously
+uninhabited. Past six! The pigeons were just gathering to roost, and
+sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy feathers, and beyond
+in a shower on the top boughs of the woods. The click of billiard-balls
+came from the ingle-nook—Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a faint rustling,
+too, from an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in this old English
+garden. She reached the verandah and was passing in, but stopped at
+the sound of voices from the drawing-room to her left. Mother! Monsieur
+Profond! From behind the verandah screen which fenced the ingle-nook she
+heard these words:
+
+“I don't, Annette.”
+
+Did Father know that he called her mother “Annette”? Always on the side
+of her Father—as children are ever on one side or the other in houses
+where relations are a little strained—she stood, uncertain. Her mother
+was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly metallic voice—one word she
+caught: “Demain.” And Profond's answer: “All right.” Fleur frowned. A
+little sound came out into the stillness. Then Profond's voice: “I'm
+takin' a small stroll.”
+
+Fleur darted through the window into the morning-room. There he came
+from the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn; and the
+click of billiard-balls which, in listening for other sounds, she had
+ceased to hear, began again. She shook herself, passed into the hall,
+and opened the drawing-room door. Her mother was sitting on the sofa
+between the windows, her knees crossed, her head resting on a cushion,
+her lips half parted, her eyes half closed. She looked extraordinarily
+handsome.
+
+“Ah! Here you are, Fleur! Your father is beginning to fuss.”
+
+“Where is he?”
+
+“In the picture-gallery. Go up!”
+
+“What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?”
+
+“To-morrow? I go up to London with your aunt.”
+
+“I thought you might be. Will you get me a quite plain parasol?”
+
+“What colour?”
+
+“Green. They're all going back, I suppose.”
+
+“Yes, all; you will console your father. Kiss me, then.”
+
+Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead, and
+went out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in the other
+corner. She ran up-stairs.
+
+Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the
+regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard imposed
+upon herself. She claimed to regulate her own life, not those of others;
+besides, an unerring instinct for what was likely to advantage her own
+case was already at work. In a disturbed domestic atmosphere the heart
+she had set on Jon would have a better chance. None the less was she
+offended, as a flower by a crisping wind. If that man had really
+been kissing her mother it was—serious, and her father ought to know.
+“Demain!” “All right!” And her mother going up to Town! She turned
+into her bedroom and hung out of the window to cool her face, which had
+suddenly grown very hot. Jon must be at the station by now! What did her
+father know about Jon? Probably everything—pretty nearly!
+
+She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time,
+and ran up to the gallery.
+
+Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens—the
+picture he loved best. He did not turn at the sound of the door, but she
+knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt. She came up softly behind
+him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his shoulder
+till her cheek lay against his. It was an advance which had never yet
+failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst. “Well,” he
+said stonily, “so you've come!”
+
+“Is that all,” murmured Fleur, “from a bad parent?” And she rubbed her
+cheek against his.
+
+Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.
+
+“Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and off?”
+
+“Darling, it was very harmless.”
+
+“Harmless! Much you know what's harmless and what isn't.”
+
+Fleur dropped her arms.
+
+“Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it.”
+
+And she went over to the window-seat.
+
+Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet. He
+looked very grey. 'He has nice small feet,' she thought, catching his
+eye, at once averted from her.
+
+“You're my only comfort,” said Soames suddenly, “and you go on like
+this.”
+
+Fleur's heart began to beat.
+
+“Like what, dear?”
+
+Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it, might
+have been called furtive.
+
+“You know what I told you,” he said. “I don't choose to have anything to
+do with that branch of our family.”
+
+“Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't.”
+
+Soames turned on his heel.
+
+“I'm not going into the reasons,” he said; “you ought to trust me,
+Fleur!”
+
+The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon, and
+was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot. Unconsciously she had
+assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of the other,
+with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her chest, and
+its hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her that was not
+involuted, and yet—in spite of all—she retained a certain grace.
+
+“You knew my wishes,” Soames went on, “and yet you stayed on there four
+days. And I suppose that boy came with you to-day.”
+
+Fleur kept her eyes on him.
+
+“I don't ask you anything,” said Soames; “I make no inquisition where
+you're concerned.”
+
+Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on her
+hands. The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched, quite
+still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-balls
+mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack Cardigan had
+turned the light up.
+
+“Will it make you any happier,” she said suddenly, “if I promise you not
+to see him for say—the next six weeks?” She was not prepared for a sort
+of tremble in the blankness of his voice.
+
+“Six weeks? Six years—sixty years more like. Don't delude yourself,
+Fleur; don't delude yourself!”
+
+Fleur turned in alarm.
+
+“Father, what is it?”
+
+Soames came close enough to see her face.
+
+“Don't tell me,” he said, “that you're foolish enough to have any
+feeling beyond caprice. That would be too much!” And he laughed.
+
+Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it is
+deep! Oh! what is it?' And putting her hand through his arm she said
+lightly:
+
+“No, of course; caprice. Only, I like my caprices and I don't like
+yours, dear.”
+
+“Mine!” said Soames bitterly, and turned away.
+
+The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the
+river. The trees had lost all gaiety of colour. She felt a sudden hunger
+for Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again on hers.
+And pressing her arms tight across her breast she forced out a little
+light laugh.
+
+“O la! la! What a small fuss! as Profond would say. Father, I don't like
+that man.”
+
+She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.
+
+“You don't?” he said. “Why?”
+
+“Nothing,” murmured Fleur; “just caprice!”
+
+“No,” said Soames; “not caprice!” And he tore what was in his hands
+across. “You're right. I don't like him either!”
+
+“Look!” said Fleur softly. “There he goes! I hate his shoes; they don't
+make any noise.”
+
+Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his side
+pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced up at
+the sky, as if saying: “I don't think much of that small moon.”
+
+Fleur drew back. “Isn't he a great cat?” she whispered; and the sharp
+click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had capped the
+cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: “In off the red!”
+
+Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in his
+beard. What was it? Oh! yes, from “Rigoletto”: “Donna a mobile.” Just
+what he would think! She squeezed her father's arm.
+
+“Prowling!” she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house. It was
+past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and night-still and
+lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent clinging on the
+riverside air. A blackbird suddenly burst out. Jon would be in London
+by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the Serpentine, thinking of her!
+A little sound beside her made her turn her eyes; her father was again
+tearing the paper in his hands. Fleur saw it was a cheque.
+
+“I shan't sell him my Gauguin,” he said. “I don't know what your aunt
+and Imogen see in him.”
+
+“Or Mother.”
+
+“Your mother!” said Soames.
+
+'Poor Father!' she thought. 'He never looks happy—not really happy. I
+don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have to, when Jon
+comes back. Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'
+
+“I'm going to dress,” she said.
+
+In her room she had a fancy to put on her “freak” dress. It was of gold
+tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the
+ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes, and
+a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold bells,
+especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she pealed. When
+she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could not see her; it
+even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man Michael Mont would not
+have a view. But the gong had sounded, and she went down.
+
+She made a sensation in the drawing-room. Winifred thought it “Most
+amusing.” Imogen was enraptured. Jack Cardigan called it “stunning,”
+“ripping,” “topping,” and “corking.”
+
+Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: “That's a nice small
+dress!” Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at her, and said
+nothing. It remained for her father to apply the test of common sense.
+“What did you put on that thing for? You're not going to dance.”
+
+Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.
+
+“Caprice!”
+
+Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred. Jack
+Cardigan took her mother. Prosper Profond took Imogen. Fleur went in by
+herself, with her bells jingling....
+
+The “small” moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft
+and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the
+billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and
+women. Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white shoulder,
+fit as a flea; or Timothy in his “mausoleum,” too old for anything
+but baby's slumber. For so many lay awake, or dreamed, teased by the
+criss-cross of the world.
+
+The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
+meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see;
+and the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones. Pheasants in the tall
+trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the
+gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the
+sparrows of Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the
+lack of wind. The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters,
+scraped at her straw a little; and the few night-flitting things—bats,
+moths, owls—were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night
+lay in the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still. Men and
+women, alone, riding the hobby-horses of anxiety or love, burned their
+wavering tapers of dream and thought into the lonely hours.
+
+Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime
+of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
+leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
+rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can
+put a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
+emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
+Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world
+which had once suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not these
+sounds; her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing from
+railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious of his
+forbidden image, and the sound of his voice, which was taboo. And she
+crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of the riverside night
+that moment when his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her cheek.
+Long she leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings at life's
+candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the
+lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there
+is no open flame. But at last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting her
+bells, drew quickly in.
+
+Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
+wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken from
+stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear such
+sounds.
+
+'Caprice!' he thought. 'I can't tell. She's wilful. What shall I do?
+Fleur!'
+
+And long into the “small” night he brooded.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+
+I.—MOTHER AND SON
+
+To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly
+would scarcely have been adequate. He went as a well-natured dog goes
+for a walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on the lawn.
+He went looking back at it. Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are
+wont to sulk. But Jon had little sulkiness in his composition. He adored
+his mother, and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy by his
+simply saying: “I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to Italy so
+many times; I'd like it new to both of us.”
+
+The fellow was subtle besides being naive. He never forgot that he
+was going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
+therefore show no sign of wishing to do so. For one with so enticing
+a mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
+companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food,
+and thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most travelled
+Englishman. Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound,
+for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could
+concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells,
+the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros,
+cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening
+plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons,
+mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a
+fascinating land.
+
+It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
+Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not English,
+was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen. He
+felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view
+of things than himself. He confided to his mother that he must be an
+unsociable beast—it was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk
+about the things people did talk about. To which Irene had replied
+simply:
+
+“Yes, Jon, I know.”
+
+In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating
+what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's
+love. Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly
+sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type
+of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but
+which he now perceived to be no such thing. Her beauty was neither
+English, French, Spanish, nor Italian—it was special! He appreciated,
+too, as never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not
+tell, for instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya
+picture, “La Vendimia,” or whether she knew that he had slipped back
+there after lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half
+an hour, a second and third time. It was not Fleur, of course, but like
+enough to give him heartache—so dear to lovers—remembering her standing
+at the foot of his bed with her hand held above her head. To keep a
+postcard reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out
+to look at became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late
+disclose themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy. And
+his mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly
+caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented
+garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at
+the view. His mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks
+between the polled acacias, when her voice said:
+
+“Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?”
+
+He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to
+conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: “Yes.”
+
+“It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol' Your
+father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when he
+was in Spain in '92.”
+
+In '92—nine years before he had been born! What had been the previous
+existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to share in
+his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He looked
+up at her. But something in her face—a look of life hard-lived, the
+mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering-seemed,
+with its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
+impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
+she was so beautiful, and so—so—but he could not frame what he felt
+about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
+all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
+sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
+deep, remote—his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
+ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the
+West, which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
+Phoenicians had dwelt—a dark, strange, secret race, above the land! His
+mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past
+was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played
+and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that she
+should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved
+him and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance—he had not
+even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody else!—made him
+small in his own eyes.
+
+That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof
+of the town—as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and,
+long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the
+hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:
+
+“Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping Spanish city
+darkened under her white stars!
+
+“What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish? Just the watchman,
+telling his dateless tale of safety? Just a road-man, flinging to the
+moon his song?
+
+“No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping, Just his cry:
+'How long?'”
+
+
+The word “deprived” seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but
+“bereaved” was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-long
+came to him, which would enable him to keep “whose lover's heart is
+weeping.” It was past two by the time he had finished it, and past
+three before he went to sleep, having said it over to himself at least
+twenty-four times. Next day he wrote it out and enclosed it in one of
+those letters to Fleur which he always finished before he went down, so
+as to have his mind free and companionable.
+
+About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he felt a
+sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in the eyes,
+and sickness. The sun had touched him too affectionately. The next three
+days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled, aching indifference to
+all except the feel of ice on his forehead and his mother's smile. She
+never moved from his room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance, which
+seemed to Jon angelic. But there were moments when he was extremely
+sorry for himself, and wished terribly that Fleur could see him. Several
+times he took a poignant imaginary leave of her and of the earth, tears
+oozing out of his eyes. He even prepared the message he would send to
+her by his mother—who would regret to her dying day that she had ever
+sought to separate them—his poor mother! He was not slow, however, in
+perceiving that he had now his excuse for going home.
+
+Toward half-past six each evening came a “gasgacha” of bells—a cascade
+of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling back chime
+on chime. After listening to them on the fourth day he said suddenly:
+
+“I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot.”
+
+“Very well, darling. As soon as you're fit to travel” And at once he
+felt better, and—meaner.
+
+They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home. Jon's head
+was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a hat lined
+by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk and he still
+walked from choice in the shade. As the long struggle of discretion
+between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more whether she
+could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had brought him
+away from. Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a day in Madrid
+between their trains, it was but natural to go again to the Prado. Jon
+was elaborately casual this time before his Goya girl. Now that he was
+going back to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny. It was his mother
+who lingered before the picture, saying:
+
+“The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite.”
+
+Jon heard her uneasily. Did she understand? But he felt once more that
+he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety. She could, in some
+supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret, feel the pulse of
+his thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped and feared and wished.
+It made him terribly uncomfortable and guilty, having, beyond most boys,
+a conscience. He wished she would be frank with him, he almost hoped for
+an open struggle. But none came, and steadily, silently, they travelled
+north. Thus did he first learn how much better than men women play
+a waiting game. In Paris they had again to pause for a day. Jon was
+grieved because it lasted two, owing to certain matters in connection
+with a dressmaker; as if his mother, who looked beautiful in anything,
+had any need of dresses! The happiest moment of his travel was that when
+he stepped on to the Folkestone boat.
+
+Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said
+
+“I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon. But you've been very sweet
+to me.”
+
+Jon squeezed her arm.
+
+“Oh! yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately.”
+
+And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of glamour
+over the past weeks—a kind of painful pleasure, such as he had tried to
+screw into those lines about the voice in the night crying; a feeling
+such as he had known as a small boy listening avidly to Chopin, yet
+wanting to cry. And he wondered why it was that he couldn't say to her
+quite simply what she had said to him:
+
+“You were very sweet to me.” Odd—one never could be nice and natural
+like that! He substituted the words: “I expect we shall be sick.”
+
+They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six
+weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had
+hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.
+
+
+
+
+
+II.—FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
+
+Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found the
+solitude at Robin Hill intolerable. A philosopher when he has all that
+he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not. Accustomed,
+however, to the idea, if not to the reality of resignation, he would
+perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter June. He was a “lame
+duck” now, and on her conscience. Having achieved—momentarily—the rescue
+of an etcher in low circumstances, which she happened to have in hand,
+she appeared at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had gone.
+June was living now in a tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick. A
+Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of responsibility was
+concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a
+manner satisfactory to herself and her father. The rent of the Gallery
+off Cork Street which he had bought for her and her increased income tax
+happening to balance, it had been quite simple—she no longer paid him
+the rent. The Gallery might be expected now at any time, after eighteen
+years of barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her
+father would not feel it. Through this device she still had twelve
+hundred a year, and by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two
+Belgians in a poor way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically
+the same surplus for the relief of genius. After three days at Robin
+Hill she carried her father back with her to Town. In those three
+days she had stumbled on the secret he had kept for two years, and had
+instantly decided to cure him. She knew, in fact, the very man. He
+had done wonders with. Paul Post—that painter a little in advance of
+Futurism; and she was impatient with her father because his eyebrows
+would go up, and because he had heard of neither. Of course, if he
+hadn't “faith” he would never get well! It was absurd not to have faith
+in the man who had healed Paul Post so that he had only just relapsed,
+from having overworked, or overlived, himself again. The great thing
+about this healer was that he relied on Nature. He had made a special
+study of the symptoms of Nature—when his patient failed in any natural
+symptom he supplied the poison which caused it—and there you were! She
+was extremely hopeful. Her father had clearly not been living a natural
+life at Robin Hill, and she intended to provide the symptoms. He was—she
+felt—out of touch with the times, which was not natural; his heart
+wanted stimulating. In the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian—a
+grateful soul, so devoted to June for rescuing her that she was in
+danger of decease from overwork—stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways,
+preparing him for his cure. But they could not keep his eyebrows down;
+as, for example, when the Austrian woke him at eight o'clock just as he
+was going to sleep, or June took The Times away from him, because it was
+unnatural to read “that stuff” when he ought to be taking an interest
+in “life.” He never failed, indeed, to be astonished at her resource,
+especially in the evenings. For his benefit, as she declared, though he
+suspected that she also got something out of it, she assembled the Age
+so far as it was satellite to genius; and with some solemnity it would
+move up and down the studio before him in the Fox-trot, and that more
+mental form of dancing—the One-step—which so pulled against the music,
+that Jolyon's eyebrows would be almost lost in his hair from wonder at
+the strain it must impose on the dancer's will-power. Aware that, hung
+on the line in the Water Colour Society, he was a back number to those
+with any pretension to be called artists, he would sit in the darkest
+corner he could find, and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he
+had been raised. And when June brought some girl or young man up to him,
+he would rise humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and
+think: 'Dear me! This is very dull for them!' Having his father's
+perennial sympathy with Youth, he used to get very tired from entering
+into their points of view. But it was all stimulating, and he never
+failed in admiration of his daughter's indomitable spirit. Even genius
+itself attended these gatherings now and then, with its nose on one
+side; and June always introduced it to her father. This, she felt, was
+exceptionally good for him, for genius was a natural symptom he had
+never had—fond as she was of him.
+
+Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered
+whence she got herself—her red-gold hair, now greyed into a special
+colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own rather
+folded and subtilised countenance, her little lithe figure, when he
+and most of the Forsytes were tall. And he would dwell on the origin of
+species, and debate whether she might be Danish or Celtic. Celtic, he
+thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs. It
+was not too much to say that he preferred her to the Age with which she
+was surrounded, youthful though, for the greater part, it was. She took,
+however, too much interest in his teeth, for he still had some of those
+natural symptoms. Her dentist at once found “Staphylococcus aureus
+present in pure culture” (which might cause boils, of course), and
+wanted to take out all the teeth he had and supply him with two complete
+sets of unnatural symptoms. Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in
+the studio that evening he developed his objections. He had never
+had any boils, and his own teeth would last his time. Of course—June
+admitted—they would last his time if he didn't have them out! But if
+he had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would be
+longer. His recalcitrance—she said—was a symptom of his whole attitude;
+he was taking it lying down. He ought to be fighting. When was he going
+to see the man who had cured Paul Post? Jolyon was very sorry, but
+the fact was he was not going to see him. June chafed. Pondridge—she
+said—the healer, was such a fine man, and he had such difficulty in
+making two ends meet, and getting his theories recognised. It was just
+such indifference and prejudice as her father manifested which was
+keeping him back. It would be so splendid for both of them!
+
+“I perceive,” said Jolyon, “that you are trying to kill two birds with
+one stone.”
+
+“To cure, you mean!” cried June.
+
+“My dear, it's the same thing.”
+
+June protested. It was unfair to say that without a trial.
+
+Jolyon thought he might not have the chance, of saying it after.
+
+“Dad!” cried June, “you're hopeless.”
+
+“That,” said Jolyon, “is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as long
+as possible. I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child. They are quiet at
+present.”
+
+“That's not giving science a chance,” cried June. “You've no idea how
+devoted Pondridge is. He puts his science before everything.”
+
+“Just,” replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he was
+reduced, “as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh? Art for Art's sake—Science
+for the sake of Science. I know those enthusiastic egomaniac gentry.
+They vivisect you without blinking. I'm enough of a Forsyte to give them
+the go-by, June.”
+
+“Dad,” said June, “if you only knew how old-fashioned that sounds!
+Nobody can afford to be half-hearted nowadays.”
+
+“I'm afraid,” murmured Jolyon, with his smile, “that's the only natural
+symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me. We are born to be
+extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though, if you'll forgive my saying
+so, half the people nowadays who believe they're extreme are really very
+moderate. I'm getting on as well as I can expect, and I must leave it at
+that.”
+
+June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable character
+of her father's amiable obstinacy so far as his own freedom of action
+was concerned.
+
+How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain puzzled
+Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion. After she had
+brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp discussion, during which
+he perceived to the full the fundamental opposition between her active
+temperament and his wife's passivity. He even gathered that a little
+soreness still remained from that generation-old struggle between them
+over the body of Philip Bosinney, in which the passive had so signally
+triumphed over the active principle.
+
+According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the past
+from Jon. Sheer opportunism, she called it.
+
+“Which,” Jolyon put in mildly, “is the working principle of real life,
+my dear.”
+
+“Oh!” cried June, “you don't really defend her for not telling Jon, Dad.
+If it were left to you, you would.”
+
+“I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will be
+worse than if we told him.”
+
+“Then why don't you tell him? It's just sleeping dogs again.”
+
+“My dear,” said Jolyon, “I wouldn't for the world go against Irene's
+instinct. He's her boy.”
+
+“Yours too,” cried June.
+
+“What is a man's instinct compared with a mother's?”
+
+“Well, I think it's very weak of you.”
+
+“I dare say,” said Jolyon, “I dare say.”
+
+And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her brain.
+She could not bear sleeping dogs. And there stirred in her a tortuous
+impulse to push the matter toward decision. Jon ought to be told, so
+that either his feeling might be nipped in the bud, or, flowering in
+spite of the past, come to fruition. And she determined to see Fleur,
+and judge for herself. When June determined on anything, delicacy became
+a somewhat minor consideration. After all, she was Soames' cousin, and
+they were both interested in pictures. She would go and tell him that
+he ought to buy a Paul Post, or perhaps a piece of sculpture by Boris
+Strumolowski, and of course she would say nothing to her father. She
+went on the following Sunday, looking so determined that she had some
+difficulty in getting a cab at Reading station. The river country was
+lovely in those days of her own month, and June ached at its loveliness.
+She who had passed through this life without knowing what union was had
+a love of natural beauty which was almost madness. And when she came to
+that choice spot where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her
+cab, because, business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water
+and the woods. She appeared at his front door, therefore, as a mere
+pedestrian, and sent in her card. It was in June's character to know
+that when her nerves were fluttering she was doing something worth
+while. If one's nerves did not flutter, she was taking the line of
+least resistance, and knew that nobleness was not obliging her. She
+was conducted to a drawing-room, which, though not in her style, showed
+every mark of fastidious elegance. Thinking, 'Too much taste—too many
+knick-knacks,' she saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the figure of
+a girl coming in from the verandah. Clothed in white, and holding some
+white roses in her hand, she had, reflected in that silvery-grey pool
+of glass, a vision-like appearance, as if a pretty ghost had come out of
+the green garden.
+
+“How do you do?” said June, turning round. “I'm a cousin of your
+father's.”
+
+“Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner's.”
+
+“With my young stepbrother. Is your father in?”
+
+“He will be directly. He's only gone for a little walk.”
+
+June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided chin.
+
+“Your name's Fleur, isn't it? I've heard of you from Holly. What do you
+think of Jon?”
+
+The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered
+calmly:
+
+“He's quite a nice boy.”
+
+“Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?”
+
+“Not a bit.”
+
+'She's cool,' thought June.
+
+And suddenly the girl said: “I wish you'd tell me why our families don't
+get on?”
+
+Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer, June
+was silent; whether because this girl was trying to get something out
+of her, or simply because what one would do theoretically is not always
+what one will do when it comes to the point.
+
+“You know,” said the girl, “the surest way to make people find out the
+worst is to keep them ignorant. My father's told me it was a quarrel
+about property. But I don't believe it; we've both got heaps. They
+wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that.”
+
+June flushed. The word applied to her grandfather and father offended
+her.
+
+“My grandfather,” she said, “was very generous, and my father is, too;
+neither of them was in the least bourgeois.”
+
+“Well, what was it then?” repeated the girl: Conscious that this young
+Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined to prevent
+her, and to get something for herself instead.
+
+“Why do you want to know?”
+
+The girl smelled at her roses. “I only want to know because they won't
+tell me.”
+
+“Well, it was about property, but there's more than one kind.”
+
+“That makes it worse. Now I really must know.”
+
+June's small and resolute face quivered. She was wearing a round cap,
+and her hair had fluffed out under it. She looked quite young at that
+moment, rejuvenated by encounter.
+
+“You know,” she said, “I saw you drop your handkerchief. Is there
+anything between you and Jon? Because, if so, you'd better drop that
+too.”
+
+The girl grew paler, but she smiled.
+
+“If there were, that isn't the way to make me.”
+
+At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.
+
+“I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have. We may as well
+be frank.”
+
+“Did you come down to tell him that?”
+
+June laughed. “No; I came down to see you.”
+
+“How delightful of you.”
+
+This girl could fence.
+
+“I'm two and a half times your age,” said June, “but I quite sympathize.
+It's horrid not to have one's own way.”
+
+The girl smiled again. “I really think you might tell me.”
+
+How the child stuck to her point
+
+“It's not my secret. But I'll see what I can do, because I think both
+you and Jon ought to be told. And now I'll say good-bye.”
+
+“Won't you wait and see Father?”
+
+June shook her head. “How can I get over to the other side?”
+
+“I'll row you across.”
+
+“Look!” said June impulsively, “next time you're in London, come and see
+me. This is where I live. I generally have young people in the evening.
+But I shouldn't tell your father that you're coming.”
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's awfully pretty
+and well made. I never thought Soames would have a daughter as pretty as
+this. She and Jon would make a lovely couple.
+
+The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at work in
+June. She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took her hand off a
+scull to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between the meadows
+and the river, with an ache in her heart. Youth to youth, like the
+dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them
+through and through. Her youth! So long ago—when Phil and she—And since?
+Nothing—no one had been quite what she had wanted. And so she had missed
+it all. But what a coil was round those two young things, if they really
+were in love, as Holly would have it—as her father, and Irene, and
+Soames himself seemed to dread. What a coil, and what a barrier! And the
+itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast,
+which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever
+believed that what one wanted was more important than what other people
+did not want. From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer stillness, she
+watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the fishes rising;
+sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how she
+could force everybody to be happy. Jon and Fleur! Two little lame
+ducks—charming callow yellow little ducks! A great pity! Surely
+something could be done! One must not take such situations lying down.
+She walked on, and reached a station, hot and cross.
+
+That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which made
+many people avoid her, she said to her father:
+
+“Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur. I think she's very attractive.
+It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?”
+
+The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began crumbling his
+bread.
+
+“It's what you appear to be doing,” he said. “Do you realise whose
+daughter she is?”
+
+“Can't the dead past bury its dead?”
+
+Jolyon rose.
+
+“Certain things can never be buried.”
+
+“I disagree,” said June. “It's that which stands in the way of all
+happiness and progress. You don't understand the Age, Dad. It's got no
+use for outgrown things. Why do you think it matters so terribly that
+Jon should know about his mother? Who pays any attention to that sort of
+thing now? The marriage laws are just as they were when Soames and Irene
+couldn't get a divorce, and you had to come in. We've moved, and they
+haven't. So nobody cares. Marriage without a decent chance of relief
+is only a sort of slave-owning; people oughtn't to own each other.
+Everybody sees that now. If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?”
+
+“It's not for me to disagree there,” said Jolyon; “but that's all quite
+beside the mark. This is a matter of human feeling.”
+
+“Of course it is,” cried June, “the human feeling of those two young
+things.”
+
+“My dear,” said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; “you're talking
+nonsense.”
+
+“I'm not. If they prove to be really fond of each other, why should they
+be made unhappy because of the past?”
+
+“You haven't lived that past. I have—through the feelings of my wife;
+through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is devoted
+can.”
+
+June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.
+
+“If,” she said suddenly, “she were the daughter of Philip Bosinney, I
+could understand you better. Irene loved him, she never loved Soames.”
+
+Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman
+utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid
+no attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.
+
+“That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I know him,
+would mind a love-past. It's the brutality of a union without love.
+This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's mother as a
+negro-slave was owned. You can't lay that ghost; don't try to, June!
+It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and blood of the man who
+possessed Jon's mother against her will. It's no good mincing words; I
+want it clear once for all. And now I mustn't talk any more, or I shall
+have to sit up with this all night.” And, putting his hand over his
+heart, Jolyon turned his back on his daughter and stood looking at the
+river Thames.
+
+June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her head
+into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her arm through
+his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because
+that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the
+obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him. She rubbed her cheek
+against his shoulder, and said nothing.
+
+After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but
+pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The peaceful beauty of
+the afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and
+poetic. In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine
+drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of hay. She watched
+the grass cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination—it
+looked so cool and fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of
+the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a
+true river song. Alongside, in the deep green water, weeds, like yellow
+snakes, were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the
+farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It was
+an afternoon to dream. And she took out Jon's letters—not flowery
+effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a
+longing very agreeable to her, and all ending “Your devoted J.” Fleur
+was not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated,
+but what poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had
+certainly in those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon.
+They all belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She
+enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars
+could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of the
+map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy sparkle
+and promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon personified to her.
+
+Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his letters,
+followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with just so much
+water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey destroyers. Fleur
+thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and pulled up to the
+landing-stage. Crossing the lawn, she wondered whether she should tell
+her father of June's visit. If he learned of it from the butler, he
+might think it odd if she did not. It gave her, too, another chance to
+startle out of him the reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the
+road to meet him.
+
+Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
+Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with weak
+lungs. Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part in local
+affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going up. He could
+not, however, remain indifferent to this new and dangerous scheme. The
+site was not half a mile from his own house. He was quite of opinion
+that the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but this was not the
+place. It should be done farther away. He took, indeed, an attitude
+common to all true Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other
+people was not his affair, and the State should do its business without
+prejudicing in any way the natural advantages which he had acquired or
+inherited. Francie, the most free-spirited Forsyte of his generation
+(except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had once asked him in her malicious
+way: “Did you ever see the name Forsyte in a subscription list,
+Soames?” That was as it might be, but a Sanatorium would depreciate the
+neighbourhood, and he should certainly sign the petition which was being
+got up against it. Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw
+Fleur coming.
+
+She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time down here
+with her in this summer weather had been making him feel quite young;
+Annette was always running up to Town for one thing or another, so that
+he had Fleur to himself almost as much as he could wish. To be sure,
+young Mont had formed a habit of appearing on his motor-cycle almost
+every other day. Thank goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his
+half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl
+friend of Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth
+or so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music
+of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a
+surprised shine on its expressive surface. Annette, even, now and then
+passed gracefully up and down in the arms of one or other of the young
+men. And Soames, coming to the drawing-room door, would lift his nose
+a little sideways, and watch them, waiting to catch a smile from Fleur;
+then move back to his chair by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The
+Times or some other collector's price list. To his ever-anxious eyes
+Fleur showed no signs of remembering that caprice of hers.
+
+When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand within her
+arm.
+
+“Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad? She couldn't wait! Guess!”
+
+“I never guess,” said Soames uneasily. “Who?”
+
+“Your cousin, June Forsyte.”
+
+Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm. “What did she want?”
+
+“I don't know. But it was rather breaking through the feud, wasn't it?”
+
+“Feud? What feud?”
+
+“The one that exists in your imagination, dear.”
+
+Soames dropped her arm. Was she mocking, or trying to draw him on?
+
+“I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture,” he said at last.
+
+“I don't think so. Perhaps it was just family affection.”
+
+“She's only a first cousin once removed,” muttered Soames.
+
+“And the daughter of your enemy.”
+
+“What d'you mean by that?”
+
+“I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was.”
+
+“Enemy!” repeated Soames. “It's ancient history. I don't know where you
+get your notions.”
+
+“From June Forsyte.”
+
+It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew, or
+were on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.
+
+Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and tenacity.
+
+“If you know,” he said coldly, “why do you plague me?”
+
+Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.
+
+“I don't want to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to know more?
+Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery—Je m'en fiche, as
+Profond says?”
+
+“That chap!” said Soames profoundly.
+
+That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this
+summer—for he had not turned up again. Ever since the Sunday when Fleur
+had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had thought of
+him a good deal, and always in connection with Annette, for no reason,
+except that she was looking handsomer than for some time past. His
+possessive instinct, subtle, less formal, more elastic since the War,
+kept all misgiving underground. As one looks on some American river,
+quiet and pleasant, knowing that an alligator perhaps is lying in the
+mud with his snout just raised and indistinguishable from a snag of
+wood—so Soames looked on the river of his own existence, subconscious of
+Monsieur Profond, refusing to see more than the suspicion of his snout.
+He had at this epoch in his life practically all he wanted, and was as
+nearly happy as his nature would permit. His senses were at rest;
+his affections found all the vent they needed in his daughter;
+his collection was well known, his money well invested; his health
+excellent, save for a touch of liver now and again; he had not yet begun
+to worry seriously about what would happen after death, inclining to
+think that nothing would happen. He resembled one of his own gilt-edged
+securities, and to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could avoid
+seeing would be, he felt instinctively, perverse and retrogressive.
+Those two crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's
+snout, would level away if he lay on them industriously.
+
+That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested
+Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father came down to dinner
+without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.
+
+“I'll get you one, dear,” she had said, and ran upstairs. In the sachet
+where she sought for it—an old sachet of very faded silk—there were
+two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was buttoned,
+and contained something flat and hard. By some childish impulse Fleur
+unbuttoned it. There was a frame and in it a photograph of herself as
+a little girl. She gazed at it, fascinated, as one is by one's own
+presentment. It slipped under her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that
+another photograph was behind. She pressed her own down further, and
+perceived a face, which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very
+good-looking, in a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own
+photograph up over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down.
+Only on the stairs did she identify that face. Surely—surely Jon's
+mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a flurry
+of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the woman her
+father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her, perhaps. Then,
+afraid of showing by her manner that she had lighted on his secret,
+she refused to think further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief,
+entered the dining-room.
+
+“I chose the softest, Father.”
+
+“H'm!” said Soames; “I only use those after a cold. Never mind!”
+
+That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together; recalling
+the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop—a look strange
+and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must have loved that woman very
+much to have kept her photograph all this time, in spite of having lost
+her. Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind darted to his relations with
+her own mother. Had he ever really loved her? She thought not. Jon was
+the son of the woman he had really loved. Surely, then, he ought not to
+mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used to. And a sigh
+of sheer relief was caught in the folds of her nightgown slipping over
+her head.
+
+
+
+
+
+III.—MEETINGS
+
+Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had never
+really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain. The face of
+the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock—it looked so
+wan and old. His father's mask had been forced awry by the emotion of
+the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how much he must have
+felt their absence. He summoned to his aid the thought: 'Well, I didn't
+want to go!' It was out of date for Youth to defer to Age. But Jon was
+by no means typically modern. His father had always been “so jolly” to
+him, and to feel that one meant to begin again at once the conduct which
+his father had suffered six weeks' loneliness to cure was not agreeable.
+
+At the question, “Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike you?” his
+conscience pricked him badly. The great Goya only existed because he had
+created a face which resembled Fleur's.
+
+On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction;
+but awoke full of anticipation. It was only the fifth of July, and no
+meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth. He was to have three days
+at home before going back to farm. Somehow he must contrive to see her!
+
+In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for
+trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny. On the second day,
+therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by
+ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face
+toward Piccadilly. Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined
+Devonshire House. It would be the merest chance that she should be at
+her Club. But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart, noticing
+the superiority of all other young men to himself. They wore their
+clothes with such an air; they had assurance; they were old. He was
+suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must have forgotten
+him. Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these weeks, he had mislaid
+that possibility. The corners of his mouth drooped, his hands felt
+clammy. Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck of her smile-Fleur
+incomparable! It was an evil moment. Jon, however, had a great idea that
+one must be able to face anything. And he braced himself with that dour
+reflection in front of a bric-a-brac shop. At this high-water mark of
+what was once the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from
+any other except a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon moved on, and
+turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward
+the Iseeum Club, to which he had just been elected.
+
+“Hallo! young man! Where are you off to?”
+
+Jon gushed. “I've just been to my tailor's.”
+
+Val looked him up and down. “That's good! I'm going in here to order
+some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch.”
+
+Jon thanked him. He might get news of her from Val!
+
+The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men,
+was seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's which they
+now entered.
+
+“Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with.
+Bless me! Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from—let me see—the
+year Melton won the Derby. One of my very best customers he was.” A
+faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face. “Many's the tip he's given
+me, to be sure! I suppose he took a couple of hundred of these every
+week, year in, year out, and never changed his cigarette. Very affable
+gentleman, brought me a lot of custom. I was sorry he met with that
+accident. One misses an old customer like him.”
+
+Val smiled. His father's decease had closed an account which had been
+running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke
+puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his
+father's face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in the
+only halo it had earned. His father had his fame here, anyway—a man
+who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and
+run accounts for ever! To his tobacconist a hero! Even that was some
+distinction to inherit!
+
+“I pay cash,” he said; “how much?”
+
+“To his son, sir, and cash—ten and six. I shall never forget Mr.
+Montague Dartie. I've known him stand talkin' to me half an hour. We
+don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry. The War was
+bad for manners, sir—it was bad for manners. You were in it, I see.”
+
+“No,” said Val, tapping his knee, “I got this in the war before. Saved
+my life, I expect. Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?”
+
+Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, “I don't smoke, you know,” and saw the
+tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say “Good God!”
+or “Now's your chance, sir!”
+
+“That's right,” said Val; “keep off it while you can. You'll want it
+when you take a knock. This is really the same tobacco, then?”
+
+“Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all. Wonderful staying
+power—the British Empire, I always say.”
+
+“Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it monthly.
+Come on, Jon.”
+
+Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity. Except to lunch now and then at
+the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London Club. The
+Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could not, so long
+as George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his culinary acumen was
+almost the controlling force. The Club had made a stand against the
+newly rich, and it had taken all George Forsyte's prestige, and praise
+of him as a “good sportsman,” to bring in Prosper Profond.
+
+The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law entered
+the dining-room, and attracted by George's forefinger, sat down at their
+table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with solemn lips
+and an attractive shyness in his glance. There was an air of privilege
+around that corner table, as though past masters were eating there.
+Jon was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere. The waiter, lean in the
+chaps, pervaded with such free-masonical deference. He seemed to hang
+on George Forsyte's lips, to watch the gloat in his eye with a kind
+of sympathy, to follow the movements of the heavy club-marked silver
+fondly. His liveried arm and confidential voice alarmed Jon, they came
+so secretly over his shoulder.
+
+Except for George's “Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a deuced
+good judge of a cigar!” neither he nor the other past master took any
+notice of him, and he was grateful for this. The talk was all about the
+breeding, points, and prices of horses, and he listened to it vaguely
+at first, wondering how it was possible to retain so much knowledge in
+a head. He could not take his eyes off the dark past master—what he said
+was so deliberate and discouraging—such heavy, queer, smiled-out words.
+Jon was thinking of butterflies, when he heard him say:
+
+“I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses.”
+
+“Old Soames! He's too dry a file!”
+
+With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past master
+went on.
+
+“His daughter's an attractive small girl. Mr. Soames Forsyde is a bit
+old-fashioned. I want to see him have a pleasure some day.” George
+Forsyte grinned.
+
+“Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as he looks. He'll never show
+he's enjoying anything—they might try and take it from him. Old Soames!
+Once bit, twice shy!”
+
+“Well, Jon,” said Val, hastily, “if you've finished, we'll go and have
+coffee.”
+
+“Who were those?” Jon asked, on the stairs. “I didn't quite—-”
+
+“Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's and of my Uncle
+Soames. He's always been here. The other chap, Profond, is a queer fish.
+I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you ask me!”
+
+Jon looked at him, startled. “But that's awful,” he said: “I mean—for
+Fleur.”
+
+“Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very up-to-date.”
+
+“Her mother!”
+
+“You're very green, Jon.”
+
+Jon grew red. “Mothers,” he stammered angrily, “are different.”
+
+“You're right,” said Val suddenly; “but things aren't what they were
+when I was your age. There's a 'To-morrow we die' feeling. That's
+what old George meant about my Uncle Soames. He doesn't mean to die
+to-morrow.”
+
+Jon said, quickly: “What's the matter between him and my father?”
+
+“Stable secret, Jon. Take my advice, and bottle up. You'll do no good by
+knowing. Have a liqueur?”
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+“I hate the way people keep things from one,” he muttered, “and then
+sneer at one for being green.”
+
+“Well, you can ask Holly. If she won't tell you, you'll believe it's for
+your own good, I suppose.”
+
+Jon got up. “I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch.”
+
+Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused. The boy looked so
+upset.
+
+“All right! See you on Friday.”
+
+“I don't know,” murmured Jon.
+
+And he did not. This conspiracy of silence made him desperate. It was
+humiliating to be treated like a child! He retraced his moody steps
+to Stratton Street. But he would go to her Club now, and find out the
+worst! To his enquiry the reply was that Miss Forsyte was not in the
+Club. She might be in perhaps later. She was often in on Monday—they
+could not say. Jon said he would call again, and, crossing into the
+Green Park, flung himself down under a tree. The sun was bright, and a
+breeze fluttered the leaves of the young lime-tree beneath which he lay;
+but his heart ached. Such darkness seemed gathered round his happiness.
+He heard Big Ben chime “Three” above the traffic. The sound moved
+something in him, and, taking out a piece of paper, he began to scribble
+on it with a pencil. He had jotted a stanza, and was searching the grass
+for another verse, when something hard touched his shoulder-a green
+parasol. There above him stood Fleur!
+
+“They told me you'd been, and were coming back. So I thought you might
+be out here; and you are—it's rather wonderful!”
+
+“Oh, Fleur! I thought you'd have forgotten me.”
+
+“When I told you that I shouldn't!”
+
+Jon seized her arm.
+
+“It's too much luck! Let's get away from this side.” He almost dragged
+her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to find some cover
+where they could sit and hold each other's hands.
+
+“Hasn't anybody cut in?” he said, gazing round at her lashes, in
+suspense above her cheeks.
+
+“There is a young idiot, but he doesn't count.”
+
+Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.
+
+“You know I've had sunstroke; I didn't tell you.”
+
+“Really! Was it interesting?”
+
+“No. Mother was an angel. Has anything happened to you?”
+
+“Nothing. Except that I think I've found out what's wrong between our
+families, Jon.”
+
+His heart began beating very fast.
+
+“I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father got
+her instead.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+“I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me. Of
+course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him pretty mad,
+wouldn't it?”
+
+Jon thought for a minute. “Not if she loved my father best.”
+
+“But suppose they were engaged?”
+
+“If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I might go
+cracked, but I shouldn't grudge it you.”
+
+“I should. You mustn't ever do that with me, Jon.
+
+“My God! Not much!”
+
+“I don't believe that he's ever really cared for my mother.”
+
+Jon was silent. Val's words—the two past masters in the Club!
+
+“You see, we don't know,” went on Fleur; “it may have been a great
+shock. She may have behaved badly to him. People do.”
+
+“My mother wouldn't.”
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders. “I don't think we know much about our
+fathers and mothers. We just see them in the light of the way they
+treat us; but they've treated other people, you know, before we were
+born-plenty, I expect. You see, they're both old. Look at your father,
+with three separate families!”
+
+“Isn't there any place,” cried Jon, “in all this beastly London where we
+can be alone?”
+
+“Only a taxi.”
+
+“Let's get one, then.”
+
+When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: “Are you going back to
+Robin Hill? I should like to see where you live, Jon. I'm staying
+with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for dinner. I
+wouldn't come to the house, of course.”
+
+Jon gazed at her enraptured.
+
+“Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan't meet anybody.
+There's a train at four.”
+
+The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured,
+official, commercial, or professional, like the working classes,
+still worked their seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth
+generation travelled down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class
+carriage, dusty and sun-warmed, of that too early train. They travelled
+in blissful silence, holding each other's hands.
+
+At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two
+unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and
+honeysuckle.
+
+For Jon—sure of her now, and without separation before him—it was a
+miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along
+the river Thames. It was love-in-a-mist—one of those illumined pages of
+Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they gave each
+other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and flowers
+and birds scrolled in among the text—a happy communing, without
+afterthought, which lasted thirty-seven minutes. They reached the
+coppice at the milking hour. Jon would not take her as far as the
+farmyard; only to where she could see the field leading up to the
+gardens, and the house beyond. They turned in among the larches, and
+suddenly, at the winding of the path, came on Irene, sitting on an old
+log seat.
+
+There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves; to
+moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal dignity.
+This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his mother. He
+became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate thing. To have
+brought Fleur down openly—yes! But to sneak her in like this! Consumed
+with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his nature would permit.
+
+Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother's startled face was
+changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious. It was she who uttered
+the first words:
+
+“I'm very glad to see you. It was nice of Jon to think of bringing you
+down to us.”
+
+“We weren't coming to the house,” Jon blurted out. “I just wanted Fleur
+to see where I lived.”
+
+His mother said quietly:
+
+“Won't you come up and have tea?”
+
+Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard
+Fleur answer:
+
+“Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner. I met Jon by accident,
+and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his home.”
+
+How self-possessed she was!
+
+“Of course; but you must have tea. We'll send you down to the station.
+My husband will enjoy seeing you.”
+
+The expression of his mother's eyes, resting on him for a moment, cast
+Jon down level with the ground—a true worm. Then she led on, and Fleur
+followed her. He felt like a child, trailing after those two, who were
+talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the house up there beyond
+the trees and the grassy slope. He watched the fencing of their eyes,
+taking each other in—the two beings he loved most in the world.
+
+He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered in
+advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that
+tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant; already
+he could feel the faint irony which would come into his voice and smile.
+
+“This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the house.
+Let's have tea at once—she has to catch a train. Jon, tell them, dear,
+and telephone to the Dragon for a car.”
+
+To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his
+mother had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up into
+the house. Now he would not see Fleur alone again—not for a minute, and
+they had arranged no further meeting! When he returned under cover of
+the maids and teapots, there was not a trace of awkwardness beneath the
+tree; it was all within himself, but not the less for that. They were
+talking of the Gallery off Cork Street.
+
+“We back numbers,” his father was saying, “are awfully anxious to find
+out why we can't appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must tell us.”
+
+“It's supposed to be satiric, isn't it?” said Fleur.
+
+He saw his father's smile.
+
+“Satiric? Oh! I think it's more than that. What do you say, Jon?”
+
+“I don't know at all,” stammered Jon. His father's face had a sudden
+grimness.
+
+“The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals. Off with their
+heads, they say—smash their idols! And let's get back to-nothing! And,
+by Jove, they've done it! Jon's a poet. He'll be going in, too, and
+stamping on what's left of us. Property, beauty, sentiment—all smoke. We
+mustn't own anything nowadays, not even our feelings. They stand in the
+way of—Nothing.”
+
+Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father's words, behind
+which he felt a meaning that he could not reach. He didn't want to stamp
+on anything!
+
+“Nothing's the god of to-day,” continued Jolyon; “we're back where the
+Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism.”
+
+“No, Dad,” cried Jon suddenly, “we only want to live, and we don't know
+how, because of the Past—that's all!”
+
+“By George!” said Jolyon, “that's profound, Jon. Is it your own? The
+Past! Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath. Let's have
+cigarettes.”
+
+Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly, as
+if to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes. He lighted his father's
+and Fleur's, then one for himself. Had he taken the knock that Val had
+spoken of? The smoke was blue when he had not puffed, grey when he had;
+he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense of equality it gave
+him. He was glad no one said: “So you've begun!” He felt less young.
+
+Fleur looked at her watch, and rose. His mother went with her into the
+house. Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.
+
+“See her into the car, old man,” said Jolyon; “and when she's gone, ask
+your mother to come back to me.”
+
+Jon went. He waited in the hall. He saw her into the car. There was no
+chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand. He waited all
+that evening for something to be said to him. Nothing was said. Nothing
+might have happened. He went up to bed, and in the mirror on his
+dressing-table met himself. He did not speak, nor did the image; but
+both looked as if they thought the more.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.—IN GREEN STREET
+
+Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous
+should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a
+remark of Fleur's: “He's like the hosts of Midian—he prowls and prowls
+around”; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: “What's the use
+of keepin' fit?” or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner,
+or alien as it was now called. Certain, that Annette was looking
+particularly handsome, and that Soames—had sold him a Gauguin and then
+torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself had said: “I didn't
+get that small picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde.”
+
+However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's evergreen
+little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness which no
+one mistook for naivete, a word hardly applicable to Monsieur Prosper
+Profond. Winifred still found him “amusing,” and would write him little
+notes saying: “Come and have a 'jolly' with us”—it was breath of life to
+her to keep up with the phrases of the day.
+
+The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
+having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in
+it—which was unnatural. The English type of disillusionment was familiar
+enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable circles. It gave
+a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got something out of it.
+But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there was
+nothing in anything, was not English; and that which was not English one
+could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form.
+It was like having the mood which the War had left, seated—dark, heavy,
+smiling, indifferent—in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that
+mood talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard. It
+was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it—for the English character at large—“a
+bit too thick”—for if nothing was really worth getting excited about,
+there were always games, and one could make it so! Even Winifred, ever
+a Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of such
+a mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be there.
+Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country which
+decently veiled such realities.
+
+When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to
+dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred's
+little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of
+seeing nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with
+an air of seeing a fire which was not there.
+
+Monsieur Profond came from the window. He was in full fig, with a white
+waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.
+
+“Well, Miss Forsyde,” he said, “I'm awful pleased to see you. Mr.
+Forsyde well? I was sayin' to-day I want to see him have some pleasure.
+He worries.”
+
+“You think so?” said Fleur shortly.
+
+“Worries,” repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r's.
+
+Fleur spun round. “Shall I tell you,” she said, “what would give him
+pleasure?” But the words, “To hear that you had cleared out,” died at
+the expression on his face. All his fine white teeth were showing.
+
+“I was hearin' at the Club to-day about his old trouble.” Fleur opened
+her eyes. “What do you mean?”
+
+Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his statement.
+
+“Before you were born,” he said; “that small business.”
+
+Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share
+in her father's worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush of nervous
+curiosity. “Tell me what you heard.”
+
+“Why!” murmured Monsieur Profond, “you know all that.”
+
+“I expect I do. But I should like to know that you haven't heard it all
+wrong.”
+
+“His first wife,” murmured Monsieur Profond.
+
+Choking back the words, “He was never married before,” she said: “Well,
+what about her?”
+
+“Mr. George Forsyde was tellin' me about your father's first wife
+marryin' his cousin Jolyon afterward. It was a small bit unpleasant, I
+should think. I saw their boy—nice boy!”
+
+Fleur looked up. Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical,
+before her. That—the reason! With the most heroic effort of her life
+so far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure. She could not tell
+whether he had noticed. And just then Winifred came in.
+
+“Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most amusing
+afternoon at the Babies' bazaar.”
+
+“What babies?” said Fleur mechanically.
+
+“The 'Save the Babies.' I got such a bargain, my dear. A piece of
+old Armenian work—from before the Flood. I want your opinion on it,
+Prosper.”
+
+“Auntie,” whispered Fleur suddenly.
+
+At the tone in the girl's voice Winifred closed in on her.'
+
+“What's the matter? Aren't you well?”
+
+Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was practically
+out of hearing.
+
+“Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before. Is it true
+that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte's father?”
+
+Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had Winifred
+felt more seriously embarrassed. Her niece's face was so pale, her eyes
+so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.
+
+“Your father didn't wish you to hear,” she said, with all the aplomb she
+could muster. “These things will happen. I've often told him he ought to
+let you know.”
+
+“Oh!” said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her
+shoulder—a firm little shoulder, nice and white! She never could help an
+appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who would have to
+be married, of course—though not to that boy Jon.
+
+“We've forgotten all about it years and years ago,” she said
+comfortably. “Come and have dinner!”
+
+“No, Auntie. I don't feel very well. May I go upstairs?”
+
+“My dear!” murmured Winifred, concerned, “you're not taking this to
+heart? Why, you haven't properly come out yet! That boy's a child!”
+
+“What boy? I've only got a headache. But I can't stand that man
+to-night.”
+
+“Well, well,” said Winifred, “go and lie down. I'll send you some
+bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond. What business had he to
+gossip? Though I must say I think it's much better you should know.”
+
+Fleur smiled. “Yes,” she said, and slipped from the room.
+
+She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a
+guttered frightened feeling in her breast. Never in her life as yet had
+she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what she
+had set her heart on. The sensations of the afternoon had been full
+and poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of them
+had really made her head ache. No wonder her father had hidden that
+photograph, so secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept it! But
+could he hate Jon's mother and yet keep her photograph? She pressed her
+hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly. Had they told
+Jon—had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell him? Everything now
+turned on that! She knew, they all knew, except—perhaps—Jon!
+
+She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard.
+Jon loved his mother. If they had told him, what would he do? She could
+not tell. But if they had not told him, should she not—could she not
+get him for herself—get married to him, before he knew? She searched her
+memories of Robin Hill. His mother's face so passive—with its dark eyes
+and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile—baffled her; and his
+father's—kindly, sunken, ironic. Instinctively she felt they would
+shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from hurting him—for of course
+it would hurt him awfully to know!
+
+Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew. So long as
+neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still a
+chance—freedom to cover one's tracks, and get what her heart was set on.
+But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation. Every one's hand was
+against her—every one's! It was as Jon had said—he and she just wanted
+to live and the past was in their way, a past they hadn't shared in, and
+didn't understand! Oh! What a shame! And suddenly she thought of June.
+Would she help them? For somehow June had left on her the impression
+that she would be sympathetic with their love, impatient of obstacle.
+Then, instinctively, she thought: 'I won't give anything away, though,
+even to her. I daren't. I mean to have Jon; against them all.'
+
+Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred's pet headache cachets.
+She swallowed both. Then Winifred herself appeared. Fleur opened her
+campaign with the words:
+
+“You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn't think I'm in love with that
+boy. Why, I've hardly seen him!”
+
+Winifred, though experienced, was not “fine.” She accepted the remark
+with considerable relief. Of course, it was not pleasant for the girl to
+hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to minimise the matter,
+a task for which she was eminently qualified, “raised” fashionably under
+a comfortable mother and a father whose nerves might not be shaken,
+and for many years the wife of Montague Dartie. Her description was a
+masterpiece of understatement. Fleur's father's first wife had been very
+foolish. There had been a young man who had got run over, and she
+had left Fleur's father. Then, years after, when it might all have
+come—right again, she had taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of
+course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce. Nobody remembered
+anything of it now, except just the family. And, perhaps, it had all
+turned out for the best; her father had Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had
+been quite happy, they said, and their boy was a nice boy. “Val having
+Holly, too, is a sort of plaster, don't you know?” With these soothing
+words, Winifred patted her niece's shoulder; thought: 'She's a nice,
+plump little thing!' and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite of
+his indiscretion, was very “amusing” this evening.
+
+For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under influence
+of bromide material and spiritual. But then reality came back. Her aunt
+had left out all that mattered—all the feeling, the hate, the love, the
+unforgivingness of passionate hearts. She, who knew so little of life,
+and had touched only the fringe of love, was yet aware by instinct that
+words have as little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread
+it buys. 'Poor Father!' she thought. 'Poor me! Poor Jon! But I don't
+care, I mean to have him!' From the window of her darkened room she saw
+“that man” issue from the door below and “prowl” away. If he and her
+mother—how would that affect her chance? Surely it must make her father
+cling to her more closely, so that he would consent in the end to
+anything she wanted, or become reconciled the sooner to what she did
+without his knowledge.
+
+She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with all her
+might flung it after that disappearing figure. It fell short, but the
+action did her good.
+
+And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of petrol,
+not sweet.
+
+
+
+
+
+V.—PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
+
+Soames, coming up to the City, with the intention of calling in at
+Green Street at the end of his day and taking Fleur back home with
+him, suffered from rumination. Sleeping partner that he was, he seldom
+visited the City now, but he still had a room of his own at Cuthcott,
+Kingson and Forsyte's, and one special clerk and a half assigned to the
+management of purely Forsyte affairs. They were somewhat in flux just
+now—an auspicious moment for the disposal of house property. And Soames
+was unloading the estates of his father and Uncle Roger, and to some
+extent of his Uncle Nicholas. His shrewd and matter-of-course probity in
+all money concerns had made him something of an autocrat in connection
+with these trusts. If Soames thought this or thought that, one had
+better save oneself the bother of thinking too. He guaranteed, as it
+were, irresponsibility to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth
+generations. His fellow trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas,
+his cousins-in-law Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely's
+husband, all trusted him; he signed first, and where he signed first
+they signed after, and nobody was a penny the worse. Just now they were
+all a good many pennies the better, and Soames was beginning to see
+the close of certain trusts, except for distribution of the income from
+securities as gilt-edged as was compatible with the period.
+
+Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect
+backwater in London, he ruminated. Money was extraordinarily tight;
+and morality extraordinarily loose! The War had done it. Banks were
+not lending; people breaking contracts all over the place. There was a
+feeling in the air and a look on faces that he did not like. The
+country seemed in for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies. There
+was satisfaction in the thought that neither he nor his trusts had
+an investment which could be affected by anything less maniacal than
+national repudiation or a levy on capital. If Soames had faith, it was
+in what he called “English common sense”—or the power to have things, if
+not one way then another. He might—like his father James before him—say
+he didn't know what things were coming to, but he never in his heart
+believed they were. If it rested with him, they wouldn't—and, after all,
+he was only an Englishman like any other, so quietly tenacious of what
+he had that he knew he would never really part with it without
+something more or less equivalent in exchange. His mind was essentially
+equilibristic in material matters, and his way of putting the national
+situation difficult to refute in a world composed of human beings. Take
+his own case, for example! He was well off. Did that do anybody harm?
+He did not eat ten meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much
+as, a poor man. He spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no
+more water to speak of than the mechanic or the porter. He certainly had
+pretty things about him, but they had given employment in the making,
+and somebody must use them. He bought pictures, but Art must be
+encouraged. He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which money
+flowed, employing labour. What was there objectionable in that? In his
+charge money was in quicker and more useful flux than it would be in
+charge of the State and a lot of slow-fly money-sucking officials. And
+as to what he saved each year—it was just as much in flux as what he
+didn't save, going into Water Board or Council Stocks, or something
+sound and useful. The State paid him no salary for being trustee of his
+own or other people's money he did all that for nothing. Therein lay
+the whole case against nationalisation—owners of private property
+were unpaid, and yet had every incentive to quicken up the flux.
+Under nationalisation—just the opposite! In a country smarting from
+officialism he felt that he had a strong case.
+
+It particularly annoyed him, entering that backwater of perfect peace,
+to think that a lot of unscrupulous Trusts and Combinations had been
+cornering the market in goods of all kinds, and keeping prices at an
+artificial height. Such abusers of the individualistic system were the
+ruffians who caused all the trouble, and it was some satisfaction to see
+them getting into a stew at last lest the whole thing might come down
+with a run—and land them in the soup.
+
+The offices of Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte occupied the ground and
+first floors of a house on the right-hand side; and, ascending to his
+room, Soames thought: 'Time we had a coat of paint.'
+
+His old clerk Gradman was seated, where he always was, at a huge bureau
+with countless pigeonholes. Half-the-clerk stood beside him, with a
+broker's note recording investment of the proceeds from sale of the
+Bryanston Square house, in Roger Forsyte's estate. Soames took it, and
+said:
+
+“Vancouver City Stock. H'm. It's down today!”
+
+With a sort of grating ingratiation old Gradman answered him:
+
+“Ye-es; but everything's down, Mr. Soames.” And half-the-clerk withdrew.
+
+Soames skewered the document on to a number of other papers and hung up
+his hat.
+
+“I want to look at my Will and Marriage Settlement, Gradman.”
+
+Old Gradman, moving to the limit of his swivel chair, drew out two
+drafts from the bottom lefthand drawer. Recovering his body, he raised
+his grizzle-haired face, very red from stooping.
+
+“Copies, Sir.”
+
+Soames took them. It struck him suddenly how like Gradman was to the
+stout brindled yard dog they had been wont to keep on his chain at
+The Shelter, till one day Fleur had come and insisted it should be let
+loose, so that it had at once bitten the cook and been destroyed. If you
+let Gradman off his chain, would he bite the cook?
+
+Checking this frivolous fancy, Soames unfolded his Marriage Settlement.
+He had not looked at it for over eighteen years, not since he remade his
+Will when his father died and Fleur was born. He wanted to see whether
+the words “during coverture” were in. Yes, they were—odd expression,
+when you thought of it, and derived perhaps from horse-breeding!
+Interest on fifteen thousand pounds (which he paid her without deducting
+income tax) so long as she remained his wife, and afterward during
+widowhood “dum casta”—old-fashioned and rather pointed words, put in to
+insure the conduct of Fleur's mother. His Will made it up to an annuity
+of a thousand under the same conditions. All right! He returned the
+copies to Gradman, who took them without looking up, swung the chair,
+restored the papers to their drawer, and went on casting up.
+
+“Gradman! I don't like the condition of the country; there are a lot of
+people about without any common sense. I want to find a way by which I
+can safeguard Miss Fleur against anything which might arise.”
+
+Gradman wrote the figure “2” on his blotting-paper.
+
+“Ye-es,” he said; “there's a nahsty spirit.”
+
+“The ordinary restraint against anticipation doesn't meet the case.”
+
+“Nao,” said Gradman.
+
+“Suppose those Labour fellows come in, or worse! It's these people with
+fixed ideas who are the danger. Look at Ireland!”
+
+“Ah!” said Gradman.
+
+“Suppose I were to make a settlement on her at once with myself as
+beneficiary for life, they couldn't take anything but the interest from
+me, unless of course they alter the law.”
+
+Gradman moved his head and smiled.
+
+“Ah!” he said, “they wouldn't do tha-at!”
+
+“I don't know,” muttered Soames; “I don't trust them.”
+
+“It'll take two years, sir, to be valid against death duties.”
+
+Soames sniffed. Two years! He was only sixty-five!
+
+“That's not the point. Draw a form of settlement that passes all my
+property to Miss Fleur's children in equal shares, with antecedent
+life-interests first to myself and then to her without power of
+anticipation, and add a clause that in the event of anything happening
+to divert her life-interest, that interest passes to the trustees, to
+apply for her benefit, in their absolute discretion.”
+
+Gradman grated: “Rather extreme at your age, sir; you lose control.”
+
+“That's my business,” said Soames sharply.
+
+Gradman wrote on a piece of paper: “Life-interest—anticipation—divert
+interest—absolute discretion....” and said:
+
+“What trustees? There's young Mr. Kingson; he's a nice steady young
+fellow.”
+
+“Yes, he might do for one. I must have three. There isn't a Forsyte now
+who appeals to me.”
+
+“Not young Mr. Nicholas? He's at the Bar. We've given 'im briefs.”
+
+“He'll never set the Thames on fire,” said Soames.
+
+A smile oozed out on Gradman's face, greasy from countless mutton-chops,
+the smile of a man who sits all day.
+
+“You can't expect it, at his age, Mr. Soames.”
+
+“Why? What is he? Forty?”
+
+“Ye-es, quite a young fellow.”
+
+“Well, put him in; but I want somebody who'll take a personal interest.
+There's no one that I can see.”
+
+“What about Mr. Valerius, now he's come home?”
+
+“Val Dartie? With that father?”
+
+“We-ell,” murmured Gradman, “he's been dead seven years—the Statute runs
+against him.”
+
+“No,” said Soames. “I don't like the connection.” He rose. Gradman said
+suddenly:
+
+“If they were makin' a levy on capital, they could come on the trustees,
+sir. So there you'd be just the same. I'd think it over, if I were you.”
+
+“That's true,” said Soames. “I will. What have you done about that
+dilapidation notice in Vere Street?”
+
+“I 'aven't served it yet. The party's very old. She won't want to go out
+at her age.”
+
+“I don't know. This spirit of unrest touches every one.”
+
+“Still, I'm lookin' at things broadly, sir. She's eighty-one.”
+
+“Better serve it,” said Soames, “and see what she says. Oh! and Mr.
+Timothy? Is everything in order in case of—”
+
+“I've got the inventory of his estate all ready; had the furniture and
+pictures valued so that we know what reserves to put on. I shall be
+sorry when he goes, though. Dear me! It is a time since I first saw Mr.
+Timothy!”
+
+“We can't live for ever,” said Soames, taking down his hat.
+
+“Nao,” said Gradman; “but it'll be a pity—the last of the old family!
+Shall I take up the matter of that nuisance in Old Compton Street? Those
+organs—they're nahsty things.”
+
+“Do. I must call for Miss Fleur and catch the four o'clock. Good-day,
+Gradman.”
+
+“Good-day, Mr. Soames. I hope Miss Fleur—”
+
+“Well enough, but gads about too much.”
+
+“Ye-es,” grated Gradman; “she's young.”
+
+Soames went out, musing: “Old Gradman! If he were younger I'd put him in
+the trust. There's nobody I can depend on to take a real interest.”
+
+Leaving the bilious and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous peace
+of that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture! Why can't
+they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-working
+Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which could
+provoke so unpatriotic a thought. But there it was! One never got
+a moment of real peace. There was always something at the back of
+everything! And he made his way toward Green Street.
+
+Two hours later by his watch, Thomas Gradman, stirring in his swivel
+chair, closed the last drawer of his bureau, and putting into
+his waistcoat pocket a bunch of keys so fat that they gave him a
+protuberance on the liver side, brushed his old top hat round with his
+sleeve, took his umbrella, and descended. Thick, short, and buttoned
+closely into his old frock coat, he walked toward Covent Garden market.
+He never missed that daily promenade to the Tube for Highgate,
+and seldom some critical transaction on the way in connection with
+vegetables and fruit. Generations might be born, and hats might change,
+wars be fought, and Forsytes fade away, but Thomas Gradman, faithful and
+grey, would take his daily walk and buy his daily vegetable. Times were
+not what they were, and his son had lost a leg, and they never gave him
+those nice little plaited baskets to carry the stuff in now, and these
+Tubes were convenient things—still he mustn't complain; his health was
+good considering his time of life, and after fifty-four years in the
+Law he was getting a round eight hundred a year and a little worried
+of late, because it was mostly collector's commission on the rents, and
+with all this conversion of Forsyte property going on, it looked like
+drying up, and the price of living still so high; but it was no good
+worrying—“The good God made us all”—as he was in the habit of saying;
+still, house property in London—he didn't know what Mr. Roger or Mr.
+James would say if they could see it being sold like this—seemed to show
+a lack of faith; but Mr. Soames—he worried. Life and lives in being and
+twenty-one years after—beyond that you couldn't go; still, he kept his
+health wonderfully—and Miss Fleur was a pretty little thing—she was;
+she'd marry; but lots of people had no children nowadays—he had had
+his first child at twenty-two; and Mr. Jolyon, married while he was at
+Cambridge, had his child the same year—gracious Peter! That was back in
+'69, a long time before old Mr. Jolyon—fine judge of property—had taken
+his Will away from Mr. James—dear, yes! Those were the days when they
+were buyin' property right and left, and none of this khaki and fallin'
+over one another to get out of things; and cucumbers at twopence; and a
+melon—the old melons, that made your mouth water! Fifty years since
+he went into Mr. James' office, and Mr. James had said to him: “Now,
+Gradman, you're only a shaver—you pay attention, and you'll make your
+five hundred a year before you've done.” And he had, and feared God, and
+served the Forsytes, and kept a vegetable diet at night. And, buying a
+copy of John Bull—not that he approved of it, an extravagant affair—he
+entered the Tube elevator with his mere brown-paper parcel, and was
+borne down into the bowels of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+
+VI.—SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE
+
+On his way to Green Street it occurred to Soames that he ought to go
+into Dumetrius' in Suffolk Street about the possibility of the Bolderby
+Old Crome. Almost worth while to have fought the war to have the
+Bolderby Old Crome, as it were, in flux! Old Bolderby had died, his son
+and grandson had been killed—a cousin was coming into the estate, who
+meant to sell it, some said because of the condition of England, others
+said because he had asthma.
+
+If Dumetrius once got hold of it the price would become prohibitive;
+it was necessary for Soames to find out whether Dumetrius had got it,
+before he tried to get it himself. He therefore confined himself to
+discussing with Dumetrius whether Monticellis would come again now that
+it was the fashion for a picture to be anything except a picture; and
+the future of Johns, with a side-slip into Buxton Knights. It was only
+when leaving that he added: “So they're not selling the Bolderby Old
+Crome, after all?” In sheer pride of racial superiority, as he had
+calculated would be the case, Dumetrius replied:
+
+“Oh! I shall get it, Mr. Forsyte, sir!”
+
+The flutter of his eyelid fortified Soames in a resolution to write
+direct to the new Bolderby, suggesting that the only dignified way
+of dealing with an Old Crome was to avoid dealers. He therefore said,
+“Well, good-day!” and went, leaving Dumetrius the wiser.
+
+At Green Street he found that Fleur was out and would be all the
+evening; she was staying one more night in London. He cabbed on
+dejectedly, and caught his train.
+
+He reached his house about six o'clock. The air was heavy, midges
+biting, thunder about. Taking his letters he went up to his
+dressing-room to cleanse himself of London.
+
+An uninteresting post. A receipt, a bill for purchases on behalf of
+Fleur. A circular about an exhibition of etchings. A letter beginning:
+
+“SIR,
+
+“I feel it my duty...”
+
+That would be an appeal or something unpleasant. He looked at once for
+the signature. There was none! Incredulously he turned the page over and
+examined each corner. Not being a public man, Soames had never yet
+had an anonymous letter, and his first impulse was to tear it up, as a
+dangerous thing; his second to read it, as a thing still more dangerous.
+
+“SIR,
+
+“I feel it my duty to inform you that having no interest in the matter
+your lady is carrying on with a foreigner—”
+
+Reaching that word Soames stopped mechanically and examined the
+postmark. So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in which
+the Post Office had wrapped it, there was something with a “sea” at the
+end and a “t” in it. Chelsea? No! Battersea? Perhaps! He read on.
+
+“These foreigners are all the same. Sack the lot. This one meets
+your lady twice a week. I know it of my own knowledge—and to see an
+Englishman put on goes against the grain. You watch it and see if what I
+say isn't true. I shouldn't meddle if it wasn't a dirty foreigner that's
+in it.
+
+“Yours obedient.”
+
+The sensation with which Soames dropped the letter was similar to
+that he would have had entering his bedroom and finding it full of
+black-beetles. The meanness of anonymity gave a shuddering obscenity
+to the moment. And the worst of it was that this shadow had been at the
+back of his mind ever since the Sunday evening when Fleur had pointed
+down at Prosper Profond strolling on the lawn, and said: “Prowling cat!”
+Had he not in connection therewith, this very day, perused his Will and
+Marriage Settlement? And now this anonymous ruffian, with nothing to
+gain, apparently, save the venting of his spite against foreigners, had
+wrenched it out of the obscurity in which he had hoped and wished it
+would remain. To have such knowledge forced on him, at his time of life,
+about Fleur's mother! He picked the letter up from the carpet, tore it
+across, and then, when it hung together by just the fold at the back,
+stopped tearing, and reread it. He was taking at that moment one of the
+decisive resolutions of his life. He would not be forced into another
+scandal. No! However he decided to deal with this matter—and it required
+the most far-sighted and careful consideration he would do nothing that
+might injure Fleur. That resolution taken, his mind answered the helm
+again, and he made his ablutions. His hands trembled as he dried them.
+Scandal he would not have, but something must be done to stop this sort
+of thing! He went into his wife's room and stood looking around him. The
+idea of searching for anything which would incriminate, and entitle
+him to hold a menace over her, did not even come to him. There would be
+nothing—she was much too practical. The idea of having her watched
+had been dismissed before it came—too well he remembered his previous
+experience of that. No! He had nothing but this torn-up letter from some
+anonymous ruffian, whose impudent intrusion into his private life he so
+violently resented. It was repugnant to him to make use of it, but he
+might have to. What a mercy Fleur was not at home to-night! A tap on the
+door broke up his painful cogitations.
+
+“Mr. Michael Mont, sir, is in the drawing-room. Will you see him?”
+
+“No,” said Soames; “yes. I'll come down.”
+
+Anything that would take his mind off for a few minutes!
+
+Michael Mont in flannels stood on the verandah smoking a cigarette. He
+threw it away as Soames came up, and ran his hand through his hair.
+
+Soames' feeling toward this young man was singular. He was no doubt
+a rackety, irresponsible young fellow according to old standards, yet
+somehow likeable, with his extraordinarily cheerful way of blurting out
+his opinions.
+
+“Come in,” he said; “have you had tea?”
+
+Mont came in.
+
+“I thought Fleur would have been back, sir; but I'm glad she isn't. The
+fact is, I—I'm fearfully gone on her; so fearfully gone that I thought
+you'd better know. It's old-fashioned, of course, coming to fathers
+first, but I thought you'd forgive that. I went to my own Dad, and he
+says if I settle down he'll see me through. He rather cottons to the
+idea, in fact. I told him about your Goya.”
+
+“Oh!” said Soames, inexpressibly dry. “He rather cottons?”
+
+“Yes, sir; do you?”
+
+Soames smiled faintly.
+
+“You see,” resumed Mont, twiddling his straw hat, while his hair, ears,
+eyebrows, all seemed to stand up from excitement, “when you've been
+through the War you can't help being in a hurry.”
+
+“To get married; and unmarried afterward,” said Soames slowly.
+
+“Not from Fleur, sir. Imagine, if you were me!”
+
+Soames cleared his throat. That way of putting it was forcible enough.
+
+“Fleur's too young,” he said.
+
+“Oh! no, sir. We're awfully old nowadays. My Dad seems to me a perfect
+babe; his thinking apparatus hasn't turned a hair. But he's a Baronight,
+of course; that keeps him back.”
+
+“Baronight,” repeated Soames; “what may that be?”
+
+“Bart, sir. I shall be a Bart some day. But I shall live it down, you
+know.”
+
+“Go away and live this down,” said Soames.
+
+Young Mont said imploringly: “Oh! no, sir. I simply must hang around, or
+I shouldn't have a dog's chance. You'll let Fleur do what she likes, I
+suppose, anyway. Madame passes me.”
+
+“Indeed!” said Soames frigidly.
+
+“You don't really bar me, do you?” and the young man looked so doleful
+that Soames smiled.
+
+“You may think you're very old,” he said; “but you strike me as
+extremely young. To rattle ahead of everything is not a proof of
+maturity.”
+
+“All right, sir; I give you our age. But to show you I mean
+business—I've got a job.”
+
+“Glad to hear it.”
+
+“Joined a publisher; my governor is putting up the stakes.”
+
+Soames put his hand over his mouth—he had so very nearly said: “God help
+the publisher!” His grey eyes scrutinised the agitated young man.
+
+“I don't dislike you, Mr. Mont, but Fleur is everything to me:
+Everything—do you understand?”
+
+“Yes, sir, I know; but so she is to me.”
+
+“That's as may be. I'm glad you've told me, however. And now I think
+there's nothing more to be said.”
+
+“I know it rests with her, sir.”
+
+“It will rest with her a long time, I hope.”
+
+“You aren't cheering,” said Mont suddenly.
+
+“No,” said Soames, “my experience of life has not made me anxious to
+couple people in a hurry. Good-night, Mr. Mont. I shan't tell Fleur what
+you've said.”
+
+“Oh!” murmured Mont blankly; “I really could knock my brains out for
+want of her. She knows that perfectly well.”
+
+“I dare say.” And Soames held out his hand. A distracted squeeze, a
+heavy sigh, and soon after sounds from the young man's motor-cycle
+called up visions of flying dust and broken bones.
+
+'The younger generation!' he thought heavily, and went out on to the
+lawn. The gardeners had been mowing, and there was still the smell of
+fresh-cut grass—the thundery air kept all scents close to earth. The sky
+was of a purplish hue—the poplars black. Two or three boats passed on
+the river, scuttling, as it were, for shelter before the storm. 'Three
+days' fine weather,' thought Soames, 'and then a storm!' Where was
+Annette? With that chap, for all he knew—she was a young woman!
+Impressed with the queer charity of that thought, he entered the
+summerhouse and sat down. The fact was—and he admitted it—Fleur was so
+much to him that his wife was very little—very little; French—had never
+been much more than a mistress, and he was getting indifferent to
+that side of things! It was odd how, with all this ingrained care for
+moderation and secure investment, Soames ever put his emotional eggs
+into one basket. First Irene—now Fleur. He was dimly conscious of it,
+sitting there, conscious of its odd dangerousness. It had brought him to
+wreck and scandal once, but now—now it should save him! He cared so much
+for Fleur that he would have no further scandal. If only he could get at
+that anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not to meddle and stir
+up mud at the bottom of water which he wished should remain stagnant!...
+A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain spattered on the
+thatch above him. He remained indifferent, tracing a pattern with his
+finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table. Fleur's future! 'I
+want fair sailing for her,' he thought. 'Nothing else matters at my time
+of life.' A lonely business—life! What you had you never could keep to
+yourself! As you warned one off, you let another in. One could make sure
+of nothing! He reached up and pulled a red rambler rose from a cluster
+which blocked the window. Flowers grew and dropped—Nature was a queer
+thing! The thunder rumbled and crashed, travelling east along a river,
+the paling flashes flicked his eyes; the poplar tops showed sharp and
+dense against the sky, a heavy shower rustled and rattled and veiled in
+the little house wherein he sat, indifferent, thinking.
+
+When the storm was over, he left his retreat and went down the wet path
+to the river bank.
+
+Two swans had come, sheltering in among the reeds. He knew the birds
+well, and stood watching the dignity in the curve of those white necks
+and formidable snake-like heads. 'Not dignified—what I have to do!' he
+thought. And yet it must be tackled, lest worse befell. Annette must be
+back by now from wherever she had gone, for it was nearly dinner-time,
+and as the moment for seeing her approached, the difficulty of knowing
+what to say and how to say it had increased. A new and scaring thought
+occurred to him. Suppose she wanted her liberty to marry this fellow!
+Well, if she did, she couldn't have it. He had not married her for that.
+The image of Prosper Profond dawdled before him reassuringly. Not a
+marrying man! No, no! Anger replaced that momentary scare. 'He had
+better not come my way,' he thought. The mongrel represented—-! But what
+did Prosper Profond represent? Nothing that mattered surely. And
+yet something real enough in the world—unmorality let off its chain,
+disillusionment on the prowl! That expression Annette had caught from
+him: “Je m'en fiche!” A fatalistic chap! A continental—a cosmopolitan—a
+product of the age! If there were condemnation more complete, Soames
+felt that he did not know it.
+
+The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into some
+distance of their own. One of them uttered a little hiss, wagged its
+tail, turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam away. The other
+followed. Their white bodies, their stately necks, passed out of his
+sight, and he went toward the house.
+
+Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he thought as
+he went up-stairs 'Handsome is as handsome does.' Handsome! Except for
+remarks about the curtains in the drawing-room, and the storm, there was
+practically no conversation during a meal distinguished by exactitude
+of quantity and perfection of quality. Soames drank nothing. He followed
+her into the drawing-room afterward, and found her smoking a cigarette
+on the sofa between the two French windows. She was leaning back, almost
+upright, in a low black frock, with her knees crossed and her blue eyes
+half-closed; grey-blue smoke issued from her red, rather full lips, a
+fillet bound her chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk stockings,
+and shoes with very high heels showing off her instep. A fine piece in
+any room! Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep into
+the side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
+
+“I'm going to shut the window; the damp's lifting in.”
+
+He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the cream-panelled
+wall close by.
+
+What was she thinking of? He had never understood a woman in his
+life—except Fleur—and Fleur not always! His heart beat fast. But if he
+meant to do it, now was the moment. Turning from the David Cox, he took
+out the torn letter.
+
+“I've had this.”
+
+Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
+
+Soames handed her the letter.
+
+“It's torn, but you can read it.” And he turned back to the David Cox—a
+sea-piece, of good tone—but without movement enough. 'I wonder what that
+chap's doing at this moment?' he thought. 'I'll astonish him yet.' Out
+of the corner of his eye he saw Annette holding the letter rigidly;
+her eyes moved from side to side under her darkened lashes and frowning
+darkened eyes. She dropped the letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and
+said:
+
+“Dirrty!”
+
+“I quite agree,” said Soames; “degrading. Is it true?”
+
+A tooth fastened on her red lower lip. “And what if it were?”
+
+She was brazen!
+
+“Is that all you have to say?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Well, speak out!”
+
+“What is the good of talking?”
+
+Soames said icily: “So you admit it?”
+
+“I admit nothing. You are a fool to ask. A man like you should not ask.
+It is dangerous.”
+
+Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
+
+“Do you remember,” he said, halting in front of her, “what you were when
+I married you? Working at accounts in a restaurant.”
+
+“Do you remember that I was not half your age?”
+
+Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to the
+David Cox.
+
+“I am not going to bandy words. I require you to give up
+this—friendship. I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur.”
+
+“Ah!—Fleur!”
+
+“Yes,” said Soames stubbornly; “Fleur. She is your child as well as
+mine.”
+
+“It is kind to admit that!”
+
+“Are you going to do what I say?”
+
+“I refuse to tell you.”
+
+“Then I must make you.”
+
+Annette smiled.
+
+“No, Soames,” she said. “You are helpless. Do not say things that you
+will regret.”
+
+Anger swelled the veins on his forehead. He opened his mouth to vent
+that emotion, and could not. Annette went on:
+
+“There shall be no more such letters, I promise you. That is enough.”
+
+Soames writhed. He had a sense of being treated like a child by this
+woman who had deserved he did not know what.
+
+“When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had
+better be quiet about each other. There are things one does not drag up
+into the light for people to laugh at. You will be quiet, then; not for
+my sake for your own. You are getting old; I am not, yet. You have made
+me ver-ry practical”
+
+Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked,
+repeated dully:
+
+“I require you to give up this friendship.”
+
+“And if I do not?”
+
+“Then—then I will cut you out of my Will.”
+
+Somehow it did not seem to meet the case. Annette laughed.
+
+“You will live a long time, Soames.”
+
+“You—you are a bad woman,” said Soames suddenly.
+
+Annette shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“I do not think so. Living with you has killed things in me, it is true;
+but I am not a bad woman. I am sensible—that is all. And so will you be
+when you have thought it over.”
+
+“I shall see this man,” said Soames sullenly, “and warn him off.”
+
+“Mon cher, you are funny. You do not want me, you have as much of me as
+you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead. I admit nothing, but I
+am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had better be quiet,
+I tell you. I myself will make no scandal; none. Now, I am not saying
+any more, whatever you do.”
+
+She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened it.
+Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings. The thought
+of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a revelation
+of their relationship, startling to one little given to introspective
+philosophy. Without saying another word he went out and up to the
+picture-gallery. This came of marrying a Frenchwoman! And yet, without
+her there would have been no Fleur! She had served her purpose.
+
+'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing. I don't even know that
+there's anything in it.' The instinct of self-preservation warned him
+to batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air. Unless
+one believed there was something in a thing, there wasn't.
+
+That night he went into her room. She received him in the most
+matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them. And he
+returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace. If one didn't
+choose to see, one needn't. And he did not choose—in future he did not
+choose. There was nothing to be gained by it—nothing! Opening the drawer
+he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed photograph of
+Fleur. When he had looked at it a little he slipped it down, and there
+was that other one—that old one of Irene. An owl hooted while he stood
+in his window gazing at it. The owl hooted, the red climbing roses
+seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom. God!
+That had been a different thing! Passion—Memory! Dust!
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.—JUNE TAKES A HAND
+
+One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York, an
+egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June Forsyte's
+studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick. On the evening of July
+6, Boris Strumolowski—several of whose works were on show there because
+they were as yet too advanced to be on show anywhere else—had begun
+well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like silence which admirably
+suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned countenance framed in
+bright hair banged like a girl's. June had known him three weeks, and he
+still seemed to her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of
+the future; a sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an
+unappreciative West. Until that evening he had conversationally confined
+himself to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust
+he had just shaken from off his feet—a country, in his opinion, so
+barbarous in every way that he had sold practically nothing there, and
+become an object of suspicion to the police; a country, as he said,
+without a race of its own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity,
+without principles, traditions, taste, without—in a word—a soul. He had
+left it for his own good, and come to the only other country where he
+could live well. June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments,
+standing before his creations—frightening, but powerful and symbolic
+once they had been explained! That he, haloed by bright hair like an
+early Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion
+of all else—the only sign of course by which real genius could be
+told—should still be a “lame duck” agitated her warm heart almost to
+the exclusion of Paul Post. And she had begun to take steps to clear her
+Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces. She had at
+once encountered trouble. Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch had stung.
+With all the emphasis of a genius which she did not as yet deny them,
+they had demanded another six weeks at least of her Gallery. The
+American stream, still flowing in, would soon be flowing out. The
+American stream was their right, their only hope, their salvation—since
+nobody in this “beastly” country cared for Art. June had yielded to
+the demonstration. After all Boris would not mind their having the full
+benefit of an American stream, which he himself so violently despised.
+
+This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present, except
+Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy Portugal,
+editor of the Neo-Artist. She had put it to him with that sudden
+confidence which continual contact with the neo-artistic world had never
+been able to dry up in her warm and generous nature. He had not broken
+his Christ-like silence, however, for more than two minutes before she
+began to move her blue eyes from side to side, as a cat moves its tail.
+This—he said—was characteristic of England, the most selfish country
+in the world; the country which sucked the blood of other countries;
+destroyed the brains and hearts of Irishmen, Hindus, Egyptians, Boers,
+and Burmese, all the best races in the world; bullying, hypocritical
+England! This was what he had expected, coming to, such a country, where
+the climate was all fog, and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind
+to Art, and sunk in profiteering and the grossest materialism. Conscious
+that Hannah Hobdey was murmuring, “Hear, hear!” and Jimmy Portugal
+sniggering, June grew crimson, and suddenly rapped out:
+
+“Then why did you ever come? We didn't ask you.”
+
+The remark was so singularly at variance with all she had led him to
+expect from her, that Strumolowski stretched out his hand and took a
+cigarette.
+
+“England never wants an idealist,” he said.
+
+But in June something primitively English was thoroughly upset; old
+Jolyon's sense of justice had risen, as it were, from bed. “You come and
+sponge on us,” she said, “and then abuse us. If you think that's playing
+the game, I don't.”
+
+She now discovered that which others had discovered before her—the
+thickness of hide beneath which the sensibility of genius is sometimes
+veiled. Strumolowski's young and ingenuous face became the incarnation
+of a sneer.
+
+“Sponge, one does not sponge, one takes what is owing—a tenth part of
+what is owing. You will repent to say that, Miss Forsyte.”
+
+“Oh, no,” said June, “I shan't.”
+
+“Ah! We know very well, we artists—you take us to get what you can out
+of us. I want nothing from you”—and he blew out a cloud of June's smoke.
+
+Decision rose in an icy puff from the turmoil of insulted shame within
+her. “Very well, then, you can take your things away.”
+
+And, almost in the same moment, she thought: 'Poor boy! He's only got
+a garret, and probably not a taxi fare. In front of these people, too;
+it's positively disgusting!'
+
+Young Strumolowski shook his head violently; his hair, thick, smooth,
+close as a golden plate, did not fall off.
+
+“I can live on nothing,” he said shrilly; “I have often had to for the
+sake of my Art. It is you bourgeois who force us to spend money.”
+
+The words hit June like a pebble, in the ribs. After all she had done
+for Art, all her identification with its troubles and lame ducks. She
+was struggling for adequate words when the door was opened, and her
+Austrian murmured:
+
+“A young lady, gnadiges Fraulein.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“In the little meal-room.”
+
+With a glance at Boris Strumolowski, at Hannah Hobdey, at Jimmy
+Portugal, June said nothing, and went out, devoid of equanimity.
+Entering the “little meal-room,” she perceived the young lady to be
+Fleur—looking very pretty, if pale. At this disenchanted moment a little
+lame duck of her own breed was welcome to June, so homoeopathic by
+instinct.
+
+The girl must have come, of course, because of Jon; or, if not, at least
+to get something out of her. And June felt just then that to assist
+somebody was the only bearable thing.
+
+“So you've remembered to come,” she said.
+
+“Yes. What a jolly little duck of a house! But please don't let me
+bother you, if you've got people.”
+
+“Not at all,” said June. “I want to let them stew in their own juice for
+a bit. Have you come about Jon?”
+
+“You said you thought we ought to be told. Well, I've found out.”
+
+“Oh!” said June blankly. “Not nice, is it?”
+
+They were standing one on each side of the little bare table at which
+June took her meals. A vase on it was full of Iceland poppies; the
+girl raised her hand and touched them with a gloved finger. To her
+new-fangled dress, frilly about the hips and tight below the knees, June
+took a sudden liking—a charming colour, flax-blue.
+
+'She makes a picture,' thought June. Her little room, with its
+whitewashed walls, its floor and hearth of old pink brick, its black
+paint, and latticed window athwart which the last of the sunlight was
+shining, had never looked so charming, set off by this young figure,
+with the creamy, slightly frowning face. She remembered with sudden
+vividness how nice she herself had looked in those old days when her
+heart was set on Philip Bosinney, that dead lover, who had broken from
+her to destroy for ever Irene's allegiance to this girl's father. Did
+Fleur know of that, too?
+
+“Well,” she said, “what are you going to do?”
+
+It was some seconds before Fleur answered.
+
+“I don't want Jon to suffer. I must see him once more to put an end to
+it.”
+
+“You're going to put an end to it!”
+
+“What else is there to do?”
+
+The girl seemed to June, suddenly, intolerably spiritless.
+
+“I suppose you're right,” she muttered. “I know my father thinks so;
+but—I should never have done it myself. I can't take things lying down.”
+
+How poised and watchful that girl looked; how unemotional her voice
+sounded!
+
+“People will assume that I'm in love.”
+
+“Well, aren't you?”
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders. 'I might have known it,' thought June;
+'she's Soames' daughter—fish! And yet—he!'
+
+“What do you want me to do then?” she said with a sort of disgust.
+
+“Could I see Jon here to-morrow on his way down to Holly's? He'd come if
+you sent him a line to-night. And perhaps afterward you'd let them know
+quietly at Robin Hill that it's all over, and that they needn't tell Jon
+about his mother.”
+
+“All right!” said June abruptly. “I'll write now, and you can post it.
+Half-past two tomorrow. I shan't be in, myself.”
+
+She sat down at the tiny bureau which filled one corner. When she looked
+round with the finished note Fleur was still touching the poppies with
+her gloved finger.
+
+June licked a stamp. “Well, here it is. If you're not in love, of
+course, there's no more to be said. Jon's lucky.”
+
+Fleur took the note. “Thanks awfully!”
+
+'Cold-blooded little baggage!' thought June. Jon, son of her father, to
+love, and not to be loved by the daughter of—Soames! It was humiliating!
+
+“Is that all?”
+
+Fleur nodded; her frills shook and trembled as she swayed toward the
+door.
+
+“Good-bye!”
+
+“Good-bye!... Little piece of fashion!” muttered June, closing the
+door. “That family!” And she marched back toward her studio. Boris
+Strumolowski had regained his Christ-like silence and Jimmy Portugal
+was damning everybody, except the group in whose behalf he ran the
+Neo-Artist. Among the condemned were Eric Cobbley, and several other
+“lame-duck” genii who at one time or another had held first place in
+the repertoire of June's aid and adoration. She experienced a sense of
+futility and disgust, and went to the window to let the river-wind blow
+those squeaky words away.
+
+But when at length Jimmy Portugal had finished, and gone with Hannah
+Hobdey, she sat down and mothered young Strumolowski for half an hour,
+promising him a month, at least, of the American stream; so that he went
+away with his halo in perfect order. 'In spite of all,' June thought,
+'Boris is wonderful.'
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII.—THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
+
+To know that your hand is against every one's is—for some natures—to
+experience a sense of moral release. Fleur felt no remorse when she left
+June's house. Reading condemnatory resentment in her little kinswoman's
+blue eyes-she was glad that she had fooled her, despising June because
+that elderly idealist had not seen what she was after.
+
+End it, forsooth! She would soon show them all that she was only just
+beginning. And she smiled to herself on the top of the bus which carried
+her back to Mayfair. But the smile died, squeezed out by spasms of
+anticipation and anxiety. Would she be able to manage Jon? She had taken
+the bit between her teeth, but could she make him take it too? She knew
+the truth and the real danger of delay—he knew neither; therein lay all
+the difference in the world.
+
+'Suppose I tell him,' she thought; 'wouldn't it really be safer?' This
+hideous luck had no right to spoil their love; he must see that! They
+could not let it! People always accepted an accomplished fact in time!
+From that piece of philosophy—profound enough at her age—she passed to
+another consideration less philosophic. If she persuaded Jon to a quick
+and secret marriage, and he found out afterward that she had known the
+truth. What then? Jon hated subterfuge. Again, then, would it not be
+better to tell him? But the memory of his mother's face kept intruding
+on that impulse. Fleur was afraid. His mother had power over him; more
+power perhaps than she herself. Who could tell? It was too great a risk.
+Deep-sunk in these instinctive calculations she was carried on past
+Green Street as far as the Ritz Hotel. She got down there, and walked
+back on the Green Park side. The storm had washed every tree; they
+still dripped. Heavy drops fell on to her frills, and to avoid them she
+crossed over under the eyes of the Iseeum Club. Chancing to look up she
+saw Monsieur Profond with a tall stout man in the bay window. Turning
+into Green Street she heard her name called, and saw “that prowler”
+coming up. He took off his hat—a glossy “bowler” such as she
+particularly detested.
+
+“Good evenin'. Miss Forsyde. Isn't there a small thing I can do for
+you?”
+
+“Yes, pass by on the other side.”
+
+“I say! Why do you dislike me?”
+
+“Do I?”
+
+“It looks like it.”
+
+“Well, then, because you make me feel life isn't worth living.”
+
+Monsieur Profond smiled.
+
+“Look here, Miss Forsyde, don't worry. It'll be all right. Nothing
+lasts.”
+
+“Things do last,” cried Fleur; “with me anyhow—especially likes and
+dislikes.”
+
+“Well, that makes me a bit un'appy.”
+
+“I should have thought nothing could ever make you happy or unhappy.”
+
+“I don't like to annoy other people. I'm goin' on my yacht.”
+
+Fleur looked at him, startled.
+
+“Where?”
+
+“Small voyage to the South Seas or somewhere,” said Monsieur Profond.
+
+Fleur suffered relief and a sense of insult. Clearly he meant to convey
+that he was breaking with her mother. How dared he have anything to
+break, and yet how dared he break it?
+
+“Good-night, Miss Forsyde! Remember me to Mrs. Dartie. I'm not so bad
+really. Good-night!” Fleur left him standing there with his hat raised.
+Stealing a look round, she saw him stroll—immaculate and heavy—back
+toward his Club.
+
+'He can't even love with conviction,' she thought. 'What will Mother
+do?'
+
+Her dreams that night were endless and uneasy; she rose heavy and
+unrested, and went at once to the study of Whitaker's Almanac. A Forsyte
+is instinctively aware that facts are the real crux of any situation.
+She might conquer Jon's prejudice, but without exact machinery to
+complete their desperate resolve, nothing would happen. From the
+invaluable tome she learned that they must each be twenty-one; or some
+one's consent would be necessary, which of course was unobtainable;
+then she became lost in directions concerning licenses, certificates,
+notices, districts, coming finally to the word “perjury.” But that was
+nonsense! Who would really mind their giving wrong ages in order to
+be married for love! She ate hardly any breakfast, and went back to
+Whitaker. The more she studied the less sure she became; till, idly
+turning the pages, she came to Scotland. People could be married
+there without any of this nonsense. She had only to go and stay there
+twenty-one days, then Jon could come, and in front of two people they
+could declare themselves married. And what was more—they would be! It
+was far the best way; and at once she ran over her schoolfellows. There
+was Mary Lambe who lived in Edinburgh and was “quite a sport!”
+
+She had a brother too. She could stay with Mary Lambe, who with her
+brother would serve for witnesses. She well knew that some girls would
+think all this unnecessary, and that all she and Jon need do was to
+go away together for a weekend and then say to their people: “We are
+married by Nature, we must now be married by Law.” But Fleur was Forsyte
+enough to feel such a proceeding dubious, and to dread her father's face
+when he heard of it. Besides, she did not believe that Jon would do it;
+he had an opinion of her such as she could not bear to diminish. No!
+Mary Lambe was preferable, and it was just the time of year to go to
+Scotland. More at ease now she packed, avoided her aunt, and took a bus
+to Chiswick. She was too early, and went on to Kew Gardens. She found no
+peace among its flower-beds, labelled trees, and broad green spaces,
+and having lunched off anchovy-paste sandwiches and coffee, returned to
+Chiswick and rang June's bell. The Austrian admitted her to the “little
+meal-room.” Now that she knew what she and Jon were up against, her
+longing for him had increased tenfold, as if he were a toy with sharp
+edges or dangerous paint such as they had tried to take from her as a
+child. If she could not have her way, and get Jon for good and all, she
+felt like dying of privation. By hook or crook she must and would get
+him! A round dim mirror of very old glass hung over the pink brick
+hearth. She stood looking at herself reflected in it, pale, and rather
+dark under the eyes; little shudders kept passing through her nerves.
+Then she heard the bell ring, and, stealing to the window, saw him
+standing on the doorstep smoothing his hair and lips, as if he too were
+trying to subdue the fluttering of his nerves.
+
+She was sitting on one of the two rush-seated chairs, with her back to
+the door, when he came in, and she said at once—
+
+“Sit down, Jon, I want to talk seriously.”
+
+Jon sat on the table by her side, and without looking at him she went
+on:
+
+“If you don't want to lose me, we must get married.”
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+“Why? Is there anything new?”
+
+“No, but I felt it at Robin Hill, and among my people.”
+
+“But—” stammered Jon, “at Robin Hill—it was all smooth—and they've said
+nothing to me.”
+
+“But they mean to stop us. Your mother's face was enough. And my
+father's.”
+
+“Have you seen him since?”
+
+Fleur nodded. What mattered a few supplementary lies?
+
+“But,” said Jon eagerly, “I can't see how they can feel like that after
+all these years.”
+
+Fleur looked up at him.
+
+“Perhaps you don't love me enough.” “Not love you enough! Why—!”
+
+“Then make sure of me.”
+
+“Without telling them?”
+
+“Not till after.”
+
+Jon was silent. How much older he looked than on that day, barely two
+months ago, when she first saw him—quite two years older!
+
+“It would hurt Mother awfully,” he said.
+
+Fleur drew her hand away.
+
+“You've got to choose.”
+
+Jon slid off the table on to his knees.
+
+“But why not tell them? They can't really stop us, Fleur!”
+
+“They can! I tell you, they can.”
+
+“How?”
+
+“We're utterly dependent—by putting money pressure, and all sorts of
+other pressure. I'm not patient, Jon.”
+
+“But it's deceiving them.”
+
+Fleur got up.
+
+“You can't really love me, or you wouldn't hesitate. 'He either fears
+his fate too much!'”
+
+Lifting his hands to her waist, Jon forced her to sit down again. She
+hurried on:
+
+“I've planned it all out. We've only to go to Scotland. When we're
+married they'll soon come round. People always come round to facts.
+Don't you see, Jon?”
+
+“But to hurt them so awfully!”
+
+So he would rather hurt her than those people of his! “All right, then;
+let me go!”
+
+Jon got up and put his back against the door.
+
+“I expect you're right,” he said slowly; “but I want to think it over.”
+
+She could see that he was seething with feelings he wanted to express;
+but she did not mean to help him. She hated herself at this moment and
+almost hated him. Why had she to do all the work to secure their love?
+It wasn't fair. And then she saw his eyes, adoring and distressed.
+
+“Don't look like that! I only don't want to lose you, Jon.”
+
+“You can't lose me so long as you want me.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I can.”
+
+Jon put his hands on her shoulders.
+
+“Fleur, do you know anything you haven't told me?”
+
+It was the point-blank question she had dreaded. She looked straight
+at him, and answered: “No.” She had burnt her boats; but what did it
+matter, if she got him? He would forgive her. And throwing her arms
+round his neck, she kissed him on the lips. She was winning! She felt it
+in the beating of his heart against her, in the closing of his eyes. “I
+want to make sure! I want to make sure!” she whispered. “Promise!”
+
+Jon did not answer. His face had the stillness of extreme trouble. At
+last he said:
+
+“It's like hitting them. I must think a little, Fleur. I really must.”
+
+Fleur slipped out of his arms.
+
+“Oh! Very well!” And suddenly she burst into tears of disappointment,
+shame, and overstrain. Followed five minutes of acute misery. Jon's
+remorse and tenderness knew no bounds; but he did not promise. Despite
+her will to cry, “Very well, then, if you don't love me enough-goodbye!”
+she dared not. From birth accustomed to her own way, this check from one
+so young, so tender, so devoted, baffled and surprised her. She wanted
+to push him away from her, to try what anger and coldness would do, and
+again she dared not. The knowledge that she was scheming to rush
+him blindfold into the irrevocable weakened everything—weakened the
+sincerity of pique, and the sincerity of passion; even her kisses had
+not the lure she wished for them. That stormy little meeting ended
+inconclusively.
+
+“Will you some tea, gnadiges Fraulein?”
+
+Pushing Jon from her, she cried out:
+
+“No-no, thank you! I'm just going.”
+
+And before he could prevent her she was gone.
+
+She went stealthily, mopping her gushed, stained cheeks, frightened,
+angry, very miserable. She had stirred Jon up so fearfully, yet nothing
+definite was promised or arranged! But the more uncertain and hazardous
+the future, the more “the will to have” worked its tentacles into the
+flesh of her heart—like some burrowing tick!
+
+No one was at Green Street. Winifred had gone with Imogen to see a play
+which some said was allegorical, and others “very exciting, don't you
+know.” It was because of what others said that Winifred and Imogen had
+gone. Fleur went on to Paddington. Through the carriage the air from
+the brick-kilns of West Drayton and the late hayfields fanned her still
+gushed cheeks. Flowers had seemed to be had for the picking; now they
+were all thorned and prickled. But the golden flower within the crown of
+spikes seemed to her tenacious spirit all the fairer and more desirable.
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.—THE FAT IN THE FIRE
+
+On reaching home Fleur found an atmosphere so peculiar that it
+penetrated even the perplexed aura of her own private life. Her mother
+was inaccessibly entrenched in a brown study; her father contemplating
+fate in the vinery. Neither of them had a word to throw to a dog. 'Is
+it because of me?' thought Fleur. 'Or because of Profond?' To her mother
+she said:
+
+“What's the matter with Father?”
+
+Her mother answered with a shrug of her shoulders.
+
+To her father:
+
+“What's the matter with Mother?”
+
+Her father answered:
+
+“Matter? What should be the matter?” and gave her a sharp look.
+
+“By the way,” murmured Fleur, “Monsieur Profond is going a 'small'
+voyage on his yacht, to the South Seas.”
+
+Soames examined a branch on which no grapes were growing.
+
+“This vine's a failure,” he said. “I've had young Mont here. He asked me
+something about you.”
+
+“Oh! How do you like him, Father?”
+
+“He—he's a product—like all these young people.”
+
+“What were you at his age, dear?”
+
+Soames smiled grimly.
+
+“We went to work, and didn't play about—flying and motoring, and making
+love.”
+
+“Didn't you ever make love?”
+
+She avoided looking at him while she said that, but she saw him well
+enough. His pale face had reddened, his eyebrows, where darkness was
+still mingled with the grey, had come close together.
+
+“I had no time or inclination to philander.”
+
+“Perhaps you had a grand passion.”
+
+Soames looked at her intently.
+
+“Yes—if you want to know—and much good it did me.” He moved away, along
+by the hot-water pipes. Fleur tiptoed silently after him.
+
+“Tell me about it, Father!”
+
+Soames became very still.
+
+“What should you want to know about such things, at your age?”
+
+“Is she alive?”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“And married?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“It's Jon Forsyte's mother, isn't it? And she was your wife first.”
+
+It was said in a flash of intuition. Surely his opposition came from his
+anxiety that she should not know of that old wound to his pride. But
+she was startled. To see some one so old and calm wince as if struck, to
+hear so sharp a note of pain in his voice!
+
+“Who told you that? If your aunt! I can't bear the affair talked of.”
+
+“But, darling,” said Fleur, softly, “it's so long ago.”
+
+“Long ago or not, I....”
+
+Fleur stood stroking his arm.
+
+“I've tried to forget,” he said suddenly; “I don't wish to be reminded.”
+And then, as if venting some long and secret irritation, he added: “In
+these days people don't understand. Grand passion, indeed! No one knows
+what it is.”
+
+“I do,” said Fleur, almost in a whisper.
+
+Soames, who had turned his back on her, spun round.
+
+“What are you talking of—a child like you!”
+
+“Perhaps I've inherited it, Father.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“For her son, you see.”
+
+He was pale as a sheet, and she knew that she was as bad. They stood
+staring at each other in the steamy heat, redolent of the mushy scent of
+earth, of potted geranium, and of vines coming along fast.
+
+“This is crazy,” said Soames at last, between dry lips.
+
+Scarcely moving her own, she murmured:
+
+“Don't be angry, Father. I can't help it.”
+
+But she could see he wasn't angry; only scared, deeply scared.
+
+“I thought that foolishness,” he stammered, “was all forgotten.”
+
+“Oh, no! It's ten times what it was.”
+
+Soames kicked at the hot-water pipe. The hapless movement touched her,
+who had no fear of her father—none.
+
+“Dearest!” she said. “What must be, must, you know.”
+
+“Must!” repeated Soames. “You don't know what you're talking of. Has
+that boy been told?”
+
+The blood rushed into her cheeks.
+
+“Not yet.”
+
+He had turned from her again, and, with one shoulder a little raised,
+stood staring fixedly at a joint in the pipes.
+
+“It's most distasteful to me,” he said suddenly; “nothing could be more
+so. Son of that fellow! It's—it's—perverse!”
+
+She had noted, almost unconsciously, that he did not say “son of that
+woman,” and again her intuition began working.
+
+Did the ghost of that grand passion linger in some corner of his heart?
+
+She slipped her hand under his arm.
+
+“Jon's father is quite ill and old; I saw him.”
+
+“You—?”
+
+“Yes, I went there with Jon; I saw them both.”
+
+“Well, and what did they say to you?”
+
+“Nothing. They were very polite.”
+
+“They would be.” He resumed his contemplation of the pipe-joint, and
+then said suddenly:
+
+“I must think this over—I'll speak to you again to-night.”
+
+She knew this was final for the moment, and stole away, leaving him
+still looking at the pipe-joint. She wandered into the fruit-garden,
+among the raspberry and currant bushes, without impetus to pick and eat.
+Two months ago—she was light-hearted! Even two days ago—light-hearted,
+before Prosper Profond told her. Now she felt tangled in a web-of
+passions, vested rights, oppressions and revolts, the ties of love and
+hate. At this dark moment of discouragement there seemed, even to her
+hold-fast nature, no way out. How deal with it—how sway and bend things
+to her will, and get her heart's desire? And, suddenly, round the corner
+of the high box hedge, she came plump on her mother, walking swiftly,
+with an open letter in her hand. Her bosom was heaving, her eyes
+dilated, her cheeks flushed. Instantly Fleur thought: 'The yacht! Poor
+Mother!'
+
+Annette gave her a wide startled look, and said:
+
+“J'ai la migraine.”
+
+“I'm awfully sorry, Mother.”
+
+“Oh, yes! you and your father—sorry!”
+
+“But, Mother—I am. I know what it feels like.”
+
+Annette's startled eyes grew wide, till the whites showed above them.
+
+“Poor innocent!” she said.
+
+Her mother—so self-possessed, and commonsensical—to look and speak like
+this! It was all frightening! Her father, her mother, herself! And only
+two months back they had seemed to have everything they wanted in this
+world.
+
+Annette crumpled the letter in her hand. Fleur knew that she must ignore
+the sight.
+
+“Can't I do anything for your head, Mother?”
+
+Annette shook that head and walked on, swaying her hips.
+
+'It's cruel,' thought Fleur, 'and I was glad! That man! What do men come
+prowling for, disturbing everything! I suppose he's tired of her. What
+business has he to be tired of my mother? What business!' And at that
+thought, so natural and so peculiar, she uttered a little choked laugh.
+
+She ought, of course, to be delighted, but what was there to be
+delighted at? Her father didn't really care! Her mother did, perhaps?
+She entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree. A breeze
+sighed in the higher boughs; the sky seen through their green was very
+blue and very white in cloud—those heavy white clouds almost always
+present in river landscape. Bees, sheltering out of the wind, hummed
+softly, and over the lush grass fell the thick shade from those
+fruit-trees planted by her father five-and-twenty, years ago. Birds were
+almost silent, the cuckoos had ceased to sing, but wood-pigeons were
+cooing. The breath and drone and cooing of high summer were not for long
+a sedative to her excited nerves. Crouched over her knees she began to
+scheme. Her father must be made to back her up. Why should he mind
+so long as she was happy? She had not lived for nearly nineteen years
+without knowing that her future was all he really cared about. She had,
+then, only to convince him that her future could not be happy without
+Jon. He thought it a mad fancy. How foolish the old were, thinking
+they could tell what the young felt! Had not he confessed that he—when
+young—had loved with a grand passion? He ought to understand! 'He piles
+up his money for me,' she thought; 'but what's the use, if I'm not going
+to be happy?' Money, and all it bought, did not bring happiness. Love
+only brought that. The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard, which gave it
+such a moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour.
+'They oughtn't to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if they didn't mean
+me to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.' Nothing real stood
+in the way, like poverty, or disease—sentiment only, a ghost from the
+unhappy past! Jon was right. They wouldn't let you live, these old
+people! They made mistakes, committed crimes, and wanted their children
+to go on paying! The breeze died away; midges began to bite. She got up,
+plucked a piece of honeysuckle, and went in.
+
+It was hot that night. Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale
+low frocks. The dinner flowers were pale. Fleur was struck with the pale
+look of everything; her father's face, her mother's shoulders; the pale
+panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-shade, even the
+soup was pale. There was not one spot of colour in the room, not even
+wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it. What was not pale
+was black—her father's clothes, the butler's clothes, her retriever
+stretched out exhausted in the window, the curtains black with a
+cream pattern. A moth came in, and that was pale. And silent was that
+half-mourning dinner in the heat.
+
+Her father called her back as she was following her mother out.
+
+She sat down beside him at the table, and, unpinning the pale
+honeysuckle, put it to her nose.
+
+“I've been thinking,” he said.
+
+“Yes, dear?”
+
+“It's extremely painful for me to talk, but there's no help for it. I
+don't know if you understand how much you are to me I've never spoken
+of it, I didn't think it necessary; but—but you're everything. Your
+mother—” he paused, staring at his finger-bowl of Venetian glass.
+
+“Yes?”'
+
+“I've only you to look to. I've never had—never wanted anything else,
+since you were born.”
+
+“I know,” Fleur murmured.
+
+Soames moistened his lips.
+
+“You may think this a matter I can smooth over and arrange for you.
+You're mistaken. I'm helpless.”
+
+Fleur did not speak.
+
+“Quite apart from my own feelings,” went on Soames with more resolution,
+“those two are not amenable to anything I can say. They—they hate me, as
+people always hate those whom they have injured.” “But he—Jon—”
+
+“He's their flesh and blood, her only child. Probably he means to her
+what you mean to me. It's a deadlock.”
+
+“No,” cried Fleur, “no, Father!”
+
+Soames leaned back, the image of pale patience, as if resolved on the
+betrayal of no emotion.
+
+“Listen!” he said. “You're putting the feelings of two months—two
+months—against the feelings of thirty-five years! What chance do you
+think you have? Two months—your very first love affair, a matter of half
+a dozen meetings, a few walks and talks, a few kisses—against, against
+what you can't imagine, what no one could who hasn't been through it.
+Come, be reasonable, Fleur! It's midsummer madness!”
+
+Fleur tore the honeysuckle into little, slow bits.
+
+“The madness is in letting the past spoil it all.
+
+“What do we care about the past? It's our lives, not yours.”
+
+Soames raised his hand to his forehead, where suddenly she saw moisture
+shining.
+
+“Whose child are you?” he said. “Whose child is he? The present is
+linked with the past, the future with both. There's no getting away from
+that.”
+
+She had never heard philosophy pass those lips before. Impressed even
+in her agitation, she leaned her elbows on the table, her chin on her
+hands.
+
+“But, Father, consider it practically. We want each other. There's ever
+so much money, and nothing whatever in the way but sentiment. Let's bury
+the past, Father.”
+
+His answer was a sigh.
+
+“Besides,” said Fleur gently, “you can't prevent us.”
+
+“I don't suppose,” said Soames, “that if left to myself I should try to
+prevent you; I must put up with things, I know, to keep your affection.
+But it's not I who control this matter. That's what I want you to
+realise before it's too late. If you go on thinking you can get your way
+and encourage this feeling, the blow will be much heavier when you find
+you can't.”
+
+“Oh!” cried Fleur, “help me, Father; you can help me, you know.”
+
+Soames made a startled movement of negation. “I?” he said bitterly.
+“Help? I am the impediment—the just cause and impediment—isn't that the
+jargon? You have my blood in your veins.”
+
+He rose.
+
+“Well, the fat's in the fire. If you persist in your wilfulness you'll
+have yourself to blame. Come! Don't be foolish, my child—my only child!”
+
+Fleur laid her forehead against his shoulder.
+
+All was in such turmoil within her. But no good to show it! No good
+at all! She broke away from him, and went out into the twilight,
+distraught, but unconvinced. All was indeterminate and vague within her,
+like the shapes and shadows in the garden, except—her will to have. A
+poplar pierced up into the dark-blue sky and touched a white star there.
+The dew wetted her shoes, and chilled her bare shoulders. She went down
+to the river bank, and stood gazing at a moonstreak on the darkening
+water. Suddenly she smelled tobacco smoke, and a white figure emerged as
+if created by the moon. It was young Mont in flannels, standing in
+his boat. She heard the tiny hiss of his cigarette extinguished in the
+water.
+
+“Fleur,” came his voice, “don't be hard on a poor devil! I've been
+waiting hours.”
+
+“For what?”
+
+“Come in my boat!”
+
+“Not I.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“I'm not a water-nymph.”
+
+“Haven't you any romance in you? Don't be modern, Fleur!”
+
+He appeared on the path within a yard of her.
+
+“Go away!”
+
+“Fleur, I love you. Fleur!”
+
+Fleur uttered a short laugh.
+
+“Come again,” she said, “when I haven't got my wish.”
+
+“What is your wish?”
+
+“Ask another.”
+
+“Fleur,” said Mont, and his voice sounded strange, “don't mock me! Even
+vivisected dogs are worth decent treatment before they're cut up for
+good.”
+
+Fleur shook her head; but her lips were trembling.
+
+“Well, you shouldn't make me jump. Give me a cigarette.”
+
+Mont gave her one, lighted it, and another for himself.
+
+“I don't want to talk rot,” he said, “but please imagine all the rot
+that all the lovers that ever were have talked, and all my special rot
+thrown in.”
+
+“Thank you, I have imagined it. Good-night!” They stood for a moment
+facing each other in the shadow of an acacia-tree with very moonlit
+blossoms, and the smoke from their cigarettes mingled in the air between
+them.
+
+“Also ran: 'Michael Mont'.” he said. Fleur turned abruptly toward the
+house. On the lawn she stopped to look back. Michael Mont was whirling
+his arms above him; she could see them dashing at his head; then waving
+at the moonlit blossoms of the acacia. His voice just reached her.
+“Jolly-jolly!” Fleur shook herself. She couldn't help him, she had
+too much trouble of her own! On the verandah she stopped very suddenly
+again. Her mother was sitting in the drawing-room at her writing bureau,
+quite alone. There was nothing remarkable in the expression of her
+face except its utter immobility. But she looked desolate! Fleur went
+upstairs. At the door of her room she paused. She could hear her father
+walking up and down, up and down the picture-gallery.
+
+'Yes,' she thought, jolly! Oh, Jon!'
+
+
+
+
+
+X.—DECISION
+
+When Fleur left him Jon stared at the Austrian. She was a thin woman
+with a dark face and the concerned expression of one who has watched
+every little good that life once had slip from her, one by one. “No
+tea?” she said.
+
+Susceptible to the disappointment in her voice, Jon murmured:
+
+“No, really; thanks.”
+
+“A lil cup—it ready. A lil cup and cigarette.”
+
+Fleur was gone! Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him! And with
+a heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, and said:
+
+“Well—thank you!”
+
+She brought in a little pot of tea with two little cups, and a silver
+box of cigarettes on a little tray.
+
+“Sugar? Miss Forsyte has much sugar—she buy my sugar, my friend's sugar
+also. Miss Forsyte is a veree kind lady. I am happy to serve her. You
+her brother?”
+
+“Yes,” said Jon, beginning to puff the second cigarette of his life.
+
+“Very young brother,” said the Austrian, with a little anxious smile,
+which reminded him of the wag of a dog's tail.
+
+“May I give you some?” he said. “And won't you sit down, please?”
+
+The Austrian shook her head.
+
+“Your father a very nice old man—the most nice old man I ever see. Miss
+Forsyte tell me all about him. Is he better?”
+
+Her words fell on Jon like a reproach. “Oh Yes, I think he's all right.”
+
+“I like to see him again,” said the Austrian, putting a hand on her
+heart; “he have veree kind heart.”
+
+“Yes,” said Jon. And again her words seemed to him a reproach.
+
+“He never give no trouble to no one, and smile so gentle.”
+
+“Yes, doesn't he?”
+
+“He look at Miss Forsyte so funny sometimes. I tell him all my story; he
+so sympatisch. Your mother—she nice and well?”
+
+“Yes, very.”
+
+“He have her photograph on his dressing-table. Veree beautiful”
+
+Jon gulped down his tea. This woman, with her concerned face and her
+reminding words, was like the first and second murderers.
+
+“Thank you,” he said; “I must go now. May—may I leave this with you?”
+
+He put a ten-shilling note on the tray with a doubting hand and gained
+the door. He heard the Austrian gasp, and hurried out. He had just time
+to catch his train, and all the way to Victoria looked at every face
+that passed, as lovers will, hoping against hope. On reaching Worthing
+he put his luggage into the local train, and set out across the Downs
+for Wansdon, trying to walk off his aching irresolution. So long as he
+went full bat, he could enjoy the beauty of those green slopes, stopping
+now and again to sprawl on the grass, admire the perfection of a wild
+rose or listen to a lark's song. But the war of motives within him was
+but postponed—the longing for Fleur, and the hatred of deception. He
+came to the old chalk-pit above Wansdon with his mind no more made up
+than when he started. To see both sides of a question vigorously was
+at once Jon's strength and weakness. He tramped in, just as the first
+dinner-bell rang. His things had already been brought up. He had a
+hurried bath and came down to find Holly alone—Val had gone to Town and
+would not be back till the last train.
+
+Since Val's advice to him to ask his sister what was the matter between
+the two families, so much had happened—Fleur's disclosure in the Green
+Park, her visit to Robin Hill, to-day's meeting—that there seemed
+nothing to ask. He talked of Spain, his sunstroke, Val's horses, their
+father's health. Holly startled him by saying that she thought their
+father not at all well. She had been twice to Robin Hill for the
+week-end. He had seemed fearfully languid, sometimes even in pain, but
+had always refused to talk about himself.
+
+“He's awfully dear and unselfish—don't you think, Jon?”
+
+Feeling far from dear and unselfish himself, Jon answered: “Rather!”
+
+“I think, he's been a simply perfect father, so long as I can remember.”
+
+“Yes,” answered Jon, very subdued.
+
+“He's never interfered, and he's always seemed to understand. I shall
+never forget his letting me go to South Africa in the Boer War when I
+was in love with Val.”
+
+“That was before he married Mother, wasn't it?” said Jon suddenly.
+
+“Yes. Why?”
+
+“Oh! nothing. Only, wasn't she engaged to Fleur's father first?”
+
+Holly put down the spoon she was using, and raised her eyes. Her stare
+was circumspect. What did the boy know? Enough to make it better to tell
+him? She could not decide. He looked strained and worried, altogether
+older, but that might be the sunstroke.
+
+“There was something,” she said. “Of course we were out there, and got
+no news of anything.” She could not take the risk.
+
+It was not her secret. Besides, she was in the dark about his feelings
+now. Before Spain she had made sure he was in love; but boys were boys;
+that was seven weeks ago, and all Spain between.
+
+She saw that he knew she was putting him off, and added:
+
+“Have you heard anything of Fleur?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+His face told her, then, more than the most elaborate explanations. So
+he had not forgotten!
+
+She said very quietly: “Fleur is awfully attractive, Jon, but you
+know—Val and I don't really like her very much.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“We think she's got rather a 'having' nature.”
+
+“'Having'. I don't know what you mean. She—she—” he pushed his dessert
+plate away, got up, and went to the window.
+
+Holly, too, got up, and put her arm round his waist.
+
+“Don't be angry, Jon dear. We can't all see people in the same light,
+can we? You know, I believe each of us only has about one or two people
+who can see the best that's in us, and bring it out. For you I think
+it's your mother. I once saw her looking at a letter of yours; it was
+wonderful to see her face. I think she's the most beautiful woman I ever
+saw—Age doesn't seem to touch her.”
+
+Jon's face softened; then again became tense. Everybody—everybody was
+against him and Fleur! It all strengthened the appeal of her words:
+“Make sure of me—marry me, Jon!”
+
+Here, where he had passed that wonderful week with her—the tug of her
+enchantment, the ache in his heart increased with every minute that she
+was not there to make the room, the garden, the very air magical. Would
+he ever be able to live down here, not seeing her? And he closed up
+utterly, going early to bed. It would not make him healthy, wealthy, and
+wise, but it closeted him with memory of Fleur in her fancy frock. He
+heard Val's arrival—the Ford discharging cargo, then the stillness
+of the summer night stole back—with only the bleating of very distant
+sheep, and a night-Jar's harsh purring. He leaned far out. Cold
+moon—warm air—the Downs like silver! Small wings, a stream bubbling, the
+rambler roses! God—how empty all of it without her! In the Bible it was
+written: Thou shalt leave father and mother and cleave to—Fleur!
+
+Let him have pluck, and go and tell them! They couldn't stop him
+marrying her—they wouldn't want to stop him when they knew how he felt.
+Yes! He would go! Bold and open—Fleur was wrong!
+
+The night-jar ceased, the sheep were silent; the only sound in the
+darkness was the bubbling of the stream. And Jon in his bed slept, freed
+from the worst of life's evils—indecision.
+
+
+
+
+
+XI.—TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
+
+On the day of the cancelled meeting at the National Gallery began the
+second anniversary of the resurrection of England's pride and glory—or,
+more shortly, the top hat. “Lord's”—that festival which the War had
+driven from the field—raised its light and dark blue flags for the
+second time, displaying almost every feature of a glorious past. Here,
+in the luncheon interval, were all species of female and one species
+of male hat, protecting the multiple types of face associated with
+“the classes.” The observing Forsyte might discern in the free or
+unconsidered seats a certain number of the squash-hatted, but they
+hardly ventured on the grass; the old school—or schools—could
+still rejoice that the proletariat was not yet paying the necessary
+half-crown. Here was still a close borough, the only one left on a
+large scale—for the papers were about to estimate the attendance at ten
+thousand. And the ten thousand, all animated by one hope, were asking
+each other one question: “Where are you lunching?” Something wonderfully
+uplifting and reassuring in that query and the sight of so many
+people like themselves voicing it! What reserve power in the British
+realm—enough pigeons, lobsters, lamb, salmon mayonnaise, strawberries,
+and bottles of champagne to feed the lot! No miracle in prospect—no case
+of seven loaves and a few fishes—faith rested on surer foundations. Six
+thousand top hats, four thousand parasols would be doffed and furled,
+ten thousand mouths all speaking the same English would be filled. There
+was life in the old dog yet! Tradition! And again Tradition! How strong
+and how elastic! Wars might rage, taxation prey, Trades Unions take
+toll, and Europe perish of starvation; but the ten thousand would be
+fed; and, within their ring fence, stroll upon green turf, wear their
+top hats, and meet—themselves. The heart was sound, the pulse still
+regular. E-ton! E-ton! Har-r-o-o-o-w!
+
+Among the many Forsytes, present on a hunting-ground theirs, by personal
+prescriptive right, or proxy, was Soames with his wife and daughter. He
+had not been at either school, he took no interest in cricket, but he
+wanted Fleur to show her frock, and he wanted to wear his top hat parade
+it again in peace and plenty among his peers. He walked sedately with
+Fleur between him and Annette. No women equalled them, so far as he
+could see. They could walk, and hold themselves up; there was substance
+in their good looks; the modern woman had no build, no chest, no
+anything! He remembered suddenly with what intoxication of pride he had
+walked round with Irene in the first years of his first marriage. And
+how they used to lunch on the drag which his mother would make his
+father have, because it was so “chic”—all drags and carriages in those
+days, not these lumbering great Stands! And how consistently Montague
+Dartie had drunk too much. He supposed that people drank too much still,
+but there was not the scope for it there used to be. He remembered
+George Forsyte—whose brothers Roger and Eustace had been at Harrow and
+Eton—towering up on the top of the drag waving a light-blue flag
+with one hand and a dark-blue flag with the other, and shouting
+“Etroow-Harrton!” Just when everybody was silent, like the buffoon he
+had always been; and Eustace got up to the nines below, too dandified
+to wear any colour or take any notice. H'm! Old days, and Irene in
+grey silk shot with palest green. He looked, sideways, at Fleur's face.
+Rather colourless-no light, no eagerness! That love affair was preying
+on her—a bad business! He looked beyond, at his wife's face, rather more
+touched up than usual, a little disdainful—not that she had any business
+to disdain, so far as he could see. She was taking Profond's defection
+with curious quietude; or was his “small” voyage just a blind? If so, he
+should refuse to see it! Having promenaded round the pitch and in front
+of the pavilion, they sought Winifred's table in the Bedouin Club tent.
+This Club—a new “cock and hen”—had been founded in the interests of
+travel, and of a gentleman with an old Scottish name, whose father had
+somewhat strangely been called Levi. Winifred had joined, not because
+she had travelled, but because instinct told her that a Club with such a
+name and such a founder was bound to go far; if one didn't join at once
+one might never have the chance. Its tent, with a text from the Koran on
+an orange ground, and a small green camel embroidered over the entrance,
+was the most striking on the ground. Outside it they found Jack Cardigan
+in a dark blue tie (he had once played for Harrow), batting with a
+Malacca cane to show how that fellow ought to have hit that ball. He
+piloted them in. Assembled in Winifred's corner were Imogen, Benedict
+with his young wife, Val Dartie without Holly, Maud and her husband,
+and, after Soames and his two were seated, one empty place.
+
+“I'm expecting Prosper,” said Winifred, “but he's so busy with his
+yacht.”
+
+Soames stole a glance. No movement in his wife's face! Whether that
+fellow were coming or not, she evidently knew all about it. It did not
+escape him that Fleur, too, looked at her mother. If Annette didn't
+respect his feelings, she might think of Fleur's! The conversation, very
+desultory, was syncopated by Jack Cardigan talking about “mid-off.” He
+cited all the “great mid-offs” from the beginning of time, as if they
+had been a definite racial entity in the composition of the British
+people. Soames had finished his lobster, and was beginning on
+pigeon-pie, when he heard the words, “I'm a small bit late, Mrs.
+Dartie,” and saw that there was no longer any empty place. That fellow
+was sitting between Annette and Imogen. Soames ate steadily on, with an
+occasional word to Maud and Winifred. Conversation buzzed around him. He
+heard the voice of Profond say:
+
+“I think you're mistaken, Mrs. Forsyde; I'll—I'll bet Miss Forsyde
+agrees with me.”
+
+“In what?” came Fleur's clear voice across the table.
+
+“I was sayin', young gurls are much the same as they always were—there's
+very small difference.”
+
+“Do you know so much about them?”
+
+That sharp reply caught the ears of all, and Soames moved uneasily on
+his thin green chair.
+
+“Well, I don't know, I think they want their own small way, and I think
+they always did.”
+
+“Indeed!”
+
+“Oh, but—Prosper,” Winifred interjected comfortably, “the girls in the
+streets—the girls who've been in munitions, the little flappers in the
+shops; their manners now really quite hit you in the eye.”
+
+At the word “hit” Jack Cardigan stopped his disquisition; and in the
+silence Monsieur Profond said:
+
+“It was inside before, now it's outside; that's all.”
+
+“But their morals!” cried Imogen.
+
+“Just as moral as they ever were, Mrs. Cardigan, but they've got more
+opportunity.”
+
+The saying, so cryptically cynical, received a little laugh from Imogen,
+a slight opening of Jack Cardigan's mouth, and a creak from Soames'
+chair.
+
+Winifred said: “That's too bad, Prosper.”
+
+“What do you say, Mrs. Forsyde; don't you think human nature's always
+the same?”
+
+Soames subdued a sudden longing to get up and kick the fellow. He heard
+his wife reply:
+
+“Human nature is not the same in England as anywhere else.” That was her
+confounded mockery!
+
+“Well, I don't know much about this small country”—'No, thank God!'
+thought Soames—“but I should say the pot was boilin' under the lid
+everywhere. We all want pleasure, and we always did.”
+
+Damn the fellow! His cynicism was—was outrageous!
+
+When lunch was over they broke up into couples for the digestive
+promenade. Too proud to notice, Soames knew perfectly that Annette and
+that fellow had gone prowling round together. Fleur was with Val; she
+had chosen him, no doubt, because he knew that boy. He himself had
+Winifred for partner. They walked in the bright, circling stream, a
+little flushed and sated, for some minutes, till Winifred sighed:
+
+“I wish we were back forty years, old boy!”
+
+Before the eyes of her spirit an interminable procession of her own
+“Lord's” frocks was passing, paid for with the money of her father, to
+save a recurrent crisis. “It's been very amusing, after all. Sometimes I
+even wish Monty was back. What do you think of people nowadays, Soames?”
+
+“Precious little style. The thing began to go to pieces with bicycles
+and motor-cars; the War has finished it.”
+
+“I wonder what's coming?” said Winifred in a voice dreamy from
+pigeon-pie. “I'm not at all sure we shan't go back to crinolines and
+pegtops. Look at that dress!”
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+“There's money, but no faith in things. We don't lay by for the future.
+These youngsters—it's all a short life and a merry one with them.”
+
+“There's a hat!” said Winifred. “I don't know—when you come to think
+of the people killed and all that in the War, it's rather wonderful, I
+think. There's no other country—Prosper says the rest are all bankrupt,
+except America; and of course her men always took their style in dress
+from us.”
+
+“Is that chap,” said Soames, “really going to the South Seas?”
+
+“Oh! one never knows where Prosper's going!”
+
+“He's a sign of the times,” muttered Soames, “if you like.”
+
+Winifred's hand gripped his arm.
+
+“Don't turn your head,” she said in a low voice, “but look to your right
+in the front row of the Stand.”
+
+Soames looked as best he could under that limitation. A man in a grey
+top hat, grey-bearded, with thin brown, folded cheeks, and a certain
+elegance of posture, sat there with a woman in a lawn-coloured frock,
+whose dark eyes were fixed on himself. Soames looked quickly at his
+feet. How funnily feet moved, one after the other like that! Winifred's
+voice said in his ear:
+
+“Jolyon looks very ill; but he always had style. She doesn't
+change—except her hair.”
+
+“Why did you tell Fleur about that business?”
+
+“I didn't; she picked it up. I always knew she would.”
+
+“Well, it's a mess. She's set her heart upon their boy.”
+
+“The little wretch,” murmured Winifred. “She tried to take me in about
+that. What shall you do, Soames?”
+
+“Be guided by events.”
+
+They moved on, silent, in the almost solid crowd.
+
+“Really,” said Winifred suddenly; “it almost seems like Fate. Only
+that's so old-fashioned. Look! there are George and Eustace!”
+
+George Forsyte's lofty bulk had halted before them.
+
+“Hallo, Soames!” he said. “Just met Profond and your wife. You'll catch
+'em if you put on pace. Did you ever go to see old Timothy?”
+
+Soames nodded, and the streams forced them apart.
+
+“I always liked old George,” said Winifred. “He's so droll.”
+
+“I never did,” said Soames. “Where's your seat? I shall go to mine.
+Fleur may be back there.”
+
+Having seen Winifred to her seat, he regained his own, conscious of
+small, white, distant figures running, the click of the bat, the cheers
+and counter-cheers. No Fleur, and no Annette! You could expect nothing
+of women nowadays! They had the vote. They were “emancipated,” and much
+good it was doing them! So Winifred would go back, would she, and put
+up with Dartie all over again? To have the past once more—to be sitting
+here as he had sat in '83 and '84, before he was certain that his
+marriage with Irene had gone all wrong, before her antagonism had become
+so glaring that with the best will in the world he could not overlook
+it. The sight of her with that fellow had brought all memory back. Even
+now he could not understand why she had been so impracticable. She could
+love other men; she had it in her! To himself, the one person she ought
+to have loved, she had chosen to refuse her heart. It seemed to him,
+fantastically, as he looked back, that all this modern relaxation of
+marriage—though its forms and laws were the same as when he married
+her—that all this modern looseness had come out of her revolt; it
+seemed to him, fantastically, that she had started it, till all decent
+ownership of anything had gone, or was on the point of going. All came
+from her! And now—a pretty state of things! Homes! How could you have
+them without mutual ownership? Not that he had ever had a real home!
+But had that been his fault? He had done his best. And his rewards
+were—those two sitting in that Stand, and this affair of Fleur's!
+
+And overcome by loneliness he thought: 'Shan't wait any longer! They
+must find their own way back to the hotel—if they mean to come!' Hailing
+a cab outside the ground, he said:
+
+“Drive me to the Bayswater Road.” His old aunts had never failed him. To
+them he had meant an ever-welcome visitor. Though they were gone, there,
+still, was Timothy!
+
+Smither was standing in the open doorway.
+
+“Mr. Soames! I was just taking the air. Cook will be so pleased.”
+
+“How is Mr. Timothy?”
+
+“Not himself at all these last few days, sir; he's been talking a great
+deal. Only this morning he was saying: 'My brother James, he's getting
+old.' His mind wanders, Mr. Soames, and then he will talk of them. He
+troubles about their investments. The other day he said: 'There's my
+brother Jolyon won't look at Consols'—he seemed quite down about it.
+Come in, Mr. Soames, come in! It's such a pleasant change!”
+
+“Well,” said Soames, “just for a few minutes.”
+
+“No,” murmured Smither in the hall, where the air had the singular
+freshness of the outside day, “we haven't been very satisfied with him,
+not all this week. He's always been one to leave a titbit to the end;
+but ever since Monday he's been eating it first. If you notice a dog,
+Mr. Soames, at its dinner, it eats the meat first. We've always thought
+it such a good sign of Mr. Timothy at his age to leave it to the last,
+but now he seems to have lost all his self-control; and, of course,
+it makes him leave the rest. The doctor doesn't make anything of it,
+but”—Smither shook her head—“he seems to think he's got to eat it first,
+in case he shouldn't get to it. That and his talking makes us anxious.”
+
+“Has he said anything important?”
+
+“I shouldn't like to say that, Mr. Soames; but he's turned against his
+Will. He gets quite pettish—and after having had it out every morning
+for years, it does seem funny. He said the other day: 'They want my
+money.' It gave me such a turn, because, as I said to him, nobody wants
+his money, I'm sure. And it does seem a pity he should be thinking about
+money at his time of life. I took my courage in my 'ands. 'You know, Mr.
+Timothy,' I said, 'my dear mistress'—that's Miss Forsyte, Mr. Soames,
+Miss Ann that trained me—'she never thought about money,' I said, 'it
+was all character with her.' He looked at me, I can't tell you how
+funny, and he said quite dry: 'Nobody wants my character.' Think of his
+saying a thing like that! But sometimes he'll say something as sharp and
+sensible as anything.”
+
+Soames, who had been staring at an old print by the hat-rack, thinking,
+'That's got value!' murmured: “I'll go up and see him, Smither.”
+
+“Cook's with him,” answered Smither above her corsets; “she will be
+pleased to see you.”
+
+He mounted slowly, with the thought: 'Shan't care to live to be that
+age.'
+
+On the second floor, he paused, and tapped. The door was opened, and he
+saw the round homely face of a woman about sixty.
+
+“Mr. Soames!” she said: “Why! Mr. Soames!”
+
+Soames nodded. “All right, Cook!” and entered.
+
+Timothy was propped up in bed, with his hands joined before his chest,
+and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where a fly was standing upside down.
+Soames stood at the foot of the bed, facing him.
+
+“Uncle Timothy,” he said, raising his voice. “Uncle Timothy!”
+
+Timothy's eyes left the fly, and levelled themselves on his visitor.
+Soames could see his pale tongue passing over his darkish lips.
+
+“Uncle Timothy,” he said again, “is there anything I can do for you? Is
+there anything you'd like to say?”
+
+“Ha!” said Timothy.
+
+“I've come to look you up and see that everything's all right.”
+
+Timothy nodded. He seemed trying to get used to the apparition before
+him.
+
+“Have you got everything you want?”
+
+“No,” said Timothy.
+
+“Can I get you anything?”
+
+“No,” said Timothy.
+
+“I'm Soames, you know; your nephew, Soames Forsyte. Your brother James'
+son.”
+
+Timothy nodded.
+
+“I shall be delighted to do anything I can for you.”
+
+Timothy beckoned. Soames went close to him:
+
+“You—” said Timothy in a voice which seemed to have outlived tone,
+“you tell them all from me—you tell them all—” and his finger tapped on
+Soames' arm, “to hold on—hold on—Consols are goin' up,” and he nodded
+thrice.
+
+“All right!” said Soames; “I will.”
+
+“Yes,” said Timothy, and, fixing his eyes again on the ceiling, he
+added: “That fly!”
+
+Strangely moved, Soames looked at the Cook's pleasant fattish face, all
+little puckers from staring at fires.
+
+“That'll do him a world of good, sir,” she said.
+
+A mutter came from Timothy, but he was clearly speaking to himself, and
+Soames went out with the cook.
+
+“I wish I could make you a pink cream, Mr. Soames, like in old days; you
+did so relish them. Good-bye, sir; it has been a pleasure.”
+
+“Take care of him, Cook, he is old.”
+
+And, shaking her crumpled hand, he went down-stairs. Smither was still
+taking the air in the doorway.
+
+“What do you think of him, Mr. Soames?”
+
+“H'm!” Soames murmured: “He's lost touch.”
+
+“Yes,” said Smither, “I was afraid you'd think that coming fresh out of
+the world to see him like.”
+
+“Smither,” said Soames, “we're all indebted to you.”
+
+“Oh, no, Mr. Soames, don't say that! It's a pleasure—he's such a
+wonderful man.”
+
+“Well, good-bye!” said Soames, and got into his taxi.
+
+'Going up!' he thought; 'going up!'
+
+Reaching the hotel at Knightsbridge he went to their sitting-room,
+and rang for tea. Neither of them were in. And again that sense of
+loneliness came over him. These hotels. What monstrous great places they
+were now! He could remember when there was nothing bigger than Long's or
+Brown's, Morley's or the Tavistock, and the heads that were shaken over
+the Langham and the Grand. Hotels and Clubs—Clubs and Hotels; no end to
+them now! And Soames, who had just been watching at Lord's a miracle
+of tradition and continuity, fell into reverie over the changes in
+that London where he had been born five-and-sixty years before. Whether
+Consols were going up or not, London had become a terrific property. No
+such property in the world, unless it were New York! There was a lot of
+hysteria in the papers nowadays; but any one who, like himself, could
+remember London sixty years ago, and see it now, realised the fecundity
+and elasticity of wealth. They had only to keep their heads, and go at
+it steadily. Why! he remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the
+floor of your cab. And old Timothy—what could he not have told them, if
+he had kept his memory! Things were unsettled, people in a funk or in
+a hurry, but here were London and the Thames, and out there the British
+Empire, and the ends of the earth. “Consols are goin' up!” He should
+n't be a bit surprised. It was the breed that counted. And all that was
+bull-dogged in Soames stared for a moment out of his grey eyes, till
+diverted by the print of a Victorian picture on the walls. The hotel
+had bought three dozen of that little lot! The old hunting or “Rake's
+Progress” prints in the old inns were worth looking at—but this
+sentimental stuff—well, Victorianism had gone! “Tell them to hold on!”
+old Timothy had said. But to what were they to hold on in this modern
+welter of the “democratic principle”? Why, even privacy was threatened!
+And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames pushed back his
+teacup and went to the window. Fancy owning no more of Nature than the
+crowd out there owned of the flowers and trees and waters of Hyde Park!
+No, no! Private possession underlay everything worth having. The world
+had slipped its sanity a bit, as dogs now and again at full moon slipped
+theirs and went off for a night's rabbiting; but the world, like the
+dog, knew where its bread was buttered and its bed warm, and would come
+back sure enough to the only home worth having—to private ownership.
+The world was in its second childhood for the moment, like old
+Timothy—eating its titbit first!
+
+He heard a sound behind him, and saw that his wife and daughter had come
+in.
+
+“So you're back!” he said.
+
+Fleur did not answer; she stood for a moment looking at him and her
+mother, then passed into her bedroom. Annette poured herself out a cup
+of tea.
+
+“I am going to Paris, to my mother, Soames.”
+
+“Oh! To your mother?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“For how long?”
+
+“I do not know.”
+
+“And when are you going?”
+
+“On Monday.”
+
+Was she really going to her mother? Odd, how indifferent he felt! Odd,
+how clearly she had perceived the indifference he would feel so long
+as there was no scandal. And suddenly between her and himself he saw
+distinctly the face he had seen that afternoon—Irene's.
+
+“Will you want money?”
+
+“Thank you; I have enough.”
+
+“Very well. Let us know when you are coming back.”
+
+Annette put down the cake she was fingering, and, looking up through
+darkened lashes, said:
+
+“Shall I give Maman any message?”
+
+“My regards.”
+
+Annette stretched herself, her hands on her waist, and said in French:
+
+“What luck that you have never loved me, Soames!” Then rising, she too
+left the room. Soames was glad she had spoken it in French—it seemed
+to require no dealing with. Again that other face—pale, dark-eyed,
+beautiful still! And there stirred far down within him the ghost of
+warmth, as from sparks lingering beneath a mound of flaky ash. And Fleur
+infatuated with her boy! Queer chance! Yet, was there such a thing as
+chance? A man went down a street, a brick fell on his head. Ah! that was
+chance, no doubt. But this! “Inherited,” his girl had said. She—she was
+“holding on”!
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+
+
+I.—OLD JOLYON WALKS
+
+Twofold impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast “Let's go
+up to Lord's!”
+
+“Wanted”—something to abate the anxiety in which those two had lived
+during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down. “Wanted”—too,
+that which might assuage the pangs of memory in one who knew he might
+lose them any day!
+
+Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had become an Eton boy, for old Jolyon's
+whim had been that he should be canonised at the greatest possible
+expense. Year after year he had gone to Lord's from Stanhope Gate with
+a father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed without
+polish in the game of cricket. Old Jolyon would speak quite openly of
+swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and young Jolyon with
+the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest his sire should be
+overheard. Only in this supreme matter of cricket he had been nervous,
+for his father—in Crimean whiskers then—had ever impressed him as
+the beau ideal. Though never canonised himself, Old Jolyon's natural
+fastidiousness and balance had saved him from the errors of the vulgar.
+How delicious, after bowling in a top hat and a sweltering heat, to go
+home with his father in a hansom cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the
+“Disunion” Club, to dine off white bait, cutlets, and a tart, and go—two
+“swells,” old and young, in lavender kid gloves—to the opera or play.
+And on Sunday, when the match was over, and his top hat duly broken,
+down with his father in a special hansom to the “Crown and Sceptre,”
+and the terrace above the river—the golden sixties when the world was
+simple, dandies glamorous, Democracy not born, and the books of Whyte
+Melville coming thick and fast.
+
+A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-buttonholed with
+corn-flowers—by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at
+a trifle less expense—again Jolyon had experienced the heat and
+counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the
+strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy
+making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid
+and grown-up. Those two days each year he and his son had been alone
+together in the world, one on each side—and Democracy just born!
+
+And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of
+light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and
+train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground. There, beside her in a
+lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game,
+and felt the old thrill stir within him.
+
+When Soames passed, the day was spoiled. Irene's face was distorted by
+compression of the lips. No good to go on sitting here with Soames or
+perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals. And he
+said:
+
+“Well, dear, if you've had enough—let's go!”
+
+That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he
+waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study. He
+opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear
+her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair,
+closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like
+that passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata—so had been his life with her, a
+divine third movement. And now this business of Jon's—this bad business!
+Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it were in sleep
+that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his father
+in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went, and
+formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting,
+he saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed, glasses balanced
+between thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep
+eyes looking up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his own,
+seeming to speak. “Are you facing it, Jo? It's for you to decide. She's
+only a woman!” Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how
+all the Victorian Age came up with it! And his answer “No, I've funked
+it—funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I've got a heart; I've funked
+it.” But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept
+at it; “It's your wife, your son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!” Was it
+a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living
+on within him? And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old
+saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put
+the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly he breathed with
+difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen.
+He got up and went out into the air. The stars were very bright. He
+passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through
+the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with
+lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself she
+seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands idle.
+Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her breast.
+'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of her—it's
+natural!'
+
+And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
+
+Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task. He wrote with
+difficulty and many erasures.
+
+“MY DEAREST BOY,
+
+“You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders
+to give themselves away to their young. Especially when—like your
+mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but
+young—their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must confess.
+I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly—people in real
+life very seldom are, I believe—but most persons would say we had, and
+at all events our conduct, righteous or not, has found us out. The truth
+is, my dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make known
+to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future. Many,
+very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she was only
+twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an
+unhappy marriage—no, not with me, Jon. Without money of her own, and
+with only a stepmother—closely related to Jezebel—she was very unhappy
+in her home life. It was Fleur's father that she married, my cousin
+Soames Forsyte. He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him
+justice was deeply in love with her. Within a week she knew the
+fearful mistake she had made. It was not his fault; it was her error of
+judgment—her misfortune.”
+
+So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject
+carried him away.
+
+“Jon, I want to explain to you if I can—and it's very hard—how it is
+that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about. You will
+of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how could she ever have
+married him?' You would be right if it were not for one or two rather
+terrible considerations. From this initial mistake of hers all the
+subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and so I must make
+it clear to you if I can. You see, Jon, in those days and even to this
+day—indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can
+well be otherwise—most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side
+of life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it.
+That's the crux. It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal
+knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble.
+In a vast number of marriages-and your mother's was one—girls are not
+and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they
+do not know until after that act of union which makes the reality of
+marriage. Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements
+and strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's
+was one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such attraction
+as there was. There is nothing more tragic in a woman's life than such
+a revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer. Coarse-grained and
+unthinking people are apt to laugh at such a mistake, and say, 'What a
+fuss about nothing!' Narrow and self-righteous people, only capable of
+judging the lives of others by their own, are apt to condemn those who
+make this tragic error, to condemn them for life to the dungeons they
+have made for themselves. You know the expression: 'She has made her
+bed, she must lie on it!' It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of
+a gentleman or lady in the best sense of those words; and I can use no
+stronger condemnation. I have not been what is called a moral man, but I
+wish to use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly
+of ties or contracts into which you enter. Heaven forbid! But with
+the experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the
+victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands
+to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
+understanding to know what they are doing. But they haven't! Let them
+go! They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them. I have
+had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a position to
+judge your mother, and you are very young, without experience of what
+life is. To go on with the story. After three years of effort to subdue
+her shrinking—I was going to say her loathing and it's not too strong a
+word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing under such circumstances—three
+years of what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother's,
+Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fell in love with her. He was
+the architect of this very house that we live in now, he was building
+it for her and Fleur's father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in
+place of the one she inhabited with him in London. Perhaps that fact
+played some part in what came of it. But in any case she, too, fell in
+love with him. I know it's not necessary to explain to you that one does
+not precisely choose with whom one will fall in love. It comes. Very
+well! It came. I can imagine—though she never said much to me about
+it—the struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she was
+brought up strictly and was not light in her ideas—not at all. However,
+this was an overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass that they loved in
+deed as well as in thought. Then came a fearful tragedy. I must tell you
+of it because if I don't you will never understand the real situation
+that you have now to face. The man whom she had married—Soames Forsyte,
+the father of Fleur one night, at the height of her passion for this
+young man, forcibly reasserted his rights over her. The next day she met
+her lover and told him of it. Whether he committed suicide or whether he
+was accidentally run over in his distraction, we never knew; but so it
+was. Think of your mother as she was that evening when she heard of his
+death. I happened to see her. Your grandfather sent me to help her if I
+could. I only just saw her, before the door was shut against me by her
+husband. But I have never forgotten her face, I can see it now. I was
+not in love with her then, not for twelve years after, but I have never
+forgotten. My dear boy—it is not easy to write like this. But you see, I
+must. Your mother is wrapped up in you, utterly, devotedly. I don't wish
+to write harshly of Soames Forsyte. I don't think harshly of him. I have
+long been sorry for him; perhaps I was sorry even then. As the world
+judges she was in error, he within his rights. He loved her—in his
+way. She was his property. That is the view he holds of life—of human
+feelings and hearts—property. It's not his fault—so was he born. To me
+it is a view that has always been abhorrent—so was I born! Knowing you
+as I do, I feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you. Let me
+go on with the story. Your mother fled from his house that night; for
+twelve years she lived quietly alone without companionship of any sort,
+until in 1899 her husband—you see, he was still her husband, for he did
+not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right to divorce
+him—became conscious, it seems, of the want of children, and commenced a
+long attempt to induce her to go back to him and give him a child. I
+was her trustee then, under your Grandfather's Will, and I watched this
+going on. While watching, I became attached to her, devotedly attached.
+His pressure increased, till one day she came to me here and practically
+put herself under my protection. Her husband, who was kept informed of
+all her movements, attempted to force us apart by bringing a divorce
+suit, or possibly he really meant it, I don't know; but anyway our names
+were publicly joined. That decided us, and we became united in fact. She
+was divorced, married me, and you were born. We have lived in perfect
+happiness, at least I have, and I believe your mother also. Soames, soon
+after the divorce, married Fleur's mother, and she was born. That is the
+story, Jon. I have told it you, because by the affection which we see
+you have formed for this man's daughter you are blindly moving toward
+what must utterly destroy your mother's happiness, if not your own.
+I don't wish to speak of myself, because at my age there's no use
+supposing I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I should
+suffer would be mainly on her account, and on yours. But what I want
+you to realise is that feelings of horror and aversion such as those
+can never be buried or forgotten. They are alive in her to-day. Only
+yesterday at Lord's we happened to see Soames Forsyte. Her face, if you
+had seen it, would have convinced you. The idea that you should marry
+his daughter is a nightmare to her, Jon. I have nothing to say against
+Fleur save that she is his daughter. But your children, if you married
+her, would be the grandchildren of Soames, as much as of your mother, of
+a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave. Think what
+that would mean. By such a marriage you enter the camp which held your
+mother prisoner and wherein she ate her heart out. You are just on the
+threshold of life, you have only known this girl two months, and however
+deeply you think you love her, I appeal to you to break it off at once.
+Don't give your mother this rankling pain and humiliation during the
+rest of her life. Young though she will always seem to me, she is
+fifty-seven. Except for us two she has no one in the world. She will
+soon have only you. Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away. Don't put
+this cloud and barrier between you. Don't break her heart! Bless you, my
+dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this letter must bring
+you—we tried to spare it you, but Spain—it seems—-was no good.
+
+“Ever your devoted father,
+
+“JOLYON FORSYTE.”
+
+Having finished his confession, Jolyon sat with a thin cheek on his
+hand, re-reading. There were things in it which hurt him so much, when
+he thought of Jon reading them, that he nearly tore the letter up. To
+speak of such things at all to a boy—his own boy—to speak of them in
+relation to his own wife and the boy's own mother, seemed dreadful to
+the reticence of his Forsyte soul. And yet without speaking of them how
+make Jon understand the reality, the deep cleavage, the ineffaceable
+scar? Without them, how justify this stiffing of the boy's love? He
+might just as well not write at all!
+
+He folded the confession, and put it in his pocket. It was—thank
+Heaven!—Saturday; he had till Sunday evening to think it over; for even
+if posted now it could not reach Jon till Monday. He felt a curious
+relief at this delay, and at the fact that, whether sent or not, it was
+written.
+
+In the rose garden, which had taken the place of the old fernery, he
+could see Irene snipping and pruning, with a little basket on her arm.
+She was never idle, it seemed to him, and he envied her now that he
+himself was idle nearly all his time. He went down to her. She held up a
+stained glove and smiled. A piece of lace tied under her chin concealed
+her hair, and her oval face with its still dark brows looked very young.
+
+“The green-fly are awful this year, and yet it's cold. You look tired,
+Jolyon.”
+
+Jolyon took the confession from his pocket. “I've been writing this. I
+think you ought to see it?”
+
+“To Jon?” Her whole face had changed, in that instant, becoming almost
+haggard.
+
+“Yes; the murder's out.”
+
+He gave it to her, and walked away among the roses. Presently, seeing
+that she had finished reading and was standing quite still with the
+sheets of the letter against her skirt, he came back to her.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“It's wonderfully put. I don't see how it could be put better. Thank
+you, dear.”
+
+“Is there anything you would like left out?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No; he must know all, if he's to understand.”
+
+“That's what I thought, but—I hate it!”
+
+He had the feeling that he hated it more than she—to him sex was so much
+easier to mention between man and woman than between man and man; and
+she had always been more natural and frank, not deeply secretive like
+his Forsyte self.
+
+“I wonder if he will understand, even now, Jolyon? He's so young; and he
+shrinks from the physical.”
+
+“He gets that shrinking from my father, he was as fastidious as a girl
+in all such matters. Would it be better to rewrite the whole thing, and
+just say you hated Soames?”
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+“Hate's only a word. It conveys nothing. No, better as it is.”
+
+“Very well. It shall go to-morrow.”
+
+She raised her face to his, and in sight of the big house's many
+creepered windows, he kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+
+II.—CONFESSION
+
+Late that same afternoon, Jolyon had a nap in the old armchair. Face
+down on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and just
+before he fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall we ever
+really like the French? Will they ever really like us!' He himself had
+always liked the French, feeling at home with their wit, their taste,
+their cooking. Irene and he had paid many visits to France before the
+War, when Jon had been at his private school. His romance with her had
+begun in Paris—his last and most enduring romance. But the French—no
+Englishman could like them who could not see them in some sort with
+the detached aesthetic eye! And with that melancholy conclusion he had
+nodded off.
+
+When he woke he saw Jon standing between him and the window. The boy
+had evidently come in from the garden and was waiting for him to wake.
+Jolyon smiled, still half asleep. How nice the chap looked—sensitive,
+affectionate, straight! Then his heart gave a nasty jump; and a quaking
+sensation overcame him. Jon! That confession! He controlled himself with
+an effort. “Why, Jon, where did you spring from?”
+
+Jon bent over and kissed his forehead.
+
+Only then he noticed the look on the boy's face.
+
+“I came home to tell you something, Dad.”
+
+With all his might Jolyon tried to get the better of the jumping,
+gurgling sensations within his chest.
+
+“Well, sit down, old man. Have you seen your mother?”
+
+“No.” The boy's flushed look gave place to pallor; he sat down on the
+arm of the old chair, as, in old days, Jolyon himself used to sit beside
+his own father, installed in its recesses. Right up to the time of the
+rupture in their relations he had been wont to perch there—had he now
+reached such a moment with his own son? All his life he had hated scenes
+like poison, avoided rows, gone on his own way quietly and let others go
+on theirs. But now—it seemed—at the very end of things, he had a scene
+before him more painful than any he had avoided. He drew a visor down
+over his emotion, and waited for his son to speak.
+
+“Father,” said Jon slowly, “Fleur and I are engaged.”
+
+'Exactly!' thought Jolyon, breathing with difficulty.
+
+“I know that you and Mother don't like the idea. Fleur says that Mother
+was engaged to her father before you married her. Of course I don't know
+what happened, but it must be ages ago. I'm devoted to her, Dad, and she
+says she is to me.”
+
+Jolyon uttered a queer sound, half laugh, half groan.
+
+“You are nineteen, Jon, and I am seventy-two. How are we to understand
+each other in a matter like this, eh?”
+
+“You love Mother, Dad; you must know what we feel. It isn't fair to us
+to let old things spoil our happiness, is it?”
+
+Brought face to face with his confession, Jolyon resolved to do without
+it if by any means he could. He laid his hand on the boy's arm.
+
+“Look, Jon! I might put you off with talk about your both being too
+young and not knowing your own minds, and all that, but you wouldn't
+listen, besides, it doesn't meet the case—Youth, unfortunately,
+cures itself. You talk lightly about 'old things like that,' knowing
+nothing—as you say truly—of what happened. Now, have I ever given you
+reason to doubt my love for you, or my word?”
+
+At a less anxious moment he might have been amused by the conflict his
+words aroused—the boy's eager clasp, to reassure him on these points,
+the dread on his face of what that reassurance would bring forth; but he
+could only feel grateful for the squeeze.
+
+“Very well, you can believe what I tell you. If you don't give up this
+love affair, you will make Mother wretched to the end of her days.
+Believe me, my dear, the past, whatever it was, can't be buried—it can't
+indeed.”
+
+Jon got off the arm of the chair.
+
+'The girl'—thought Jolyon—'there she goes—starting up before him—life
+itself—eager, pretty, loving!'
+
+“I can't, Father; how can I—just because you say that? Of course, I
+can't!”
+
+“Jon, if you knew the story you would give this up without hesitation;
+you would have to! Can't you believe me?”
+
+“How can you tell what I should think? Father, I love her better than
+anything in the world.”
+
+Jolyon's face twitched, and he said with painful slowness:
+
+“Better than your mother, Jon?”
+
+From the boy's face, and his clenched fists Jolyon realised the stress
+and struggle he was going through.
+
+“I don't know,” he burst out, “I don't know! But to give Fleur up for
+nothing—for something I don't understand, for something that I don't
+believe can really matter half so much, will make me—make me....”
+
+“Make you feel us unjust, put a barrier—yes. But that's better than
+going on with this.”
+
+“I can't. Fleur loves me, and I love her. You want me to trust you;
+why don't you trust me, Father? We wouldn't want to know anything—we
+wouldn't let it make any difference. It'll only make us both love you
+and Mother all the more.”
+
+Jolyon put his hand into his breast pocket, but brought it out again
+empty, and sat, clucking his tongue against his teeth.
+
+“Think what your mother's been to you, Jon! She has nothing but you; I
+shan't last much longer.”
+
+“Why not? It isn't fair to—Why not?”
+
+“Well,” said Jolyon, rather coldly, “because the doctors tell me I
+shan't; that's all.”
+
+“Oh, Dad!” cried Jon, and burst into tears.
+
+This downbreak of his son, whom he had not seen cry since he was ten,
+moved Jolyon terribly. He recognised to the full how fearfully soft the
+boy's heart was, how much he would suffer in this business, and in life
+generally. And he reached out his hand helplessly—not wishing, indeed
+not daring to get up.
+
+“Dear man,” he said, “don't—or you'll make me!”
+
+Jon smothered down his paroxysm, and stood with face averted, very
+still.
+
+'What now?' thought Jolyon. 'What can I say to move him?'
+
+“By the way, don't speak of that to Mother,” he said; “she has enough to
+frighten her with this affair of yours. I know how you feel. But, Jon,
+you know her and me well enough to be sure we wouldn't wish to spoil
+your happiness lightly. Why, my dear boy, we don't care for anything but
+your happiness—at least, with me it's just yours and Mother's and with
+her just yours. It's all the future for you both that's at stake.”
+
+Jon turned. His face was deadly pale; his eyes, deep in his head, seemed
+to burn.
+
+“What is it? What is it? Don't keep me like this!”
+
+Jolyon, who knew that he was beaten, thrust his hand again into his
+breast pocket, and sat for a full minute, breathing with difficulty, his
+eyes closed. The thought passed through his mind: 'I've had a good long
+innings—some pretty bitter moments—this is the worst!' Then he brought
+his hand out with the letter, and said with a sort of fatigue: “Well,
+Jon, if you hadn't come to-day, I was going to send you this. I wanted
+to spare you—I wanted to spare your mother and myself, but I see it's no
+good. Read it, and I think I'll go into the garden.” He reached forward
+to get up.
+
+Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, “No, I'll go”; and was
+gone.
+
+Jolyon sank back in his chair. A blue-bottle chose that moment to come
+buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely, better
+than nothing.... Where had the boy gone to read his letter? The wretched
+letter—the wretched story! A cruel business—cruel to her—to Soames—to
+those two children—to himself!... His heart thumped and pained him.
+Life—its loves—its work—its beauty—its aching, and—its end! A good time;
+a fine time in spite of all; until—you regretted that you had ever been
+born. Life—it wore you down, yet did not make you want to die—that was
+the cunning evil! Mistake to have a heart! Again the blue-bottle came
+buzzing—bringing in all the heat and hum and scent of summer—yes,
+even the scent—as of ripe fruits, dried grasses, sappy shrubs, and the
+vanilla breath of cows. And out there somewhere in the fragrance Jon
+would be reading that letter, turning and twisting its pages in his
+trouble, his bewilderment and trouble—breaking his heart about it! The
+thought made Jolyon acutely miserable. Jon was such a tender-hearted
+chap, affectionate to his bones, and conscientious, too—it was so
+unfair, so damned unfair! He remembered Irene saying to him once: “Never
+was any one born more loving and lovable than Jon.” Poor little Jon! His
+world gone up the spout, all of a summer afternoon! Youth took things so
+hard! And stirred, tormented by that vision of Youth taking things hard,
+Jolyon got out of his chair, and went to the window. The boy was nowhere
+visible. And he passed out. If one could take any help to him now—one
+must!
+
+He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden—no Jon! Nor
+where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to swell and colour.
+He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral, into the meadow.
+Where had the boy got to? Had he rushed down to the coppice—his old
+hunting-ground? Jolyon crossed the rows of hay. They would cock it on
+Monday and be carrying the day after, if rain held off. Often they had
+crossed this field together—hand in hand, when Jon was a little chap.
+Dash it! The golden age was over by the time one was ten! He came to the
+pond, where flies and gnats were dancing over a bright reedy surface;
+and on into the coppice. It was cool there, fragrant of larches. Still
+no Jon! He called. No answer! On the log seat he sat down, nervous,
+anxious, forgetting his own physical sensations. He had been wrong to
+let the boy get away with that letter; he ought to have kept him under
+his eye from the start! Greatly troubled, he got up to retrace his
+steps. At the farm-buildings he called again, and looked into the dark
+cow-house. There in the cool, and the scent of vanilla and ammonia, away
+from flies, the three Alderneys were chewing the quiet cud; just milked,
+waiting for evening, to be turned out again into the lower field. One
+turned a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon could see the slobber on
+its grey lower lip. He saw everything with passionate clearness, in the
+agitation of his nerves—all that in his time he had adored and tried
+to paint—wonder of light and shade and colour. No wonder the legend put
+Christ into a manger—what more devotional than the eyes and moon-white
+horns of a chewing cow in the warm dusk! He called again. No answer! And
+he hurried away out of the coppice, past the pond, up the hill. Oddly
+ironical—now he came to think of it—if Jon had taken the gruel of his
+discovery down in the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those old
+days had made the plunge of acknowledging their love. Where he himself,
+on the log seat the Sunday morning he came back from Paris, had realised
+to the full that Irene had become the world to him. That would have been
+the place for Irony to tear the veil from before the eyes of Irene's
+boy! But he was not here! Where had he got to? One must find the poor
+chap!
+
+A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all the
+beauty of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening shadows, of
+the blue, and the white clouds, the scent of the hay, and the cooing of
+the pigeons; and the flower shapes standing tall. He came to the rosery,
+and the beauty of the roses in that sudden sunlight seemed to him
+unearthly. “Rose, you Spaniard!” Wonderful three words! There she had
+stood by that bush of dark red roses; had stood to read and decide that
+Jon must know it all! He knew all now! Had she chosen wrong? He bent and
+sniffed a rose, its petals brushed his nose and trembling lips; nothing
+so soft as a rose-leaf's velvet, except her neck—Irene! On across
+the lawn he went, up the slope, to the oak-tree. Its top alone was
+glistening, for the sudden sun was away over the house; the lower shade
+was thick, blessedly cool—he was greatly overheated. He paused a minute
+with his hand on the rope of the swing—Jolly, Holly—Jon! The old swing!
+And suddenly, he felt horribly—deadly ill. 'I've over done it!' he
+thought: 'by Jove! I've overdone it—after all!' He staggered up toward
+the terrace, dragged himself up the steps, and fell against the wall of
+the house. He leaned there gasping, his face buried in the honey-suckle
+that he and she had taken such trouble with that it might sweeten the
+air which drifted in. Its fragrance mingled with awful pain. 'My love!'
+he thought; 'the boy!' And with a great effort he tottered in through
+the long window, and sank into old Jolyon's chair. The book was there, a
+pencil in it; he caught it up, scribbled a word on the open page.... His
+hand dropped.... So it was like this—was it?...
+
+There was a great wrench; and darkness....
+
+
+
+
+
+III.—IRENE
+
+When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along the
+terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and confusion.
+Leaning against the creepered wall he tore open the letter. It was
+long—very long! This added to his fear, and he began reading. When he
+came to the words: “It was Fleur's father that she married,” everything
+seemed to spin before him. He was close to a window, and entering by it,
+he passed, through music-room and hall, up to his bedroom. Dipping his
+face in cold water, he sat on his bed, and went on reading, dropping
+each finished page on the bed beside him. His father's writing was easy
+to read—he knew it so well, though he had never had a letter from him
+one quarter so long. He read with a dull feeling—imagination only half
+at work. He best grasped, on that first reading, the pain his father
+must have had in writing such a letter. He let the last sheet fall, and
+in a sort of mental, moral helplessness began to read the first again.
+It all seemed to him disgusting—dead and disgusting. Then, suddenly, a
+hot wave of horrified emotion tingled through him. He buried his face in
+his hands. His mother! Fleur's father! He took up the letter again, and
+read on mechanically. And again came the feeling that it was all
+dead and disgusting; his own love so different! This letter said his
+mother—and her father! An awful letter!
+
+Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their property?
+Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him—red,
+stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent faces;
+hundreds, thousands of them! How could he know what men who had such
+faces thought and did? He held his head in his hands and groaned.
+His mother! He caught up the letter and read on again: “horror and
+aversion-alive in her to-day.... your children.... grandchildren.... of
+a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave....” He got
+up from his bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his
+love and Fleur's, was true, or his father could never have written it.
+'Why didn't they tell me the first thing,' he thought, 'the day I first
+saw Fleur? They knew I'd seen her. They were afraid, and—now—I've—got
+it!' Overcome by misery too acute for thought or reason, he crept into
+a dusky corner of the room and sat down on the floor. He sat there, like
+some unhappy little animal. There was comfort in dusk, and the floor—as
+if he were back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all
+over it. He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped round
+his knees, for how long he did not know. He was wrenched from his blank
+wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from his mother's room.
+The blinds were down over the windows of his room, shut up in his
+absence, and from where he sat he could only hear a rustle, her
+footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her standing before
+his dressing-table. She had something in her hand. He hardly breathed,
+hoping she would not see him, and go away. He saw her touch things on
+the table as if they had some virtue in them, then face the window-grey
+from head to foot like a ghost. The least turn of her head, and she must
+see him! Her lips moved: “Oh! Jon!” She was speaking to herself; the
+tone of her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her hand a little
+photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at it—very small. He
+knew it—one of himself as a tiny boy, which she always kept in her bag.
+His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had heard it, she turned
+her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave, and the movement of her
+hands pressing the photograph against her breast, he said:
+
+“Yes, it's me.”
+
+She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him, her
+hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the sheets of the letter
+which had slipped to the floor. She saw them, and her hands grasped the
+edge of the bed. She sat very upright, her dark eyes fixed on him. At
+last she spoke.
+
+“Well, Jon, you know, I see.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You've seen Father?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+There was a long silence, till she said:
+
+“Oh! my darling!”
+
+“It's all right.” The emotions in him were so, violent and so mixed that
+he dared not move—resentment, despair, and yet a strange yearning for
+the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
+
+“What are you going to do?”
+
+“I don't know.”
+
+There was another long silence, then she got up. She stood a moment,
+very still, made a little movement with her hand, and said: “My darling
+boy, my most darling boy, don't think of me—think of yourself,” and,
+passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her room.
+
+Jon turned—curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog—into the
+corner made by the two walls.
+
+He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him. It came
+from the terrace below. He got up, scared. Again came the cry: “Jon!”
+His mother was calling! He ran out and down the stairs, through the
+empty dining-room into the study. She was kneeling before the old
+armchair, and his father was lying back quite white, his head on his
+breast, one of his hands resting on an open book, with a pencil clutched
+in it—more strangely still than anything he had ever seen. She looked
+round wildly, and said:
+
+“Oh! Jon—he's dead—he's dead!”
+
+Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where
+he had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead. Icy cold! How
+could—how could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago—! His mother's arms
+were round the knees; pressing her breast against them. “Why—why wasn't
+I with him?” he heard her whisper. Then he saw the tottering word
+“Irene” pencilled on the open page, and broke down himself. It was his
+first sight of human death, and its unutterable stillness blotted from
+him all other emotion; all else, then, was but preliminary to this! All
+love and life, and joy, anxiety, and sorrow, all movement, light and
+beauty, but a beginning to this terrible white stillness. It made a
+dreadful mark on him; all seemed suddenly little, futile, short. He
+mastered himself at last, got up, and raised her.
+
+“Mother! don't cry—Mother!”
+
+Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother was
+lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a white
+sheet. He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had never
+looked angry—always whimsical, and kind. “To be kind and keep your end
+up—there's nothing else in it,” he had once heard his father say. How
+wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy! He understood now
+that his father had known for a long time past that this would
+come suddenly—known, and not said a word. He gazed with an awed and
+passionate reverence. The loneliness of it—just to spare his mother and
+himself! His own trouble seemed small while he was looking at that face.
+The word scribbled on the page! The farewell word! Now his mother had no
+one but himself! He went up close to the dead face—not changed at all,
+and yet completely changed. He had heard his father say once that he did
+not believe in consciousness surviving death, or that if it did it
+might be just survival till the natural age limit of the body had been
+reached—the natural term of its inherent vitality; so that if the body
+were broken by accident, excess, violent disease, consciousness might
+still persist till, in the course of Nature uninterfered with, it would
+naturally have faded out. It had struck him because he had never heard
+any one else suggest it. When the heart failed like this—surely it was
+not quite natural! Perhaps his father's consciousness was in the room
+with him. Above the bed hung a picture of his father's father.
+Perhaps his consciousness, too, was still alive; and his brother's—his
+half-brother, who had died in the Transvaal. Were they all gathered
+round this bed? Jon kissed the forehead, and stole back to his own room.
+The door between it and his mother's was ajar; she had evidently been
+in—everything was ready for him, even some biscuits and hot milk, and
+the letter no longer on the floor. He ate and drank, watching the last
+light fade. He did not try to see into the future—just stared at the
+dark branches of the oak-tree, level with his window, and felt as if
+life had stopped. Once in the night, turning in his heavy sleep, he was
+conscious of something white and still, beside his bed, and started up.
+
+His mother's voice said:
+
+“It's only I, Jon dear!” Her hand pressed his forehead gently back; her
+white figure disappeared.
+
+Alone! He fell heavily asleep again, and dreamed he saw his mother's
+name crawling on his bed.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.—SOAMES COGITATES
+
+The announcement in The Times of his cousin Jolyon's death affected
+Soames quite simply. So that chap was gone! There had never been a
+time in their two lives when love had not been lost between them. That
+quick-blooded sentiment hatred had run its course long since in Soames'
+heart, and he had refused to allow any recrudescence, but he considered
+this early decease a piece of poetic justice. For twenty years the
+fellow had enjoyed the reversion of his wife and house, and—he was
+dead! The obituary notice, which appeared a little later, paid Jolyon—he
+thought—too much attention. It spoke of that “diligent and agreeable
+painter whose work we have come to look on as typical of the best
+late-Victorian water-colour art.” Soames, who had almost mechanically
+preferred Mole, Morpin, and Caswell Baye, and had always sniffed quite
+audibly when he came to one of his cousin's on the line, turned The
+Times with a crackle.
+
+He had to go up to Town that morning on Forsyte affairs, and was fully
+conscious of Gradman's glance sidelong over his spectacles. The old
+clerk had about him an aura of regretful congratulation. He smelled, as
+it were, of old days. One could almost hear him thinking: “Mr. Jolyon,
+ye-es—just my age, and gone—dear, dear! I dare say she feels it. She was
+a nice-lookin' woman. Flesh is flesh! They've given 'im a notice in the
+papers. Fancy!” His atmosphere in fact caused Soames to handle certain
+leases and conversions with exceptional swiftness.
+
+“About that settlement on Miss Fleur, Mr. Soames?”
+
+“I've thought better of that,” answered Soames shortly.
+
+“Ah! I'm glad of that. I thought you were a little hasty. The times do
+change.”
+
+How this death would affect Fleur had begun to trouble Soames. He was
+not certain that she knew of it—she seldom looked at the paper, never at
+the births, marriages, and deaths.
+
+He pressed matters on, and made his way to Green Street for lunch.
+Winifred was almost doleful. Jack Cardigan had broken a splashboard,
+so far as one could make out, and would not be “fit” for some time. She
+could not get used to the idea.
+
+“Did Profond ever get off?” he said suddenly.
+
+“He got off,” replied Winifred, “but where—I don't know.”
+
+Yes, there it was—impossible to tell anything! Not that he wanted to
+know. Letters from Annette were coming from Dieppe, where she and her
+mother were staying.
+
+“You saw that fellow's death, I suppose?”
+
+“Yes,” said Winifred. “I'm sorry for—for his children. He was very
+amiable.” Soames uttered a rather queer sound. A suspicion of the old
+deep truth—that men were judged in this world rather by what they were
+than by what they did—crept and knocked resentfully at the back doors of
+his mind.
+
+“I know there was a superstition to that effect,” he muttered.
+
+“One must do him justice now he's dead.”
+
+“I should like to have done him justice before,” said Soames; “but I
+never had the chance. Have you got a 'Baronetage' here?”
+
+“Yes; in that bottom row.”
+
+Soames took out a fat red book, and ran over the leaves.
+
+“Mont-Sir Lawrence, 9th Bt., cr. 1620, e. s. of Geoffrey, 8th Bt., and
+Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt., of Muskham Hall, Shrops:
+marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq., of Condaford Grange,
+co. Oxon; 1 son, heir Michael Conway, b. 1895, 2 daurs. Residence:
+Lippinghall Manor, Folwell, Bucks. Clubs: Snooks'. Coffee House:
+Aeroplane. See Bidicott.”
+
+“H'm!” he said. “Did you ever know a publisher?”
+
+“Uncle Timothy.”
+
+“Alive, I mean.”
+
+“Monty knew one at his Club. He brought him here to dinner once. Monty
+was always thinking of writing a book, you know, about how to make money
+on the turf. He tried to interest that man.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“He put him on to a horse—for the Two Thousand. We didn't see him again.
+He was rather smart, if I remember.”
+
+“Did it win?”
+
+“No; it ran last, I think. You know Monty really was quite clever in his
+way.”
+
+“Was he?” said Soames. “Can you see any connection between a sucking
+baronet and publishing?”
+
+“People do all sorts of things nowadays,” replied Winifred. “The great
+stunt seems not to be idle—so different from our time. To do nothing was
+the thing then. But I suppose it'll come again.”
+
+“This young Mont that I'm speaking of is very sweet on Fleur. If it
+would put an end to that other affair I might encourage it.”
+
+“Has he got style?” asked Winifred.
+
+“He's no beauty; pleasant enough, with some scattered brains. There's a
+good deal of land, I believe. He seems genuinely attached. But I don't
+know.”
+
+“No,” murmured Winifred; “it's—very difficult. I always found it best
+to do nothing. It is such a bore about Jack; now we shan't get away till
+after Bank Holiday. Well, the people are always amusing, I shall go into
+the Park and watch them.”
+
+“If I were you,” said Soames, “I should have a country cottage, and be
+out of the way of holidays and strikes when you want.”
+
+“The country bores me,” answered Winifred, “and I found the railway
+strike quite exciting.”
+
+Winifred had always been noted for sang-froid.
+
+Soames took his leave. All the way down to Reading he debated whether
+he should tell Fleur of that boy's father's death. It did not alter the
+situation except that he would be independent now, and only have his
+mother's opposition to encounter. He would come into a lot of money, no
+doubt, and perhaps the house—the house built for Irene and
+himself—the house whose architect had wrought his domestic ruin. His
+daughter—mistress of that house! That would be poetic justice! Soames
+uttered a little mirthless laugh. He had designed that house
+to re-establish his failing union, meant it for the seat of his
+descendants, if he could have induced Irene to give him one! Her son
+and Fleur! Their children would be, in some sort, offspring of the union
+between himself and her!
+
+The theatricality in that thought was repulsive to his sober sense. And
+yet—it would be the easiest and wealthiest way out of the impasse, now
+that Jolyon was gone. The juncture of two Forsyte fortunes had a kind
+of conservative charm. And she—Irene-would be linked to him once more.
+Nonsense! Absurd! He put the notion from his head.
+
+On arriving home he heard the click of billiard-balls, and through the
+window saw young Mont sprawling over the table. Fleur, with her cue
+akimbo, was watching with a smile. How pretty she looked! No wonder
+that young fellow was out of his mind about her. A title—land! There
+was little enough in land, these days; perhaps less in a title. The old
+Forsytes had always had a kind of contempt for titles, rather remote and
+artificial things—not worth the money they cost, and having to do with
+the Court. They had all had that feeling in differing measure—Soames
+remembered. Swithin, indeed, in his most expansive days had once
+attended a Levee. He had come away saying he shouldn't go again—“all
+that small fry.” It was suspected that he had looked too big in
+knee-breeches. Soames remembered how his own mother had wished to be
+presented because of the fashionable nature of the performance, and how
+his father had put his foot down with unwonted decision. What did she
+want with that peacocking—wasting time and money; there was nothing in
+it!
+
+The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the chief
+power in the State, a feeling that their own world was good enough and
+a little better than any other because it was their world, had kept the
+old Forsytes singularly free of “flummery,” as Nicholas had been wont
+to call it when he had the gout. Soames' generation, more self-conscious
+and ironical, had been saved by a sense of Swithin in knee-breeches.
+While the third and the fourth generation, as it seemed to him, laughed
+at everything.
+
+However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a title
+and estate—a thing one couldn't help. He entered quietly, as Mont missed
+his shot. He noted the young man's eyes, fixed on Fleur bending over in
+her turn; and the adoration in them almost touched him.
+
+She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand, and shook
+her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
+
+“I shall never do it.”
+
+“'Nothing venture.'”
+
+“All right.” The cue struck, the ball rolled. “There!”
+
+“Bad luck! Never mind!”
+
+Then they saw him, and Soames said:
+
+“I'll mark for you.”
+
+He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and tired,
+furtively studying those two young faces. When the game was over Mont
+came up to him.
+
+“I've started in, sir. Rum game, business, isn't it? I suppose you saw a
+lot of human nature as a solicitor.”
+
+“I did.”
+
+“Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the wrong tack
+in offering less than they can afford to give; they ought to offer more,
+and work backward.”
+
+Soames raised his eyebrows.
+
+“Suppose the more is accepted?”
+
+“That doesn't matter a little bit,” said Mont; “it's much more paying to
+abate a price than to increase it. For instance, say we offer an author
+good terms—he naturally takes them. Then we go into it, find we can't
+publish at a decent profit and tell him so. He's got confidence in us
+because we've been generous to him, and he comes down like a lamb, and
+bears us no malice. But if we offer him poor terms at the start, he
+doesn't take them, so we have to advance them to get him, and he thinks
+us damned screws into the bargain.
+
+“Try buying pictures on that system,” said Soames; “an offer accepted is
+a contract—haven't you learned that?”
+
+Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the window.
+
+“No,” he said, “I wish I had. Then there's another thing. Always let a
+man off a bargain if he wants to be let off.”
+
+“As advertisement?” said Soames dryly.
+
+“Of course it is; but I meant on principle.”
+
+“Does your firm work on those lines?”
+
+“Not yet,” said Mont, “but it'll come.”
+
+“And they will go.”
+
+“No, really, sir. I'm making any number of observations, and they all
+confirm my theory. Human nature is consistently underrated in business,
+people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure and profit by that.
+Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and open, but that's easy
+if you feel it. The more human and generous you are the better chance
+you've got in business.”
+
+Soames rose.
+
+“Are you a partner?”
+
+“Not for six months, yet.”
+
+“The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire.”
+
+Mont laughed.
+
+“You'll see,” he said. “There's going to be a big change. The possessive
+principle has got its shutters up.”
+
+“What?” said Soames.
+
+“The house is to let! Good-bye, sir; I'm off now.”
+
+Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the squeeze
+it received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as he passed out.
+Then she came from the window, trailing her finger along the mahogany
+edge of the billiard-table. Watching her, Soames knew that she was going
+to ask him something. Her finger felt round the last pocket, and she
+looked up.
+
+“Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?”
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+“You haven't seen, then?” he said. “His father died just a week ago
+to-day.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to apprehend
+what this would mean.
+
+“Poor Jon! Why didn't you tell me, Father?”
+
+“I never know!” said Soames slowly; “you don't confide in me.”
+
+“I would, if you'd help me, dear.”
+
+“Perhaps I shall.”
+
+Fleur clasped her hands. “Oh! darling—when one wants a thing fearfully,
+one doesn't think of other people. Don't be angry with me.”
+
+Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
+
+“I'm cogitating,” he said. What on earth had made him use a word like
+that! “Has young Mont been bothering you again?”
+
+Fleur smiled. “Oh! Michael! He's always bothering; but he's such a good
+sort—I don't mind him.”
+
+“Well,” said Soames, “I'm tired; I shall go and have a nap before
+dinner.”
+
+He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there, and
+closed his eyes. A terrible responsibility this girl of his—whose mother
+was—ah! what was she? A terrible responsibility! Help her—how could he
+help her? He could not alter the fact that he was her father. Or
+that Irene—! What was it young Mont had said—some nonsense about the
+possessive instinct—shutters up—To let? Silly!
+
+The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and
+roses, closed on his senses, drowsing them.
+
+
+
+
+
+V.—THE FIXED IDEA
+
+“The fixed idea,” which has outrun more constables than any other form
+of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when it takes
+the avid guise of love. To hedges and ditches, and doors, to humans
+without ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the contents
+sucking their fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from this fast
+malady—the fixed idea of love pays no attention. It runs with eyes
+turned inward to its own light, oblivious of all other stars. Those
+with the fixed ideas that human happiness depends on their art, on
+vivisecting dogs, on hating foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining
+Ministers, on making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours
+from being divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church
+dogma, paradox and superiority to everybody else, with other forms of
+ego-mania—all are unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is
+the possession of some her or him. And though Fleur, those chilly summer
+days, pursued the scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are
+paid for, and whose business is pleasure, she was—as Winifred would have
+said in the latest fashion of speech—“honest to God” indifferent to
+it all. She wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies
+above the river or the Green Park when she went to Town. She even kept
+Jon's letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which in days
+when corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and chests so out of
+fashion, there could, perhaps, have been no greater proof of the fixity
+of her idea.
+
+After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received his
+answer three days later on her return from a river picnic. It was
+his first letter since their meeting at June's. She opened it with
+misgiving, and read it with dismay.
+
+“Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past. I won't tell it
+you—I think you knew when we met at June's. She says you did. If you
+did, Fleur, you ought to have told me. I expect you only heard your
+father's side of it. I have heard my mother's. It's dreadful. Now that
+she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt her more. Of course, I long
+for you all day, but I don't believe now that we shall ever come
+together—there's something too strong pulling us apart.”
+
+So! Her deception had found her out. But Jon—she felt—had forgiven that.
+It was what he said of his mother which caused the guttering in her
+heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
+
+Her first impulse was to reply—her second, not to reply. These impulses
+were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while desperation
+grew within her. She was not her father's child for nothing. The
+tenacity which had at once made and undone Soames was her backbone, too,
+frilled and embroidered by French grace and quickness. Instinctively
+she conjugated the verb “to have” always with the pronoun “I.” She
+concealed, however, all signs of her growing desperation, and pursued
+such river pleasures as the winds and rain of a disagreeable July
+permitted, as if she had no care in the world; nor did any “sucking
+baronet” ever neglect the business of a publisher more consistently than
+her attendant spirit, Michael Mont.
+
+To Soames she was a puzzle. He was almost deceived by this careless
+gaiety. Almost—because he did not fail to mark her eyes often fixed on
+nothing, and the film of light shining from her bedroom window late at
+night. What was she thinking and brooding over into small hours when she
+ought to have been asleep? But he dared not ask what was in her mind;
+and, since that one little talk in the billiard-room, she said nothing
+to him.
+
+In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred invited
+them to lunch and to go afterward to “a most amusing little play, 'The
+Beggar's Opera'” and would they bring a man to make four? Soames,
+whose attitude toward theatres was to go to nothing, accepted, because
+Fleur's attitude was to go to everything. They motored up, taking
+Michael Mont, who, being in his seventh heaven, was found by Winifred
+“very amusing.” “The Beggar's Opera” puzzled Soames. The people
+were very unpleasant, the whole thing very cynical. Winifred was
+“intrigued”—by the dresses. The music, too, did not displease her. At
+the Opera, the night before, she had arrived too early for the Russian
+Ballet, and found the stage occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale
+or apoplectic from terror lest by some dreadful inadvertence they might
+drop into a tune. Michael Mont was enraptured with the whole thing.
+And all three wondered what Fleur was thinking of it. But Fleur was not
+thinking of it. Her fixed idea stood on the stage and sang with Polly
+Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced with Jenny Diver, postured with Lucy
+Lockit, kissed, trolled, and cuddled with Macheath. Her lips might
+smile, her hands applaud, but the comic old masterpiece made no more
+impression on her than if it had been pathetic, like a modern “Revue.”
+When they embarked in the car to return, she ached because Jon was not
+sitting next her instead of Michael Mont. When, at some jolt, the young
+man's arm touched hers as if by accident, she only thought: 'If that
+were Jon's arm!' When his cheerful voice, tempered by her proximity,
+murmured above the sound of the car's progress, she smiled and answered,
+thinking: 'If that were Jon's voice!' and when once he said, “Fleur, you
+look a perfect angel in that dress!” she answered, “Oh, do you like it?”
+thinking, 'If only Jon could see it!'
+
+During this drive she took a resolution. She would go to Robin Hill and
+see him—alone; she would take the car, without word beforehand to him or
+to her father. It was nine days since his letter, and she could wait
+no longer. On Monday she would go! The decision made her well disposed
+toward young Mont. With something to look forward to she could afford to
+tolerate and respond. He might stay to dinner; propose to her as usual;
+dance with her, press her hand, sigh—do what he liked. He was only a
+nuisance when he interfered with her fixed idea. She was even sorry for
+him so far as it was possible to be sorry for anybody but herself just
+now. At dinner he seemed to talk more wildly than usual about what he
+called “the death of the close borough”—she paid little attention, but
+her father seemed paying a good deal, with the smile on his face which
+meant opposition, if not anger.
+
+“The younger generation doesn't think as you do, sir; does it, Fleur?”
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders—the younger generation was just Jon, and
+she did not know what he was thinking.
+
+“Young people will think as I do when they're my age, Mr. Mont. Human
+nature doesn't change.”
+
+“I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the times. The
+pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that's going out.”
+
+“Indeed! To mind one's own business is not a form of thought, Mr. Mont,
+it's an instinct.”
+
+Yes, when Jon was the business!
+
+“But what is one's business, sir? That's the point. Everybody's business
+is going to be one's business. Isn't it, Fleur?”
+
+Fleur only smiled.
+
+“If not,” added young Mont, “there'll be blood.”
+
+“People have talked like that from time immemorial”
+
+“But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?”
+
+“I should say increasing among those who have none.”
+
+“Well, look at me! I'm heir to an entailed estate. I don't want the
+thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow.”
+
+“You're not married, and you don't know what you're talking about.”
+
+Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.
+
+“Do you really mean that marriage—?” he began.
+
+“Society is built on marriage,” came from between her father's close
+lips; “marriage and its consequences. Do you want to do away with it?”
+
+Young Mont made a distracted gesture. Silence brooded over the dinner
+table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest—a pheasant
+proper—under the electric light in an alabaster globe. And outside, the
+river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and sweet scents.
+
+'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'
+
+
+
+
+
+VI.—DESPERATE
+
+The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty to
+the only Jolyon Forsyte left. The necessary forms and ceremonies—the
+reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of the
+legacies—were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet of age.
+Jolyon was cremated. By his special wish no one attended that ceremony,
+or wore black for him. The succession of his property, controlled to
+some extent by old Jolyon's Will, left his widow in possession of Robin
+Hill, with two thousand five hundred pounds a year for life. Apart from
+this the two Wills worked together in some complicated way to insure
+that each of Jolyon's three children should have an equal share in their
+grandfather's and father's property in the future as in the present,
+save only that Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his
+capital when he was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the
+spirit of theirs, in order that their children might have the body after
+them. If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he outlived
+them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was
+considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of income
+tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he died.
+All this was nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother. It was
+June who did everything needful for one who had left his affairs in
+perfect order. When she had gone, and those two were alone again in the
+great house, alone with death drawing them together, and love driving
+them apart, Jon passed very painful days secretly disgusted and
+disappointed with himself. His mother would look at him with such a
+patient sadness which yet had in it an instinctive pride, as if she were
+reserving her defence. If she smiled he was angry that his answering
+smile should be so grudging and unnatural. He did not judge or condemn
+her; that was all too remote—indeed, the idea of doing so had never come
+to him. No! he was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have
+what he wanted because of her. There was one alleviation—much to do in
+connection with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted
+to June, though she had offered to undertake it. Both Jon and his mother
+had felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings and
+unfinished matter, away with her, the work would encounter such icy
+blasts from Paul Post and other frequenters of her studio, that it would
+soon be frozen out even of her warm heart. On its old-fashioned plane
+and of its kind the work was good, and they could not bear the thought
+of its subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the
+least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation
+for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously
+increased respect for his father. The quiet tenacity with which he
+had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was
+disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with
+a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing
+certainly went very deep, or reached very high—but such as the work
+was, it was thorough, conscientious, and complete. And, remembering
+his father's utter absence of “side” or self-assertion, the chaffing
+humility with which he had always spoken of his own efforts, ever
+calling himself “an amateur,” Jon could not help feeling that he had
+never really known his father. To take himself seriously, yet never that
+he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle. There was something
+in this which appealed to the boy, and made him heartily endorse his
+mother's comment: “He had true refinement; he couldn't help thinking
+of others, whatever he did. And when he took a resolution which went
+counter, he did it with the minimum of defiance—not like the Age, is it?
+Twice in his life he had to go against everything; and yet it never
+made him bitter.” Jon saw tears running down her face, which she at once
+turned away from him. She was so quiet about her loss that sometimes he
+had thought she didn't feel it much. Now, as he looked at her, he felt
+how far he fell short of the reserve power and dignity in both his
+father and his mother. And, stealing up to her, he put his arm round her
+waist. She kissed him swiftly, but with a sort of passion, and went out
+of the room.
+
+The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once been
+Holly's schoolroom, devoted to her silkworms, dried lavender, music,
+and other forms of instruction. Now, at the end of July, despite its
+northern and eastern aspects, a warm and slumberous air came in between
+the long-faded lilac linen curtains. To redeem a little the departed
+glory, as of a field that is golden and gone, clinging to a room which
+its master has left, Irene had placed on the paint-stained table a bowl
+of red roses. This, and Jolyon's favourite cat, who still clung to
+the deserted habitat, were the pleasant spots in that dishevelled, sad
+workroom. Jon, at the north window, sniffing air mysteriously scented
+with warm strawberries, heard a car drive up. The lawyers again about
+some nonsense! Why did that scent so make one ache? And where did it
+come from—there were no strawberry beds on this side of the house.
+Instinctively he took a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, and
+wrote down some broken words. A warmth began spreading in his chest; he
+rubbed the palms of his hands together. Presently he had jotted this:
+
+“If I could make a little song A little song to soothe my heart! I'd
+make it all of little things The plash of water, rub of wings, The
+puffing-off of dandies crown, The hiss of raindrop spilling down, The
+purr of cat, the trill of bird, And ev'ry whispering I've heard From
+willy wind in leaves and grass, And all the distant drones that pass. A
+song as tender and as light As flower, or butterfly in flight; And when
+I saw it opening, I'd let it fly and sing!”
+
+He was still muttering it over to himself at the window, when he
+heard his name called, and, turning round, saw Fleur. At that amazing
+apparition, he made at first no movement and no sound, while her clear
+vivid glance ravished his heart. Then he went forward to the table,
+saying, “How nice of you to come!” and saw her flinch as if he had
+thrown something at her.
+
+“I asked for you,” she said, “and they showed me up here. But I can go
+away again.”
+
+Jon clutched the paint-stained table. Her face and figure in its frilly
+frock photographed itself with such startling vividness upon his eyes,
+that if she had sunk through the floor he must still have seen her.
+
+“I know I told you a lie, Jon. But I told it out of love.”
+
+“Yes, oh! yes! That's nothing!”
+
+“I didn't answer your letter. What was the use—there wasn't anything to
+answer. I wanted to see you instead.” She held out both her hands, and
+Jon grasped them across the table. He tried to say something, but all
+his attention was given to trying not to hurt her hands. His own felt so
+hard and hers so soft. She said almost defiantly:
+
+“That old story—was it so very dreadful?”
+
+“Yes.” In his voice, too, there was a note of defiance.
+
+She dragged her hands away. “I didn't think in these days boys were tied
+to their mothers' apron-strings.”
+
+Jon's chin went up as if he had been struck.
+
+“Oh! I didn't mean it, Jon. What a horrible thing to say!” Swiftly she
+came close to him. “Jon, dear; I didn't mean it.”
+
+“All right.”
+
+She had put her two hands on his shoulder, and her forehead down on
+them; the brim of her hat touched his neck, and he felt it quivering.
+But, in a sort of paralysis, he made no response. She let go of his
+shoulder and drew away.
+
+“Well, I'll go, if you don't want me. But I never thought you'd have
+given me up.”
+
+“I haven't,” cried Jon, coming suddenly to life. “I can't. I'll try
+again.”
+
+Her eyes gleamed, she swayed toward him. “Jon—I love you! Don't give
+me up! If you do, I don't know what—I feel so desperate. What does it
+matter—all that past-compared with this?”
+
+She clung to him. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. But while he
+kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down on the floor of
+his bedroom—his father's white dead face—his mother kneeling before it.
+Fleur's whispered, “Make her! Promise! Oh! Jon, try!” seemed childish in
+his ear. He felt curiously old.
+
+“I promise!” he muttered. “Only, you don't understand.”
+
+“She wants to spoil our lives, just because—”
+
+“Yes, of what?”
+
+Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer. Her arms
+tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even while he
+yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the letter. Fleur did
+not know, she did not understand—she misjudged his mother; she came
+from the enemy's camp! So lovely, and he loved her so—yet, even in her
+embrace, he could not help the memory of Holly's words: “I think she
+has a 'having' nature,” and his mother's “My darling boy, don't think of
+me—think of yourself!”
+
+When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on his
+eyes, her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon leaned in
+the window, listening to the car bearing her away. Still the scent as of
+warm strawberries, still the little summer sounds that should make his
+song; still all the promise of youth and happiness in sighing, floating,
+fluttering July—and his heart torn; yearning strong in him; hope high
+in him yet with its eyes cast down, as if ashamed. The miserable task
+before him! If Fleur was desperate, so was he—watching the poplars
+swaying, the white clouds passing, the sunlight on the grass.
+
+He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till his
+mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling that she knew what
+he was waiting to say. She kissed him and went up-stairs, and still he
+lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that unreality of
+colouring which steals along and stains a summer night. And he would
+have given anything to be back again in the past—barely three months
+back; or away forward, years, in the future. The present with this
+dark cruelty of a decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible.
+He realised now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had
+at first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ
+producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt there
+were two camps, his mother's and his—Fleur's and her father's. It might
+be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and enmity, but dead things
+were poisonous till time had cleaned them away. Even his love felt
+tainted, less illusioned, more of the earth, and with a treacherous
+lurking doubt lest Fleur, like her father, might want to own; not
+articulate, just a stealing haunt, horribly unworthy, which crept in and
+about the ardour of his memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the
+vividness and grace of that charmed face and figure—a doubt, not real
+enough to convince him of its presence, just real enough to deflower a
+perfect faith. And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was essential.
+He still had Youth's eagerness to give with both hands, to take with
+neither—to give lovingly to one who had his own impulsive generosity.
+Surely she had! He got up from the window-seat and roamed in the big
+grey ghostly room, whose walls were hung with silvered canvas. This
+house his father said in that death-bed letter—had been built for
+his mother to live in—with Fleur's father! He put out his hand in the
+half-dark, as if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead. He clenched,
+trying to feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze them,
+and reassure him that he—he was on his father's side. Tears, prisoned
+within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot. He went back to the window.
+It was warmer, not so eerie, more comforting outside, where the
+moon hung golden, three days off full; the freedom of the night was
+comforting. If only Fleur and he had met on some desert island without
+a past—and Nature for their house! Jon had still his high regard for
+desert islands, where breadfruit grew, and the water was blue above the
+coral. The night was deep, was free—there was enticement in it; a lure,
+a promise, a refuge from entanglement, and love! Milksop tied to his
+mother's...! His cheeks burned. He shut the window, drew curtains over
+it, switched off the lighted sconce, and went up-stairs.
+
+The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother, still in
+her evening gown, was standing at the window. She turned and said:
+
+“Sit down, Jon; let's talk.” She sat down on the window-seat, Jon on his
+bed. She had her profile turned to him, and the beauty and grace of her
+figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose, the neck, the strange
+and as it were remote refinement of her, moved him. His mother never
+belonged to her surroundings. She came into them from somewhere—as it
+were! What was she going to say to him, who had in his heart such things
+to say to her?
+
+“I know Fleur came to-day. I'm not surprised.” It was as though she had
+added: “She is her father's daughter!” And Jon's heart hardened. Irene
+went on quietly:
+
+“I have Father's letter. I picked it up that night and kept it. Would
+you like it back, dear?”
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+“I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you. It didn't quite do
+justice to my criminality.”
+
+“Mother!” burst from Jon's lips.
+
+“He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's father
+without love I did a dreadful thing. An unhappy marriage, Jon, can play
+such havoc with other lives besides one's own. You are fearfully young,
+my darling, and fearfully loving. Do you think you can possibly be happy
+with this girl?”
+
+Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
+
+“Yes; oh! yes—if you could be.”
+
+Irene smiled.
+
+“Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love. If yours
+were another case like mine, Jon—where the deepest things are stifled;
+the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!”
+
+“Why should it, Mother? You think she must be like her father, but she's
+not. I've seen him.”
+
+Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something wavered;
+there was such irony and experience in that smile.
+
+“You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker.”
+
+That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again! He said with
+vehemence:
+
+“She isn't—she isn't. It's only because I can't bear to make you
+unhappy, Mother, now that Father—” He thrust his fists against his
+forehead.
+
+Irene got up.
+
+“I told you that night, dear, not to mind me. I meant it. Think of
+yourself and your own happiness! I can stand what's left—I've brought it
+on myself.”
+
+Again the word “Mother!” burst from Jon's lips.
+
+She came over to him and put her hands over his.
+
+“Do you feel your head, darling?”
+
+Jon shook it. What he felt was in his chest—a sort of tearing asunder of
+the tissue there, by the two loves.
+
+“I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do. You won't lose
+anything.” She smoothed his hair gently, and walked away.
+
+He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay, stifling his
+breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
+
+
+
+
+
+VII.—EMBASSY
+
+Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been out in
+the car since two. Three hours! Where had she gone? Up to London without
+a word to him? He had never become quite reconciled with cars. He had
+embraced them in principle—like the born empiricist, or Forsyte, that he
+was—adopting each symptom of progress as it came along with: “Well, we
+couldn't do without them now.” But in fact he found them tearing, great,
+smelly things. Obliged by Annette to have one—a Rollhard with pearl-grey
+cushions, electric light, little mirrors, trays for the ashes of
+cigarettes, flower vases—all smelling of petrol and stephanotis—he
+regarded it much as he used to regard his brother-in-law, Montague
+Dartie. The thing typified all that was fast, insecure, and
+subcutaneously oily in modern life. As modern life became faster,
+looser, younger, Soames was becoming older, slower, tighter, more and
+more in thought and language like his father James before him. He was
+almost aware of it himself. Pace and progress pleased him less and
+less; there was an ostentation, too, about a car which he considered
+provocative in the prevailing mood of Labour. On one occasion that
+fellow Sims had driven over the only vested interest of a working man.
+Soames had not forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many
+people would have stopped to put up with it. He had been sorry for
+the dog, and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that
+ruffian hadn't been so outrageous. With four hours fast becoming five,
+and still no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had experienced in
+person and by proxy balled within him, and sinking sensations troubled
+the pit of his stomach. At seven he telephoned to Winifred by trunk
+call. No! Fleur had not been to Green Street. Then where was she?
+Visions of his beloved daughter rolled up in her pretty frills, all
+blood and dust-stained, in some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him.
+He went to her room and spied among her things. She had taken nothing—no
+dressing-case, no Jewellery. And this, a relief in one sense, increased
+his fears of an accident. Terrible to be helpless when his loved one was
+missing, especially when he couldn't bear fuss or publicity of any kind!
+What should he do if she were not back by nightfall?
+
+At a quarter to eight he heard the car. A great weight lifted from off
+his heart; he hurried down. She was getting out—pale and tired-looking,
+but nothing wrong. He met her in the hall.
+
+“You've frightened me. Where have you been?”
+
+“To Robin Hill. I'm sorry, dear. I had to go; I'll tell you afterward.”
+And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
+
+Soames waited in the drawing-room. To Robin Hill! What did that portend?
+
+It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner—consecrated to the
+susceptibilities of the butler. The agony of nerves Soames had been
+through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his power to condemn
+what she had done, or resist what she was going to do; he waited in a
+relaxed stupor for her revelation. Life was a queer business. There he
+was at sixty-five and no more in command of things than if he had not
+spent forty years in building up security-always something one couldn't
+get on terms with! In the pocket of his dinner-jacket was a letter from
+Annette. She was coming back in a fortnight. He knew nothing of what she
+had been doing out there. And he was glad that he did not. Her absence
+had been a relief. Out of sight was out of mind! And now she was coming
+back. Another worry! And the Bolderby Old Crome was gone—Dumetrius had
+got it—all because that anonymous letter had put it out of his thoughts.
+He furtively remarked the strained look on his daughter's face, as if
+she too were gazing at a picture that she couldn't buy. He almost wished
+the War back. Worries didn't seem, then, quite so worrying. From the
+caress in her voice, the look on her face, he became certain that she
+wanted something from him, uncertain whether it would be wise of him to
+give it her. He pushed his savoury away uneaten, and even joined her in
+a cigarette.
+
+After dinner she set the electric piano-player going. And he augured the
+worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his knee, and put her
+hand on his.
+
+“Darling, be nice to me. I had to see Jon—he wrote to me. He's going to
+try what he can do with his mother. But I've been thinking. It's really
+in your hands, Father. If you'd persuade her that it doesn't mean
+renewing the past in any way! That I shall stay yours, and Jon will stay
+hers; that you need never see him or her, and she need never see you or
+me! Only you could persuade her, dear, because only you could promise.
+One can't promise for other people. Surely it wouldn't be too awkward
+for you to see her just this once now that Jon's father is dead?”
+
+“Too awkward?” Soames repeated. “The whole thing's preposterous.”
+
+“You know,” said Fleur, without looking up, “you wouldn't mind seeing
+her, really.”
+
+Soames was silent. Her words had expressed a truth too deep for him to
+admit. She slipped her fingers between his own—hot, slim, eager, they
+clung there. This child of his would corkscrew her way into a brick
+wall!
+
+“What am I to do if you won't, Father?” she said very softly.
+
+“I'll do anything for your happiness,” said Soanies; “but this isn't for
+your happiness.”
+
+“Oh! it is; it is!”
+
+“It'll only stir things up,” he said grimly.
+
+“But they are stirred up. The thing is to quiet them. To make her feel
+that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with yours or hers.
+You can do it, Father, I know you can.”
+
+“You know a great deal, then,” was Soames' glum answer.
+
+“If you will, Jon and I will wait a year—two years if you like.”
+
+“It seems to me,” murmured Soames, “that you care nothing about what I
+feel.”
+
+Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.
+
+“I do, darling. But you wouldn't like me to be awfully miserable.”
+
+How she wheedled to get her ends! And trying with all his might to think
+she really cared for him—he was not sure—not sure. All she cared for was
+this boy! Why should he help her to get this boy, who was killing her
+affection for himself? Why should he? By the laws of the Forsytes it was
+foolish! There was nothing to be had out of it—nothing! To give her to
+that boy! To pass her into the enemy's camp, under the influence of the
+woman who had injured him so deeply! Slowly—inevitably—he would lose
+this flower of his life! And suddenly he was conscious that his hand was
+wet. His heart gave a little painful jump. He couldn't bear her to cry.
+He put his other hand quickly over hers, and a tear dropped on that,
+too. He couldn't go on like this! “Well, well,” he said, “I'll think
+it over, and do what I can. Come, come!” If she must have it for her
+happiness—she must; he couldn't refuse to help her. And lest she
+should begin to thank him he got out of his chair and went up to the
+piano-player—making that noise! It ran down, as he reached it, with
+a faint buzz. That musical box of his nursery days: “The Harmonious
+Blacksmith,” “Glorious Port”—the thing had always made him miserable
+when his mother set it going on Sunday afternoons. Here it was again—the
+same thing, only larger, more expensive, and now it played “The Wild,
+Wild Women,” and “The Policeman's Holiday,” and he was no longer in
+black velvet with a sky blue collar. 'Profond's right,' he thought,
+'there's nothing in it! We're all progressing to the grave!' And with
+that surprising mental comment he walked out.
+
+He did not see Fleur again that night. But, at breakfast, her eyes
+followed him about with an appeal he could not escape—not that he
+intended to try. No! He had made up his mind to the nerve-racking
+business. He would go to Robin Hill—to that house of memories. Pleasant
+memory—the last! Of going down to keep that boy's father and Irene
+apart by threatening divorce. He had often thought, since, that it had
+clinched their union. And, now, he was going to clinch the union of that
+boy with his girl. 'I don't know what I've done,' he thought, 'to have
+such things thrust on me!' He went up by train and down by train, and
+from the station walked by the long rising lane, still very much as
+he remembered it over thirty years ago. Funny—so near London! Some one
+evidently was holding on to the land there. This speculation soothed
+him, moving between the high hedges slowly, so as not to get overheated,
+though the day was chill enough. After all was said and done there was
+something real about land, it didn't shift. Land, and good pictures! The
+values might fluctuate a bit, but on the whole they were always going
+up—worth holding on to, in a world where there was such a lot of
+unreality, cheap building, changing fashions, such a “Here to-day and
+gone to-morrow” spirit. The French were right, perhaps, with their
+peasant proprietorship, though he had no opinion of the French. One's
+bit of land! Something solid in it! He had heard peasant proprietors
+described as a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont call his father a
+pigheaded Morning Poster—disrespectful young devil. Well, there were
+worse things than being pig-headed or reading the Morning Post. There
+was Profond and his tribe, and all these Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed
+politicians and 'wild, wild women'. A lot of worse things! And suddenly
+Soames became conscious of feeling weak, and hot, and shaky. Sheer
+nerves at the meeting before him! As Aunt Juley might have said—quoting
+“Superior Dosset”—his nerves were “in a proper fautigue.” He could see
+the house now among its trees, the house he had watched being built,
+intending it for himself and this woman, who, by such strange fate,
+had lived in it with another after all! He began to think of Dumetrius,
+Local Loans, and other forms of investment. He could not afford to meet
+her with his nerves all shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgment
+for her on earth as it was in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified,
+meeting lawless beauty, incarnate. His dignity demanded impassivity
+during this embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she had
+behaved herself, would have been brother and sister. That wretched tune,
+“The Wild, Wild Women,” kept running in his head, perversely, for tunes
+did not run there as a rule. Passing the poplars in front of the house,
+he thought: 'How they've grown; I had them planted!' A maid answered his
+ring.
+
+“Will you say—Mr. Forsyte, on a very special matter.”
+
+If she realised who he was, quite probably she would not see him. 'By
+George!' he thought, hardening as the tug came. 'It's a topsy-turvy
+affair!'
+
+The maid came back. “Would the gentleman state his business, please?”
+
+“Say it concerns Mr. Jon,” said Soames.
+
+And once more he was alone in that hall with the pool of grey-white
+marble designed by her first lover. Ah! she had been a bad lot—had loved
+two men, and not himself! He must remember that when he came face to
+face with her once more. And suddenly he saw her in the opening chink
+between the long heavy purple curtains, swaying, as if in hesitation;
+the old perfect poise and line, the old startled dark-eyed gravity, the
+old calm defensive voice: “Will you come in, please?”
+
+He passed through that opening. As in the picture-gallery and the
+confectioner's shop, she seemed to him still beautiful. And this was the
+first time—the very first—since he married her seven-and-thirty years
+ago, that he was speaking to her without the legal right to call her
+his. She was not wearing black—one of that fellow's radical notions, he
+supposed.
+
+“I apologise for coming,” he said glumly; “but this business must be
+settled one way or the other.”
+
+“Won't you sit down?”
+
+“No, thank you.”
+
+Anger at his false position, impatience of ceremony between them,
+mastered him, and words came tumbling out:
+
+“It's an infernal mischance; I've done my best to discourage it. I
+consider my daughter crazy, but I've got into the habit of indulging
+her; that's why I'm here. I suppose you're fond of your son.”
+
+“Devotedly.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“It rests with him.”
+
+He had a sense of being met and baffled. Always—always she had baffled
+him, even in those old first married days.
+
+“It's a mad notion,” he said.
+
+“It is.”
+
+“If you had only—! Well—they might have been—” he did not finish that
+sentence “brother and sister and all this saved,” but he saw her shudder
+as if he had, and stung by the sight he crossed over to the window. Out
+there the trees had not grown—they couldn't, they were old!
+
+“So far as I'm concerned,” he said, “you may make your mind easy. I
+desire to see neither you nor your son if this marriage comes about.
+Young people in these days are—are unaccountable. But I can't bear to
+see my daughter unhappy. What am I to say to her when I go back?”
+
+“Please say to her as I said to you, that it rests with Jon.”
+
+“You don't oppose it?”
+
+“With all my heart; not with my lips.”
+
+Soames stood, biting his finger.
+
+“I remember an evening—” he said suddenly; and was silent. What was
+there—what was there in this woman that would not fit into the four
+corners of his hate or condemnation? “Where is he—your son?”
+
+“Up in his father's studio, I think.”
+
+“Perhaps you'd have him down.”
+
+He watched her ring the bell, he watched the maid come in.
+
+“Please tell Mr. Jon that I want him.”
+
+“If it rests with him,” said Soames hurriedly, when the maid was gone,
+“I suppose I may take it for granted that this unnatural marriage
+will take place; in that case there'll be formalities. Whom do I deal
+with—Herring's?”
+
+Irene nodded.
+
+“You don't propose to live with them?”
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+“What happens to this house?”
+
+“It will be as Jon wishes.”
+
+“This house,” said Soames suddenly: “I had hopes when I began it.
+If they live in it—their children! They say there's such a thing as
+Nemesis. Do you believe in it?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Oh! You do!”
+
+He had come back from the window, and was standing close to her, who, in
+the curve of her grand piano, was, as it were, embayed.
+
+“I'm not likely to see you again,” he said slowly. “Will you shake
+hands”—his lip quivered, the words came out jerkily—“and let the past
+die.” He held out his hand. Her pale face grew paler, her eyes so dark,
+rested immovably on his, her hands remained clasped in front of her. He
+heard a sound and turned. That boy was standing in the opening of the
+curtains. Very queer he looked, hardly recognisable as the young fellow
+he had seen in the Gallery off Cork Street—very queer; much older, no
+youth in the face at all—haggard, rigid, his hair ruffled, his eyes deep
+in his head. Soames made an effort, and said with a lift of his lip, not
+quite a smile nor quite a sneer:
+
+“Well, young man! I'm here for my daughter; it rests with you, it
+seems—this matter. Your mother leaves it in your hands.”
+
+The boy continued staring at his mother's face, and made no answer.
+
+“For my daughter's sake I've brought myself to come,” said Soames. “What
+am I to say to her when I go back?”
+
+Still looking at his mother, the boy said, quietly:
+
+“Tell Fleur that it's no good, please; I must do as my father wished
+before he died.”
+
+“Jon!”
+
+“It's all right, Mother.”
+
+In a kind of stupefaction Soames looked from one to the other; then,
+taking up hat and umbrella which he had put down on a chair, he walked
+toward the curtains. The boy stood aside for him to go by. He passed
+through and heard the grate of the rings as the curtains were drawn
+behind him. The sound liberated something in his chest.
+
+'So that's that!' he thought, and passed out of the front door.
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII.—THE DARK TUNE
+
+As Soames walked away from the house at Robin Hill the sun broke through
+the grey of that chill afternoon, in smoky radiance. So absorbed in
+landscape painting that he seldom looked seriously for effects of Nature
+out of doors—he was struck by that moody effulgence—it mourned with a
+triumph suited to his own feeling. Victory in defeat. His embassy
+had come to naught. But he was rid of those people, had regained his
+daughter at the expense of—her happiness. What would Fleur say to him?
+Would she believe he had done his best? And under that sunlight faring
+on the elms, hazels, hollies of the lane and those unexploited fields,
+Soames felt dread. She would be terribly upset! He must appeal to her
+pride. That boy had given her up, declared part and lot with the woman
+who so long ago had given her father up! Soames clenched his hands.
+Given him up, and why? What had been wrong with him? And once more he
+felt the malaise of one who contemplates himself as seen by another—like
+a dog who chances on his refection in a mirror and is intrigued and
+anxious at the unseizable thing.
+
+Not in a hurry to get home, he dined in town at the Connoisseurs. While
+eating a pear it suddenly occurred to him that, if he had not gone down
+to Robin Hill, the boy might not have so decided. He remembered the
+expression on his face while his mother was refusing the hand he had
+held out. A strange, an awkward thought! Had Fleur cooked her own goose
+by trying to make too sure?
+
+He reached home at half-past nine. While the car was passing in at one
+drive gate he heard the grinding sputter of a motor-cycle passing out
+by the other. Young Mont, no doubt, so Fleur had not been lonely. But he
+went in with a sinking heart. In the cream-panelled drawing-room she was
+sitting with her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands,
+in front of a white camellia plant which filled the fireplace. That
+glance at her before she saw him renewed his dread. What was she seeing
+among those white camellias?
+
+“Well, Father!”
+
+Soames shook his head. His tongue failed him. This was murderous work!
+He saw her eyes dilate, her lips quivering.
+
+“What? What? Quick, Father!”
+
+“My dear,” said Soames, “I—I did my best, but—” And again he shook his
+head.
+
+Fleur ran to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
+
+“She?”
+
+“No,” muttered Soames; “he. I was to tell you that it was no use; he
+must do what his father wished before he died.” He caught her by the
+waist. “Come, child, don't let them hurt you. They're not worth your
+little finger.”
+
+Fleur tore herself from his grasp.
+
+“You didn't you—couldn't have tried. You—you betrayed me, Father!”
+
+Bitterly wounded, Soames gazed at her passionate figure writhing there
+in front of him.
+
+“You didn't try—you didn't—I was a fool! I won't believe he could—he
+ever could! Only yesterday he—! Oh! why did I ask you?”
+
+“Yes,” said Soames, quietly, “why did you? I swallowed my feelings;
+I did my best for you, against my judgment—and this is my reward.
+Good-night!”
+
+With every nerve in his body twitching he went toward the door.
+
+Fleur darted after him.
+
+“He gives me up? You mean that? Father!”
+
+Soames turned and forced himself to answer:
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Oh!” cried Fleur. “What did you—what could you have done in those old
+days?”
+
+The breathless sense of really monstrous injustice cut the power of
+speech in Soames' throat. What had he done! What had they done to him!
+
+And with quite unconscious dignity he put his hand on his breast, and
+looked at her.
+
+“It's a shame!” cried Fleur passionately.
+
+Soames went out. He mounted, slow and icy, to his picture gallery, and
+paced among his treasures. Outrageous! Oh! Outrageous! She was spoiled!
+Ah! and who had spoiled her? He stood still before the Goya copy.
+Accustomed to her own way in everything. Flower of his life! And
+now that she couldn't have it! He turned to the window for some air.
+Daylight was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the poplars! What sound
+was that? Why! That piano thing! A dark tune, with a thrum and a throb!
+She had set it going—what comfort could she get from that? His eyes
+caught movement down there beyond the lawn, under the trellis of rambler
+roses and young acacia-trees, where the moonlight fell. There she was,
+roaming up and down. His heart gave a little sickening jump. What would
+she do under this blow? How could he tell? What did he know of her—he
+had only loved her all his life—looked on her as the apple of his eye!
+He knew nothing—had no notion. There she was—and that dark tune—and the
+river gleaming in the moonlight!
+
+'I must go out,' he thought.
+
+He hastened down to the drawing-room, lighted just as he had left it,
+with the piano thrumming out that waltz, or fox-trot, or whatever they
+called it in these days, and passed through on to the verandah.
+
+Where could he watch, without her seeing him? And he stole down through
+the fruit garden to the boat-house. He was between her and the river
+now, and his heart felt lighter. She was his daughter, and Annette's—she
+wouldn't do anything foolish; but there it was—he didn't know! From the
+boat house window he could see the last acacia and the spin of her
+skirt when she turned in her restless march. That tune had run down at
+last—thank goodness! He crossed the floor and looked through the farther
+window at the water slow-flowing past the lilies. It made little bubbles
+against them, bright where a moon-streak fell. He remembered suddenly
+that early morning when he had slept on the house-boat after his father
+died, and she had just been born—nearly nineteen years ago! Even now he
+recalled the unaccustomed world when he woke up, the strange feeling it
+had given him. That day the second passion of his life began—for this
+girl of his, roaming under the acacias. What a comfort she had been to
+him! And all the soreness and sense of outrage left him. If he could
+make her happy again, he didn't care! An owl flew, queeking, queeking; a
+bat flitted by; the moonlight brightened and broadened on the water. How
+long was she going to roam about like this! He went back to the window,
+and suddenly saw her coming down to the bank. She stood quite close, on
+the landing-stage. And Soames watched, clenching his hands. Should he
+speak to her? His excitement was intense. The stillness of her figure,
+its youth, its absorption in despair, in longing, in—itself. He would
+always remember it, moonlit like that; and the faint sweet reek of the
+river and the shivering of the willow leaves. She had everything in the
+world that he could give her, except the one thing that she could not
+have because of him! The perversity of things hurt him at that moment,
+as might a fish-bone in his throat.
+
+Then, with an infinite relief, he saw her turn back toward the house.
+What could he give her to make amends? Pearls, travel, horses, other
+young men—anything she wanted—that he might lose the memory of her young
+figure lonely by the water! There! She had set that tune going again!
+Why—it was a mania! Dark, thrumming, faint, travelling from the house.
+It was as though she had said: “If I can't have something to keep me
+going, I shall die of this!” Soames dimly understood. Well, if it helped
+her, let her keep it thrumming on all night! And, mousing back through
+the fruit garden, he regained the verandah. Though he meant to go in and
+speak to her now, he still hesitated, not knowing what to say, trying
+hard to recall how it felt to be thwarted in love. He ought to know,
+ought to remember—and he could not! Gone—all real recollection; except
+that it had hurt him horribly. In this blankness he stood passing his
+handkerchief over hands and lips, which were very dry. By craning his
+head he could just see Fleur, standing with her back to that piano still
+grinding out its tune, her arms tight crossed on her breast, a lighted
+cigarette between her lips, whose smoke half veiled her face. The
+expression on it was strange to Soames, the eyes shone and stared, and
+every feature was alive with a sort of wretched scorn and anger. Once
+or twice he had seen Annette look like that—the face was too vivid,
+too naked, not his daughter's at that moment. And he dared not go in,
+realising the futility of any attempt at consolation. He sat down in the
+shadow of the ingle-nook.
+
+Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him! Nemesis! That old unhappy
+marriage! And in God's name-why? How was he to know, when he wanted
+Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that she would never
+love him? The tune died and was renewed, and died again, and still
+Soames sat in the shadow, waiting for he knew not what. The fag of
+Fleur's cigarette, flung through the window, fell on the grass; he
+watched it glowing, burning itself out. The moon had freed herself above
+the poplars, and poured her unreality on the garden. Comfortless light,
+mysterious, withdrawn—like the beauty of that woman who had never loved
+him—dappling the nemesias and the stocks with a vesture not of earth.
+Flowers! And his flower so unhappy! Ah! Why could one not put happiness
+into Local Loans, gild its edges, insure it against going down?
+
+Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window. All was
+silent and dark in there. Had she gone up? He rose, and, tiptoeing,
+peered in. It seemed so! He entered. The verandah kept the moonlight
+out; and at first he could see nothing but the outlines of furniture
+blacker than the darkness. He groped toward the farther window to shut
+it. His foot struck a chair, and he heard a gasp. There she was, curled
+and crushed into the corner of the sofa! His hand hovered. Did she want
+his consolation? He stood, gazing at that ball of crushed frills and
+hair and graceful youth, trying to burrow its way out of sorrow. How
+leave her there? At last he touched her hair, and said:
+
+“Come, darling, better go to bed. I'll make it up to you, somehow.” How
+fatuous! But what could he have said?
+
+
+
+
+
+IX.—UNDER THE OAK-TREE
+
+When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood without
+speaking, till he said suddenly:
+
+“I ought to have seen him out.”
+
+But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went upstairs to
+his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.
+
+The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had once
+been married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever
+since she left him the night before. It had put the finishing touch
+of reality. To marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face; to
+betray his dead father! It was no good! Jon had the least resentful of
+natures. He bore his parents no grudge in this hour of his distress. For
+one so young there was a rather strange power in him of seeing things
+in some sort of proportion. It was worse for Fleur, worse for his mother
+even, than it was for him. Harder than to give up was to be given up,
+or to be the cause of some one you loved giving up for you. He must not,
+would not behave grudgingly! While he stood watching the tardy sunlight,
+he had again that sudden vision of the world which had come to him the
+night before. Sea on sea, country on country, millions on millions
+of people, all with their own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and
+suffering—all with things they had to give up, and separate struggles
+for existence. Even though he might be willing to give up all else for
+the one thing he couldn't have, he would be a fool to think his feelings
+mattered much in so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a
+cad. He pictured the people who had nothing—the millions who had given
+up life in the War, the millions whom the War had left with life and
+little else; the hungry children he had read of, the shattered men;
+people in prison, every kind of unfortunate. And—they did not help him
+much. If one had to miss a meal, what comfort in the knowledge that many
+others had to miss it too? There was more distraction in the thought of
+getting away out into this vast world of which he knew nothing yet. He
+could not go on staying here, walled in and sheltered, with everything
+so slick and comfortable, and nothing to do but brood and think what
+might have been. He could not go back to Wansdon, and the memories of
+Fleur. If he saw her again he could not trust himself; and if he stayed
+here or went back there, he would surely see her. While they were within
+reach of each other that must happen. To go far away and quickly was the
+only thing to do. But, however much he loved his mother, he did not want
+to go away with her. Then feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind
+desperately to propose that they should go to Italy. For two hours in
+that melancholy room he tried to master himself, then dressed solemnly
+for dinner.
+
+His mother had done the same. They ate little, at some length, and
+talked of his father's catalogue. The show was arranged for October, and
+beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.
+
+After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a little,
+talked a little, till they were standing silent at last beneath the
+oak-tree. Ruled by the thought: 'If I show anything, I show all,' Jon
+put his arm through hers and said quite casually:
+
+“Mother, let's go to Italy.”
+
+Irene pressed his arm, and said as casually:
+
+“It would be very nice; but I've been thinking you ought to see and do
+more than you would if I were with you.”
+
+“But then you'd be alone.”
+
+“I was once alone for more than twelve years. Besides, I should like to
+be here for the opening of Father's show.”
+
+Jon's grip tightened round her arm; he was not deceived.
+
+“You couldn't stay here all by yourself; it's too big.”
+
+“Not here, perhaps. In London, and I might go to Paris, after the show
+opens. You ought to have a year at least, Jon, and see the world.”
+
+“Yes, I'd like to see the world and rough it. But I don't want to leave
+you all alone.”
+
+“My dear, I owe you that at least. If it's for your good, it'll be for
+mine. Why not start tomorrow? You've got your passport.”
+
+“Yes; if I'm going it had better be at once. Only—Mother—if—if I
+wanted to stay out somewhere—America or anywhere, would you mind coming
+presently?”
+
+“Wherever and whenever you send for me. But don't send until you really
+want me.”
+
+Jon drew a deep breath.
+
+“I feel England's choky.”
+
+They stood a few minutes longer under the oak-tree—looking out to where
+the grand stand at Epsom was veiled in evening. The branches kept the
+moonlight from them, so that it only fell everywhere else—over the
+fields and far away, and on the windows of the creepered house behind,
+which soon would be to let.
+
+
+
+
+
+X.—FLEUR'S WEDDING
+
+The October paragraphs describing the wedding of Fleur Forsyte to
+Michael Mont hardly conveyed the symbolic significance of this event. In
+the union of the great-granddaughter of “Superior Dosset” with the heir
+of a ninth baronet was the outward and visible sign of that merger of
+class in class which buttresses the political stability of a realm. The
+time had come when the Forsytes might resign their natural resentment
+against a “flummery” not theirs by birth, and accept it as the still
+more natural due of their possessive instincts. Besides, they had to
+mount to make room for all those so much more newly rich. In that
+quiet but tasteful ceremony in Hanover Square, and afterward among the
+furniture in Green Street, it had been impossible for those not in the
+know to distinguish the Forsyte troop from the Mont contingent—so
+far away was “Superior Dosset” now. Was there, in the crease of his
+trousers, the expression of his moustache, his accent, or the shine
+on his top-hat, a pin to choose between Soames and the ninth baronet
+himself? Was not Fleur as self-possessed, quick, glancing, pretty,
+and hard as the likeliest Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present? If
+anything, the Forsytes had it in dress and looks and manners. They had
+become “upper class” and now their name would be formally recorded in
+the Stud Book, their money joined to land. Whether this was a little
+late in the day, and those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and
+money, destined for the melting-pot—was still a question so moot that
+it was not mooted. After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin'
+up. Timothy, the last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the
+Bayswater Road—so Francie had reported. It was whispered, too, that this
+young Mont was a sort of socialist—strangely wise of him, and in the
+nature of insurance, considering the days they lived in. There was
+no uneasiness on that score. The landed classes produced that sort
+of amiable foolishness at times, turned to safe uses and confined to
+theory. As George remarked to his sister Francie: “They'll soon be
+having puppies—that'll give him pause.”
+
+The church with white flowers and something blue in the middle of
+the East window looked extremely chaste, as though endeavouring to
+counteract the somewhat lurid phraseology of a Service calculated to
+keep the thoughts of all on puppies. Forsytes, Haymans, Tweetymans,
+sat in the left aisle; Monts, Charwells; Muskhams in the right; while
+a sprinkling of Fleur's fellow-sufferers at school, and of Mont's
+fellow-sufferers in, the War, gaped indiscriminately from either side,
+and three maiden ladies, who had dropped in on their way from Skyward's
+brought up the rear, together with two Mont retainers and Fleur's old
+nurse. In the unsettled state of the country as full a house as could be
+expected.
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed his
+hand more than once during the performance. To her, who knew the plot
+of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh painful.
+'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought—Jon, out in British
+Columbia. She had received a letter from him only that morning which had
+made her smile and say:
+
+“Jon's in British Columbia, Val, because he wants to be in California.
+He thinks it's too nice there.”
+
+“Oh!” said Val, “so he's beginning to see a joke again.”
+
+“He's bought some land and sent for his mother.”
+
+“What on earth will she do out there?”
+
+“All she cares about is Jon. Do you still think it a happy release?”
+
+Val's shrewd eyes narrowed to grey pin-points between their dark lashes.
+
+“Fleur wouldn't have suited him a bit. She's not bred right.”
+
+“Poor little Fleur!” sighed Holly. Ah! it was strange—this marriage.
+The young man, Mont, had caught her on the rebound, of course, in the
+reckless mood of one whose ship has just gone down. Such a plunge could
+not but be—as Val put it—an outside chance. There was little to be told
+from the back view of her young cousin's veil, and Holly's eyes reviewed
+the general aspect of this Christian wedding. She, who had made a
+love-match which had been successful, had a horror of unhappy marriages.
+This might not be one in the end—but it was clearly a toss-up; and to
+consecrate a toss-up in this fashion with manufactured unction before
+a crowd of fashionable free-thinkers—for who thought otherwise than
+freely, or not at all, when they were “dolled” up—seemed to her as near
+a sin as one could find in an age which had abolished them. Her eyes
+wandered from the prelate in his robes (a Charwell-the Forsytes had
+not as yet produced a prelate) to Val, beside her, thinking—she was
+certain—of the Mayfly filly at fifteen to one for the Cambridgeshire.
+They passed on and caught the profile of the ninth baronet, in
+counterfeitment of the kneeling process. She could just see the neat
+ruck above his knees where he had pulled his trousers up, and thought:
+'Val's forgotten to pull up his!' Her eyes passed to the pew in front of
+her, where Winifred's substantial form was gowned with passion, and on
+again to Soames and Annette kneeling side by side. A little smile came
+on her lips—Prosper Profond, back from the South Seas of the Channel,
+would be kneeling too, about six rows behind. Yes! This was a funny
+“small” business, however it turned out; still it was in a proper church
+and would be in the proper papers to-morrow morning.
+
+They had begun a hymn; she could hear the ninth baronet across the
+aisle, singing of the hosts of Midian. Her little finger touched Val's
+thumb—they were holding the same hymn-book—and a tiny thrill passed
+through her, preserved—from twenty years ago. He stooped and whispered:
+
+“I say, d'you remember the rat?” The rat at their wedding in Cape
+Colony, which had cleaned its whiskers behind the table at the
+Registrar's! And between her little and third forgers she squeezed his
+thumb hard.
+
+The hymn was over, the prelate had begun to deliver his discourse. He
+told them of the dangerous times they lived in, and the awful conduct of
+the House of Lords in connection with divorce. They were all soldiers—he
+said—in the trenches under the poisonous gas of the Prince of Darkness,
+and must be manful. The purpose of marriage was children, not mere
+sinful happiness.
+
+An imp danced in Holly's eyes—Val's eyelashes were meeting. Whatever
+happened; he must not snore. Her finger and thumb closed on his thigh
+till he stirred uneasily.
+
+The discourse was over, the danger past. They were signing in the
+vestry; and general relaxation had set in.
+
+A voice behind her said:
+
+“Will she stay the course?”
+
+“Who's that?” she whispered.
+
+“Old George Forsyte!”
+
+Holly demurely scrutinized one of whom she had often heard. Fresh
+from South Africa, and ignorant of her kith and kin, she never saw one
+without an almost childish curiosity. He was very big, and very dapper;
+his eyes gave her a funny feeling of having no particular clothes.
+
+“They're off!” she heard him say.
+
+They came, stepping from the chancel. Holly looked first in young Mont's
+face. His lips and ears were twitching, his eyes, shifting from his feet
+to the hand within his arm, stared suddenly before them as if to face
+a firing party. He gave Holly the feeling that he was spiritually
+intoxicated. But Fleur! Ah! That was different. The girl was perfectly
+composed, prettier than ever, in her white robes and veil over her
+banged dark chestnut hair; her eyelids hovered demure over her dark
+hazel eyes. Outwardly, she seemed all there. But inwardly, where was
+she? As those two passed, Fleur raised her eyelids—the restless glint
+of those clear whites remained on Holly's vision as might the flutter of
+caged bird's wings.
+
+In Green Street Winifred stood to receive, just a little less composed
+than usual. Soames' request for the use of her house had come on her
+at a deeply psychological moment. Under the influence of a remark
+of Prosper Profond, she had begun to exchange her Empire for
+Expressionistic furniture. There were the most amusing arrangements,
+with violet, green, and orange blobs and scriggles, to be had at
+Mealard's. Another month and the change would have been complete. Just
+now, the very “intriguing” recruits she had enlisted, did not march too
+well with the old guard. It was as if her regiment were half in khaki,
+half in scarlet and bearskins. But her strong and comfortable character
+made the best of it in a drawing-room which typified, perhaps, more
+perfectly than she imagined, the semi-bolshevized imperialism of her
+country. After all, this was a day of merger, and you couldn't have too
+much of it! Her eyes travelled indulgently among her guests. Soames had
+gripped the back of a buhl chair; young Mont was behind that “awfully
+amusing” screen, which no one as yet had been able to explain to her.
+The ninth baronet had shied violently at a round scarlet table, inlaid
+under glass with blue Australian butteries' wings, and was clinging
+to her Louis-Quinze cabinet; Francie Forsyte had seized the new
+mantel-board, finely carved with little purple grotesques on an ebony
+ground; George, over by the old spinet, was holding a little sky-blue
+book as if about to enter bets; Prosper Profond was twiddling the knob
+of the open door, black with peacock-blue panels; and Annette's hands,
+close by, were grasping her own waist; two Muskhams clung to the balcony
+among the plants, as if feeling ill; Lady Mont, thin and brave-looking,
+had taken up her long-handled glasses and was gazing at the central
+light shade, of ivory and orange dashed with deep magenta, as if the
+heavens had opened. Everybody, in fact, seemed holding on to something.
+Only Fleur, still in her bridal dress, was detached from all support,
+flinging her words and glances to left and right.
+
+The room was full of the bubble and the squeak of conversation.
+Nobody could hear anything that anybody said; which seemed of little
+consequence, since no one waited for anything so slow as an answer.
+Modern conversation seemed to Winifred so different from the days of her
+prime, when a drawl was all the vogue. Still it was “amusing,” which,
+of course, was all that mattered. Even the Forsytes were talking with
+extreme rapidity—Fleur and Christopher, and Imogen, and young Nicholas's
+youngest, Patrick. Soames, of course, was silent; but George, by the
+spinet, kept up a running commentary, and Francie, by her mantel-shelf.
+Winifred drew nearer to the ninth baronet. He seemed to promise a
+certain repose; his nose was fine and drooped a little, his grey
+moustaches too; and she said, drawling through her smile:
+
+“It's rather nice, isn't it?”
+
+His reply shot out of his smile like a snipped bread pellet
+
+“D'you remember, in Frazer, the tribe that buries the bride up to the
+waist?”
+
+He spoke as fast as anybody! He had dark lively little eyes, too, all
+crinkled round like a Catholic priest's. Winifred felt suddenly he might
+say things she would regret.
+
+“They're always so amusing—weddings,” she murmured, and moved on to
+Soames. He was curiously still, and Winifred saw at once what was
+dictating his immobility. To his right was George Forsyte, to his left
+Annette and Prosper Profond. He could not move without either seeing
+those two together, or the reflection of them in George Forsyte's japing
+eyes. He was quite right not to be taking notice.
+
+“They say Timothy's sinking;” he said glumly.
+
+“Where will you put him, Soames?”
+
+“Highgate.” He counted on his fingers. “It'll make twelve of them there,
+including wives. How do you think Fleur looks?”
+
+“Remarkably well.”
+
+Soames nodded. He had never seen her look prettier, yet he could not rid
+himself of the impression that this business was unnatural—remembering
+still that crushed figure burrowing into the corner of the sofa. From
+that night to this day he had received from her no confidences. He knew
+from his chauffeur that she had made one more attempt on Robin Hill
+and drawn blank—an empty house, no one at home. He knew that she had
+received a letter, but not what was in it, except that it had made her
+hide herself and cry. He had remarked that she looked at him sometimes
+when she thought he wasn't noticing, as if she were wondering still what
+he had done—forsooth—to make those people hate him so. Well, there
+it was! Annette had come back, and things had worn on through the
+summer—very miserable, till suddenly Fleur had said she was going to
+marry young Mont. She had shown him a little more affection when she
+told him that. And he had yielded—what was the good of opposing it? God
+knew that he had never wished to thwart her in anything! And the young
+man seemed quite delirious about her. No doubt she was in a reckless
+mood, and she was young, absurdly young. But if he opposed her, he
+didn't know what she would do; for all he could tell she might want to
+take up a profession, become a doctor or solicitor, some nonsense. She
+had no aptitude for painting, writing, music, in his view the legitimate
+occupations of unmarried women, if they must do something in these
+days. On the whole, she was safer married, for he could see too well how
+feverish and restless she was at home. Annette, too, had been in favour
+of it—Annette, from behind the veil of his refusal to know what she was
+about, if she was about anything. Annette had said: “Let her marry this
+young man. He is a nice boy—not so highty-flighty as he seems.” Where
+she got her expressions, he didn't know—but her opinion soothed his
+doubts. His wife, whatever her conduct, had clear eyes and an almost
+depressing amount of common sense. He had settled fifty thousand on
+Fleur, taking care that there was no cross settlement in case it didn't
+turn out well. Could it turn out well? She had not got over that other
+boy—he knew. They were to go to Spain for the honeymoon. He would be
+even lonelier when she was gone. But later, perhaps, she would forget,
+and turn to him again! Winifred's voice broke on his reverie.
+
+“Why! Of all wonders-June!”
+
+There, in a djibbah—what things she wore!—with her hair straying from
+under a fillet, Soames saw his cousin, and Fleur going forward to greet
+her. The two passed from their view out on to the stairway.
+
+“Really,” said Winifred, “she does the most impossible things! Fancy her
+coming!”
+
+“What made you ask her?” muttered Soames.
+
+“Because I thought she wouldn't accept, of course.”
+
+Winifred had forgotten that behind conduct lies the main trend of
+character; or, in other words, omitted to remember that Fleur was now a
+“lame duck.”
+
+On receiving her invitation, June had first thought, 'I wouldn't go near
+them for the world!' and then, one morning, had awakened from a dream of
+Fleur waving to her from a boat with a wild unhappy gesture. And she had
+changed her mind.
+
+When Fleur came forward and said to her, “Do come up while I'm changing
+my dress,” she had followed up the stairs. The girl led the way into
+Imogen's old bedroom, set ready for her toilet.
+
+June sat down on the bed, thin and upright, like a little spirit in the
+sear and yellow. Fleur locked the door.
+
+The girl stood before her divested of her wedding dress. What a pretty
+thing she was!
+
+“I suppose you think me a fool,” she said, with quivering lips, “when it
+was to have been Jon. But what does it matter? Michael wants me, and
+I don't care. It'll get me away from home.” Diving her hand into the
+frills on her breast, she brought out a letter. “Jon wrote me this.”
+
+June read: “Lake Okanagen, British Columbia. I'm not coming back to
+England. Bless you always. Jon.”
+
+“She's made safe, you see,” said Fleur.
+
+June handed back the letter.
+
+“That's not fair to Irene,” she said, “she always told Jon he could do
+as he wished.”
+
+Fleur smiled bitterly. “Tell me, didn't she spoil your life too?” June
+looked up. “Nobody can spoil a life, my dear. That's nonsense. Things
+happen, but we bob up.”
+
+With a sort of terror she saw the girl sink on her knees and bury her
+face in the djibbah. A strangled sob mounted to June's ears.
+
+“It's all right—all right,” she murmured, “Don't! There, there!”
+
+But the point of the girl's chin was pressed ever closer into her thigh,
+and the sound was dreadful of her sobbing.
+
+Well, well! It had to come. She would feel better afterward! June
+stroked the short hair of that shapely head; and all the scattered
+mother-sense in her focussed itself and passed through the tips of her
+fingers into the girl's brain.
+
+“Don't sit down under it, my dear,” she said at last. “We can't control
+life, but we can fight it. Make the best of things. I've had to. I held
+on, like you; and I cried, as you're crying now. And look at me!”
+
+Fleur raised her head; a sob merged suddenly into a little choked laugh.
+In truth it was a thin and rather wild and wasted spirit she was looking
+at, but it had brave eyes.
+
+“All right!” she said. “I'm sorry. I shall forget him, I suppose, if I
+fly fast and far enough.”
+
+And, scrambling to her feet, she went over to the wash-stand.
+
+June watched her removing with cold water the traces of emotion. Save
+for a little becoming pinkness there was nothing left when she stood
+before the mirror. June got off the bed and took a pin-cushion in her
+hand. To put two pins into the wrong places was all the vent she found
+for sympathy.
+
+“Give me a kiss,” she said when Fleur was ready, and dug her chin into
+the girl's warm cheek.
+
+“I want a whiff,” said Fleur; “don't wait.”
+
+June left her, sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her lips
+and her eyes half closed, and went down-stairs. In the doorway of the
+drawing-room stood Soames as if unquiet at his daughter's tardiness.
+June tossed her head and passed down on to the half-landing. Her cousin
+Francie was standing there.
+
+“Look!” said June, pointing with her chin at Soames. “That man's fatal!”
+
+“How do you mean,” said Francie, “fatal?”
+
+June did not answer her. “I shan't wait to see them off,” she said.
+“Good-bye!”
+
+“Good-bye!” said Francie, and her eyes, of a Celtic grey, goggled. That
+old feud! Really, it was quite romantic!
+
+Soames, moving to the well of the staircase, saw June go, and drew a
+breath of satisfaction. Why didn't Fleur come? They would miss their
+train. That train would bear her away from him, yet he could not help
+fidgeting at the thought that they would lose it. And then she did come,
+running down in her tan-coloured frock and black velvet cap, and passed
+him into the drawing-room. He saw her kiss her mother, her aunt, Val's
+wife, Imogen, and then come forth, quick and pretty as ever. How would
+she treat him at this last moment of her girlhood? He couldn't hope for
+much!
+
+Her lips pressed the middle of his cheek.
+
+“Daddy!” she said, and was past and gone! Daddy! She hadn't called him
+that for years. He drew a long breath and followed slowly down. There
+was all the folly with that confetti stuff and the rest of it to go
+through with yet. But he would like just to catch her smile, if she
+leaned out, though they would hit her in the eye with the shoe, if they
+didn't take care. Young Mont's voice said fervently in his ear:
+
+“Good-bye, sir; and thank you! I'm so fearfully bucked.”
+
+“Good-bye,” he said; “don't miss your train.”
+
+He stood on the bottom step but three, whence he could see above the
+heads—the silly hats and heads. They were in the car now; and there was
+that stuff, showering, and there went the shoe. A flood of something
+welled up in Soames, and—he didn't know—he couldn't see!
+
+
+
+
+
+XI.—THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
+
+When they came to prepare that terrific symbol Timothy Forsyte—the one
+pure individualist left, the only man who hadn't heard of the Great
+War—they found him wonderful—not even death had undermined his
+soundness.
+
+To Smither and Cook that preparation came like final evidence of what
+they had never believed possible—the end of the old Forsyte family on
+earth. Poor Mr. Timothy must now take a harp and sing in the company of
+Miss Forsyte, Mrs. Julia, Miss Hester; with Mr. Jolyon, Mr. Swithin,
+Mr. James, Mr. Roger, and Mr. Nicholas of the party. Whether Mrs. Hayman
+would be there was more doubtful, seeing that she had been cremated.
+Secretly Cook thought that Mr. Timothy would be upset—he had always been
+so set against barrel organs. How many times had she not said: “Drat the
+thing! There it is again! Smither, you'd better run up and see what you
+can do.” And in her heart she would so have enjoyed the tunes, if she
+hadn't known that Mr. Timothy would ring the bell in a minute and say:
+“Here, take him a halfpenny and tell him to move on.” Often they
+had been obliged to add threepence of their own before the man would
+go—Timothy had ever underrated the value of emotion. Luckily he had
+taken the organs for blue-bottles in his last years, which had been a
+comfort, and they had been able to enjoy the tunes. But a harp! Cook
+wondered. It was a change! And Mr. Timothy had never liked change. But
+she did not speak of this to Smither, who did so take a line of her own
+in regard to heaven that it quite put one about sometimes.
+
+She cried while Timothy was being prepared, and they all had sherry
+afterward out of the yearly Christmas bottle, which would not be needed
+now. Ah! dear! She had been there five-and-forty years and Smither
+three-and-forty! And now they would be going to a tiny house in Tooting,
+to live on their savings and what Miss Hester had so kindly left
+them—for to take fresh service after the glorious past—No! But they
+would like just to see Mr. Soames again, and Mrs. Dartie, and Miss
+Francie, and Miss Euphemia. And even if they had to take their own cab,
+they felt they must go to the funeral. For six years Mr. Timothy had
+been their baby, getting younger and younger every day, till at last he
+had been too young to live.
+
+They spent the regulation hours of waiting in polishing and dusting, in
+catching the one mouse left, and asphyxiating the last beetle so as to
+leave it nice, discussing with each other what they would buy at the
+sale. Miss Ann's workbox; Miss Juley's (that is Mrs. Julia's) seaweed
+album; the fire-screen Miss Hester had crewelled; and Mr. Timothy's
+hair—little golden curls, glued into a black frame. Oh! they must have
+those—only the price of things had gone up so!
+
+It fell to Soames to issue invitations for the funeral. He had them
+drawn up by Gradman in his office—only blood relations, and no flowers.
+Six carriages were ordered. The Will would be read afterward at the
+house.
+
+He arrived at eleven o'clock to see that all was ready. At a quarter
+past old Gradman came in black gloves and crape on his hat. He and
+Soames stood in the drawing-room waiting. At half-past eleven the
+carriages drew up in a long row. But no one else appeared. Gradman said:
+
+“It surprises me, Mr. Soames. I posted them myself.”
+
+“I don't know,” said Soames; “he'd lost touch with the family.” Soames
+had often noticed in old days how much more neighbourly his family were
+to the dead than to the living. But, now, the way they had flocked to
+Fleur's wedding and abstained from Timothy's funeral, seemed to show
+some vital change. There might, of course, be another reason; for Soames
+felt that if he had not known the contents of Timothy's Will, he might
+have stayed away himself through delicacy. Timothy had left a lot of
+money, with nobody in particular to leave it to. They mightn't like to
+seem to expect something.
+
+At twelve o'clock the procession left the door; Timothy alone in the
+first carriage under glass. Then Soames alone; then Gradman alone;
+then Cook and Smither together. They started at a walk, but were soon
+trotting under a bright sky. At the entrance to Highgate Cemetery they
+were delayed by service in the Chapel. Soames would have liked to stay
+outside in the sunshine. He didn't believe a word of it; on the other
+hand, it was a form of insurance which could not safely be neglected, in
+case there might be something in it after all.
+
+They walked up two and two—he and Gradman, Cook and Smither—to the
+family vault. It was not very distinguished for the funeral of the last
+old Forsyte.
+
+He took Gradman into his carriage on the way back to the Bayswater Road
+with a certain glow in his heart. He had a surprise in pickle for the
+old chap who had served the Forsytes four-and-fifty years-a treat that
+was entirely his doing. How well he remembered saying to Timothy the
+day—after Aunt Hester's funeral: “Well; Uncle Timothy, there's Gradman.
+He's taken a lot of trouble for the family. What do you say to leaving
+him five thousand?” and his surprise, seeing the difficulty there had
+been in getting Timothy to leave anything, when Timothy had nodded.
+And now the old chap would be as pleased as Punch, for Mrs. Gradman, he
+knew, had a weak heart, and their son had lost a leg in the War. It
+was extraordinarily gratifying to Soames to have left him five thousand
+pounds of Timothy's money. They sat down together in the little
+drawing-room, whose walls—like a vision of heaven—were sky-blue and gold
+with every picture-frame unnaturally bright, and every speck of
+dust removed from every piece of furniture, to read that little
+masterpiece—the Will of Timothy. With his back to the light in Aunt
+Hester's chair, Soames faced Gradman with his face to the light, on Aunt
+Ann's sofa; and, crossing his legs, began:
+
+“This is the last Will and Testament of me Timothy Forsyte of The Bower
+Bayswater Road, London I appoint my nephew Soames Forsyte of The Shelter
+Mapleduram and Thomas Gradman of 159 Folly Road Highgate (hereinafter
+called my Trustees) to be the trustees and executors of this my Will To
+the said Soames Forsyte I leave the sum of one thousand pounds free
+of legacy duty and to the said Thomas Gradman I leave the sum of five
+thousand pounds free of legacy duty.”
+
+Soames paused. Old Gradman was leaning forward, convulsively gripping a
+stout black knee with each of his thick hands; his mouth had fallen
+open so that the gold fillings of three teeth gleamed; his eyes were
+blinking, two tears rolled slowly out of them. Soames read hastily on.
+
+“All the rest of my property of whatsoever description I bequeath to
+my Trustees upon Trust to convert and hold the same upon the following
+trusts namely To pay thereout all my debts funeral expenses and
+outgoings of any kind in connection with my Will and to hold the residue
+thereof in trust for that male lineal descendant of my father Jolyon
+Forsyte by his marriage with Ann Pierce who after the decease of all
+lineal descendants whether male or female of my said father by his said
+marriage in being at the time of my death shall last attain the age of
+twenty-one years absolutely it being my desire that my property shall
+be nursed to the extreme limit permitted by the laws of England for the
+benefit of such male lineal descendant as aforesaid.”
+
+Soames read the investment and attestation clauses, and, ceasing,
+looked at Gradman. The old fellow was wiping his brow with a large
+handkerchief, whose brilliant colour supplied a sudden festive tinge to
+the proceedings.
+
+“My word, Mr. Soames!” he said, and it was clear that the lawyer in him
+had utterly wiped out the man: “My word! Why, there are two babies now,
+and some quite young children—if one of them lives to be eighty—it's not
+a great age—and add twenty-one—that's a hundred years; and Mr. Timothy
+worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound net if he's worth a penny.
+Compound interest at five per cent. doubles you in fourteen years.
+In fourteen years three hundred thousand-six hundred thousand in
+twenty-eight—twelve hundred thousand in forty-two—twenty-four
+hundred thousand in fifty-six—four million eight hundred thousand in
+seventy—nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four—Why, in a
+hundred years it'll be twenty million! And we shan't live to use it! It
+is a Will!”
+
+Soames said dryly: “Anything may happen. The State might take the lot;
+they're capable of anything in these days.”
+
+“And carry five,” said Gradman to himself. “I forgot—Mr. Timothy's in
+Consols; we shan't get more than two per cent. with this income tax. To
+be on the safe side, say eight millions. Still, that's a pretty penny.”
+
+Soames rose and handed him the Will. “You're going into the City. Take
+care of that, and do what's necessary. Advertise; but there are no
+debts. When's the sale?”
+
+“Tuesday week,” said Gradman. “Life or lives in bein' and twenty-one
+years afterward—it's a long way off. But I'm glad he's left it in the
+family....”
+
+The sale—not at Jobson's, in view of the Victorian nature of the
+effects—was far more freely attended than the funeral, though not by
+Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give them
+their heart's desires. Winifred was present, Euphemia, and Francie,
+and Eustace had come in his car. The miniatures, Barbizons, and J. R.
+drawings had been bought in by Soames; and relics of no marketable value
+were set aside in an off-room for members of the family who cared
+to have mementoes. These were the only restrictions upon bidding
+characterised by an almost tragic languor. Not one piece of furniture,
+no picture or porcelain figure appealed to modern taste. The humming
+birds had fallen like autumn leaves when taken from where they had not
+hummed for sixty years. It was painful to Soames to see the chairs his
+aunts had sat on, the little grand piano they had practically never
+played, the books whose outsides they had gazed at, the china they had
+dusted, the curtains they had drawn, the hearth-rug which had warmed
+their feet; above all, the beds they had lain and died in—sold to little
+dealers, and the housewives of Fulham. And yet—what could one do? Buy
+them and stick them in a lumber-room? No; they had to go the way of all
+flesh and furniture, and be worn out. But when they put up Aunt Ann's
+sofa and were going to knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out,
+suddenly: “Five pounds!” The sensation was considerable, and the sofa
+his.
+
+When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those
+Victorian ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October sunshine
+feeling as if cosiness had died out of the world, and the board “To Let”
+was up, indeed. Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in Spain; no comfort
+in Annette; no Timothy's on the Bayswater Road. In the irritable
+desolation of his soul he went into the Goupenor Gallery. That chap
+Jolyon's watercolours were on view there. He went in to look down his
+nose at them—it might give him some faint satisfaction. The news had
+trickled through from June to Val's wife, from her to Val, from Val to
+his mother, from her to Soames, that the house—the fatal house at
+Robin Hill—was for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British
+Columbia, or some such place. For one wild moment the thought had come
+to Soames: 'Why shouldn't I buy it back? I meant it for my!' No sooner
+come than gone. Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many humiliating
+memories for himself and Fleur. She would never live there after what
+had happened. No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer.
+It had been a bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud;
+and with the woman gone, it was an empty shell. “For Sale or To Let.”
+With his mind's eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied
+wall which he had built.
+
+He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery. There was
+certainly a body of work! And now that the fellow was dead it did not
+seem so trivial. The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense
+of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work. 'His father
+and my father; he and I; his child and mine!' thought Soames. So it had
+gone on! And all about that woman! Softened by the events of the past
+week, affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came
+nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth—passing the
+understanding of a Forsyte pure—that the body of Beauty has a spiritual
+essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks not of self. After
+all, he was near that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps
+that made him understand a little how he had missed the prize. And
+there, among the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that
+which he had found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a
+tolerance which surprised him. But he did not buy a drawing.
+
+Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air he
+met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his mind
+when he went into the Gallery—Irene, herself, coming in. So she had not
+gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that fellow's remains!
+He subdued the little involuntary leap of his subconsciousness, the
+mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm of this once-owned woman,
+and passed her with averted eyes. But when he had gone by he could not
+for the life of him help looking back. This, then, was finality—the heat
+and stress of his life, the madness and the longing thereof, the only
+defeat he had known, would be over when she faded from his view this
+time; even such memories had their own queer aching value.
+
+She, too, was looking back. Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her
+lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak. It was the turn of
+Soames to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell wave;
+he went out into the fashionable street quivering from head to foot. He
+knew what she had meant to say: “Now that I am going for ever out of
+the reach of you and yours—forgive me; I wish you well.” That was the
+meaning; last sign of that terrible reality—passing morality, duty,
+common sense—her aversion from him who had owned her body, but had never
+touched her spirit or her heart. It hurt; yes—more than if she had kept
+her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
+
+Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-cab
+to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the Forsyte
+vault. Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria, tall, ugly,
+and individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive system. He
+could remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated the addition
+to its face of the pheasant proper. The proposal had been rejected in
+favour of a wreath in stone, above the stark words: “The family vault
+of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850.” It was in good order. All trace of the recent
+interment had been removed, and its sober grey gloomed reposefully in
+the sunshine. The whole family lay there now, except old Jolyon's wife,
+who had gone back under a contract to her own family vault in Suffolk;
+old Jolyon himself lying at Robin Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated
+so that none knew where she might be. Soames gazed at it with
+satisfaction—massive, needing little attention; and this was important,
+for he was well aware that no one would attend to it when he himself was
+gone, and he would have to be looking out for lodgings soon. He might
+have twenty years before him, but one never knew. Twenty years without
+an aunt or uncle, with a wife of whom one had better not know anything,
+with a daughter gone from home. His mood inclined to melancholy and
+retrospection.
+
+This cemetery was full, they said—of people with extraordinary names,
+buried in extraordinary taste. Still, they had a fine view up here,
+right over London. Annette had once given him a story to read by that
+Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern, where all the skeletons
+emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious inscriptions on
+the stones were altered to descriptions of their sins. Not a true story
+at all. He didn't know about the French, but there was not much real
+harm in English people except their teeth and their taste, which was
+certainly deplorable. “The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850.” A lot
+of people had been buried here since then—a lot of English life crumbled
+to mould and dust! The boom of an airplane passing under the gold-tinted
+clouds caused him to lift his eyes. The deuce of a lot of expansion had
+gone on. But it all came back to a cemetery—to a name and a date on a
+tomb. And he thought with a curious pride that he and his family had
+done little or nothing to help this feverish expansion. Good solid
+middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.
+“Superior Dosset,” indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted
+in a doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them
+all had soiled his hands by creating anything—unless you counted Val
+Dartie and his horse-breeding. Collectors, solicitors, barristers,
+merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even
+soldiers—there they had been! The country had expanded, as it were,
+in spite of them. They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken
+advantage of the process and when you considered how “Superior Dosset”
+had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal descendants already
+owned what old Gradman estimated at between a million and a million and
+a half, it was not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as if the family
+bolt was shot, their possessive instinct dying out. They seemed
+unable to make money—this fourth generation; they were going into
+art, literature, farming, or the army; or just living on what was left
+them—they had no push and no tenacity. They would die out if they didn't
+take care.
+
+Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze. The air up
+here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the feeling
+that mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the crosses and the
+urns, the angels, the “immortelles,” the flowers, gaudy or withering;
+and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different from anything
+else up there that he was obliged to walk the few necessary yards and
+look at it. A sober corner, with a massive queer-shaped cross of grey
+rough-hewn granite, guarded by four dark yew-trees. The spot was free
+from the pressure of the other graves, having a little box-hedged garden
+on the far side, and in front a goldening birch-tree. This oasis in the
+desert of conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames,
+and he sat down there in the sunshine. Through those trembling gold
+birch leaves he gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of
+memory. He thought of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair
+was rusty-golden and her white shoulders his—Irene, the prize of his
+love-passion, resistant to his ownership. He saw Bosinney's body lying
+in that white mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space
+with the eyes of a dying bird. Again he thought of her by the little
+green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him. His fancy
+took him on beside his drifting river on the November day when Fleur
+was to be born, took him to the dead leaves floating on the green-tinged
+water and the snake-headed weed for ever swaying and nosing, sinuous,
+blind, tethered. And on again to the window opened to the cold starry
+night above Hyde Park, with his father lying dead. His fancy darted
+to that picture of “the future town,” to that boy's and Fleur's first
+meeting; to the bluish trail of Prosper Profond's cigar, and Fleur in
+the window pointing down to where the fellow prowled. To the sight of
+Irene and that dead fellow sitting side by side in the stand at Lord's.
+To her and that boy at Robin Hill. To the sofa, where Fleur lay crushed
+up in the corner; to her lips pressed into his cheek, and her farewell
+“Daddy.” And suddenly he saw again Irene's grey-gloved hand waving its
+last gesture of release.
+
+He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the scut of
+his possessive instinct, warming himself even with its failures.
+
+“To Let”—the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his soul, his
+investments, and his woman, without check or question. And now the State
+had, or would have, his investments, his woman had herself, and God knew
+who had his soul. “To Let”—that sane and simple creed!
+
+The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new forms
+only when their destructive flood should have passed its full. He sat
+there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts resolutely set on the
+past—as a man might ride into a wild night with his face to the tail of
+his galloping horse. Athwart the Victorian dykes the waters were
+rolling on property, manners, and morals, on melody and the old forms
+of art—waters bringing to his mouth a salt taste as of blood, lapping
+to the foot of this Highgate Hill where Victorianism lay buried. And
+sitting there, high up on its most individual spot, Soames—like a figure
+of Investment—refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he would
+not fight them—there was in him too much primeval wisdom, of Man the
+possessive animal. They would quiet down when they had fulfilled their
+tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when the creations and the
+properties of others were sufficiently broken and defected—they would
+lapse and ebb, and fresh forms would rise based on an instinct older
+than the fever of change—the instinct of Home.
+
+“Je m'en fiche,” said Prosper Profond. Soames did not say “Je m'en
+fiche”—it was French, and the fellow was a thorn in his side—but deep
+down he knew that change was only the interval of death between two
+forms of life, destruction necessary to make room for fresher property.
+What though the board was up, and cosiness to let?—some one would come
+along and take it again some day.
+
+And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there—the melancholy
+craving in his heart—because the sun was like enchantment on his face
+and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's rustle
+was so gentle, and the yewtree green so dark, and the sickle of a moon
+pale in the sky.
+
+He might wish and wish and never get it—the beauty and the loving in the
+world!
+
+
+
+cutpages (132K)” src=
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Forsyte Saga, Awakening and To Let, by
+John Galsworthy
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Forsyte Saga, Awakening and To Let, by John Galsworthy
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Forsyte Saga, Complete, by John Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Forsyte Saga, Awakening and To Let
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2596]
+Last Updated: February 22, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AWAKENING AND TO LET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="spines (203K)" src="images/spines.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="subscription (12K)" src="images/subscription.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="editon (10K)" src="images/editon.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      FORSYTE SAGA
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      AWAKENING AND TO LET
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By John Galsworthy
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0094"> <big><b>AWAKENING</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0095"> <big><b>TO LET</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PARTc1"> <b>PART I</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0097"> I.&mdash;ENCOUNTER </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0098"> II.&mdash;FINE FLEUR FORSYTE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0099"> III.&mdash;AT ROBIN HILL </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0100"> IV.&mdash;THE MAUSOLEUM </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0101"> V.&mdash;THE NATIVE HEATH </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0102"> VI.&mdash;JON </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0103"> VII.&mdash;FLEUR </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0104"> VIII.&mdash;IDYLL ON GRASS </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0105"> IX. GOYA </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0106"> X.&mdash;TRIO </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0107"> XI.&mdash;DUET </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0108"> XII.&mdash;CAPRICE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PARTc2"> <b>PART II</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0110"> I.&mdash;MOTHER AND SON </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0111"> II.&mdash;FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0112"> III.&mdash;MEETINGS </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0113"> IV.&mdash;IN GREEN STREET </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0114"> V.&mdash;PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0115"> VI.&mdash;SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0116"> VII.&mdash;JUNE TAKES A HAND </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0117"> VIII.&mdash;THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0118"> IX.&mdash;THE FAT IN THE FIRE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0119"> X.&mdash;DECISION </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0120"> XI.&mdash;TIMOTHY PROPHESIES </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_PARTc3"> <b>PART III</b> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0122"> I.&mdash;OLD JOLYON WALKS </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0123"> II.&mdash;CONFESSION </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0124"> III.&mdash;IRENE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0125"> IV.&mdash;SOAMES COGITATES </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0126"> V.&mdash;THE FIXED IDEA </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0127"> VI.&mdash;DESPERATE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0128"> VII.&mdash;EMBASSY </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0129"> VIII.&mdash;THE DARK TUNE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0130"> IX.&mdash;UNDER THE OAK-TREE </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0131"> X.&mdash;FLEUR'S WEDDING </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0132"> XI.&mdash;THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_TOC" id="link2H_TOC">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0092" id="link2H_4_0092">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="titlepage3 (37K)" src="images/titlepage3.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="frontis3 (120K)" src="images/frontis3.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      THE FORSYTE SAGA&mdash;VOLUME III.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      By John Galsworthy
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0093" id="link2H_4_0093">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AWAKENING
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0094" id="link2H_4_0094">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AWAKENING
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the July
+      sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway turned;
+      and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-linen-suited.
+      His hair was shining, and his eyes, from beneath a frown, for he was
+      considering how to go downstairs, this last of innumerable times, before
+      the car brought his father and mother home. Four at a time, and five at
+      the bottom? Stale! Down the banisters? But in which fashion? On his face,
+      feet foremost? Very stale. On his stomach, sideways? Paltry! On his back,
+      with his arms stretched down on both sides? Forbidden! Or on his face,
+      head foremost, in a manner unknown as yet to any but himself? Such was the
+      cause of the frown on the illuminated face of little Jon....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to simplify
+      the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of little Jon, or they
+      would have claimed him for a disciple. But one can be too simple in this
+      life, for his real name was Jolyon, and his living father and dead
+      half-brother had usurped of old the other shortenings, Jo and Jolly. As a
+      fact little Jon had done his best to conform to convention and spell
+      himself first Jhon, then John; not till his father had explained the sheer
+      necessity, had he spelled his name Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart by the
+      groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse &ldquo;Da,&rdquo; who
+      wore the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins in
+      that private life lived at odd moments even by domestic servants. His
+      mother had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling delicious,
+      smoothing his forehead just before he fell asleep, and sometimes docking
+      his hair, of a golden brown colour. When he cut his head open against the
+      nursery fender she was there to be bled over; and when he had nightmare
+      she would sit on his bed and cuddle his head against her neck. She was
+      precious but remote, because &ldquo;Da&rdquo; was so near, and there is
+      hardly room for more than one woman at a time in a man's heart. With
+      his father, too, of course, he had special bonds of union; for little Jon
+      also meant to be a painter when he grew up&mdash;with the one small
+      difference, that his father painted pictures, and little Jon intended to
+      paint ceilings and walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders, in
+      a dirty-white apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash. His father also took
+      him riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because it was
+      so-coloured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was rather
+      curly and large. He had never heard his father or his mother speak in an
+      angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody else; the groom,
+      Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other servants, even &ldquo;Da,&rdquo; who
+      alone restrained him in his courses, had special voices when they talked
+      to him. He was therefore of opinion that the world was a place of perfect
+      and perpetual gentility and freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just over
+      that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing for the
+      Liberal revival of 1906. Coercion was unpopular, parents had exalted
+      notions of giving their offspring a good time. They spoiled their rods,
+      spared their children, and anticipated the results with enthusiasm. In
+      choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had
+      already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight,
+      whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely.
+      What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little
+      prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little
+      Jon could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played
+      second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his
+      mother's heart he knew not yet. As for &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; June,
+      his half-sister (but so old that she had grown out of the relationship)
+      she loved him, of course, but was too sudden. His devoted &ldquo;Da,&rdquo;
+      too, had a Spartan touch. His bath was cold and his knees were bare; he
+      was not encouraged to be sorry for himself. As to the vexed question of
+      his education, little Jon shared the theory of those who considered that
+      children should not be forced. He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came
+      for two hours every morning to teach him her language, together with
+      history, geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother
+      gave him disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune,
+      never making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that he
+      remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his father
+      he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a highly
+      educated little boy. Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed in his
+      mouth without spoiling it, though &ldquo;Da&rdquo; sometimes said that
+      other children would do him a &ldquo;world of good.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held
+      him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which she did
+      not approve. This first interference with the free individualism of a
+      Forsyte drove him almost frantic. There was something appalling in the
+      utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to whether it
+      would ever come to an end. Suppose she never let him get up any more! He
+      suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds. Worse than
+      anything was his perception that &ldquo;Da&rdquo; had taken all that time
+      to realise the agony of fear he was enduring. Thus, dreadfully, was
+      revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he was let up he remained convinced that &ldquo;Da&rdquo; had done a
+      dreadful thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had
+      been compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say: &ldquo;Mum,
+      don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
+      hair&mdash;&ldquo;couleur de feuille morte,&rdquo; as little Jon had not
+      yet learned to call it&mdash;had looked at him with eyes like little bits
+      of his brown velvet tunic, and answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, darling, I won't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
+      especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
+      happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his
+      father:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's
+      so devoted to him&rdquo;; and his father's answer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it
+      feels like to be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it
+      for a minute.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon was
+      visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed where he
+      was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence. Nothing
+      much had been revealed to him after that, till one day, having gone down
+      to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from the cow, after Garratt
+      had finished milking, he had seen Clover's calf, dead. Inconsolable,
+      and followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought &ldquo;Da&rdquo;; but
+      suddenly aware that she was not the person he wanted, had rushed away to
+      find his father, and had run into the arms of his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother's clasp, and her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, darling, there, there!&rdquo; had stayed his sobbing. But if
+      Clover's calf could die, anything could&mdash;not only bees, flies,
+      beetles and chickens&mdash;and look soft like that! This was appalling&mdash;and
+      soon forgotten!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant experience,
+      which his mother had understood much better than &ldquo;Da&rdquo;; and
+      nothing of vital importance had happened after that till the year turned;
+      when, following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease
+      composed of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine
+      oranges. It was then that the world had flowered. To &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo;
+      June he owed that flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than
+      she came rushing down from London, bringing with her the books which had
+      nurtured her own Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of 1869. Aged,
+      and of many colours, they were stored with the most formidable happenings.
+      Of these she read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to himself;
+      whereupon she whisked back to London and left them with him in a heap.
+      Those books cooked his fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but
+      midshipmen and dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses,
+      sharks, battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
+      extravagant delights. The moment he was suffered to get up, he rigged his
+      bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath across green seas
+      of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of its mahogany drawer
+      knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking tumbler screwed to his eye,
+      in search of rescuing sails. He made a daily raft out of the towel stand,
+      the tea tray, and his pillows. He saved the juice from his French plums,
+      bottled it in an empty medicine bottle, and provisioned the raft with the
+      rum that it became; also with pemmican made out of little saved-up bits of
+      chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with lime juice against scurvy,
+      extracted from the peel of his oranges and a little economised juice. He
+      made a North Pole one morning from the whole of his bedclothes except the
+      bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark canoe (in private life the
+      fender), after a terrible encounter with a polar bear fashioned from the
+      bolster and four skittles dressed up in &ldquo;Da's&rdquo;
+      nightgown. After that, his father, seeking to steady his imagination,
+      brought him Ivanhoe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur, and Tom Brown's
+      Schooldays. He read the first, and for three days built, defended and
+      stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every part in the piece
+      except those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing cries of: &ldquo;En
+      avant, de Bracy!&rdquo; and similar utterances. After reading the book
+      about King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir Lamorac de Galis,
+      because, though there was very little about him, he preferred his name to
+      that of any other knight; and he rode his old rocking-horse to death,
+      armed with a long bamboo. Bevis he found tame; besides, it required woods
+      and animals, of which he had none in his nursery, except his two cats,
+      Fitz and Puck Forsyte, who permitted no liberties. For Tom Brown he was as
+      yet too young. There was relief in the house when, after the fourth week,
+      he was permitted to go down and out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The month being March the trees were exceptionally like the masts of
+      ships, and for little Jon that was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard on
+      his knees, suits, and the patience of &ldquo;Da,&rdquo; who had the
+      washing and reparation of his clothes. Every morning the moment his
+      breakfast was over, he could be viewed by his mother and father, whose
+      windows looked out that way, coming from the study, crossing the terrace,
+      climbing the old oak tree, his face resolute and his hair bright. He began
+      the day thus because there was not time to go far afield before his
+      lessons. The old tree's variety never staled; it had mainmast,
+      foremast, top-gallant mast, and he could always come down by the halyards&mdash;or
+      ropes of the swing. After his lessons, completed by eleven, he would go to
+      the kitchen for a thin piece of cheese, a biscuit and two French plums&mdash;provision
+      enough for a jolly-boat at least&mdash;and eat it in some imaginative way;
+      then, armed to the teeth with gun, pistols, and sword, he would begin the
+      serious climbing of the morning, encountering by the way innumerable
+      slavers, Indians, pirates, leopards, and bears. He was seldom seen at that
+      hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like Dick Needham) amid
+      the rapid explosion of copper caps. And many were the gardeners he brought
+      down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun. He lived a life of the
+      most violent action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon,&rdquo; said his father to his mother, under the oak tree,
+      &ldquo;is terrible. I'm afraid he's going to turn out a
+      sailor, or something hopeless. Do you see any sign of his appreciating
+      beauty?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the faintest.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines! I can
+      bear anything but that. But I wish he'd take more interest in
+      Nature.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's imaginative, Jolyon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, in a sanguinary way. Does he love anyone just now?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; only everyone. There never was anyone born more loving or more
+      lovable than Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Being your boy, Irene.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them, brought
+      them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged, thick, in his
+      small gizzard. Loving, lovable, imaginative, sanguinary!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
+      which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always memorable
+      for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons, and ginger
+      beer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he stood in
+      the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several important things
+      had happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Da,&rdquo; worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that
+      mysterious instinct which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings,
+      left the very day after his birthday in floods of tears &ldquo;to be
+      married&rdquo;&mdash;of all things&mdash;&ldquo;to a man.&rdquo; Little
+      Jon, from whom it had been kept, was inconsolable for an afternoon. It
+      ought not to have been kept from him! Two large boxes of soldiers and some
+      artillery, together with The Young Buglers, which had been among his
+      birthday presents, cooperated with his grief in a sort of conversion, and
+      instead of seeking adventures in person and risking his own life, he began
+      to play imaginative games, in which he risked the lives of countless tin
+      soldiers, marbles, stones and beans. Of these forms of &ldquo;chair a
+      canon&rdquo; he made collections, and, using them alternately, fought the
+      Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty Years, and other wars, about which
+      he had been reading of late in a big History of Europe which had been his
+      grandfather's. He altered them to suit his genius, and fought them
+      all over the floor in his day nursery, so that nobody could come in, for
+      fearing of disturbing Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, or treading on an
+      army of Austrians. Because of the sound of the word he was passionately
+      addicted to the Austrians, and finding there were so few battles in which
+      they were successful he had to invent them in his games. His favourite
+      generals were Prince Eugene, the Archduke Charles and Wallenstein. Tilly
+      and Mack (&ldquo;music-hall turns&rdquo; he heard his father call them one
+      day, whatever that might mean) one really could not love very much,
+      Austrian though they were. For euphonic reasons, too, he doted on Turenne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This phase, which caused his parents anxiety, because it kept him indoors
+      when he ought to have been out, lasted through May and half of June, till
+      his father killed it by bringing home to him Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
+      Finn. When he read those books something happened in him, and he went out
+      of doors again in passionate quest of a river. There being none on the
+      premises at Robin Hill, he had to make one out of the pond, which
+      fortunately had water lilies, dragonflies, gnats, bullrushes, and three
+      small willow trees. On this pond, after his father and Garratt had
+      ascertained by sounding that it had a reliable bottom and was nowhere more
+      than two feet deep, he was allowed a little collapsible canoe, in which he
+      spent hours and hours paddling, and lying down out of sight of Indian Joe
+      and other enemies. On the shore of the pond, too, he built himself a
+      wigwam about four feet square, of old biscuit tins, roofed in by boughs.
+      In this he would make little fires, and cook the birds he had not shot
+      with his gun, hunting in the coppice and fields, or the fish he did not
+      catch in the pond because there were none. This occupied the rest of June
+      and that July, when his father and mother were away in Ireland. He led a
+      lonely life of &ldquo;make believe&rdquo; during those five weeks of
+      summer weather, with gun, wigwam, water and canoe; and, however hard his
+      active little brain tried to keep the sense of beauty away, she did creep
+      in on him for a second now and then, perching on the wing of a dragon-fly,
+      glistening on the water lilies, or brushing his eyes with her blue as he
+      lay on his back in ambush.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; June, who had been left in charge, had a &ldquo;grown-up&rdquo;
+      in the house, with a cough and a large piece of putty which he was making
+      into a face; so she hardly ever came down to see him in the pond. Once,
+      however, she brought with her two other &ldquo;grown-ups.&rdquo; Little
+      Jon, who happened to have painted his naked self bright blue and yellow in
+      stripes out of his father's water-colour box, and put some duck's
+      feathers in his hair, saw them coming, and&mdash;ambushed himself among
+      the willows. As he had foreseen, they came at once to his wigwam and knelt
+      down to look inside, so that with a blood-curdling yell he was able to
+      take the scalps of &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; June and the woman &ldquo;grown-up&rdquo;
+      in an almost complete manner before they kissed him. The names of the two
+      grown-ups were &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; Holly and &ldquo;Uncle&rdquo; Val, who
+      had a brown face and a little limp, and laughed at him terribly. He took a
+      fancy to &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; Holly, who seemed to be a sister too; but
+      they both went away the same afternoon and he did not see them again.
+      Three days before his father and mother were to come home &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo;
+      June also went off in a great hurry, taking the &ldquo;grown-up&rdquo; who
+      coughed and his piece of putty; and Mademoiselle said: &ldquo;Poor man, he
+      was veree ill. I forbid you to go into his room, Jon.&rdquo; Little Jon,
+      who rarely did things merely because he was told not to, refrained from
+      going, though he was bored and lonely. In truth the day of the pond was
+      past, and he was filled to the brim of his soul with restlessness and the
+      want of something&mdash;not a tree, not a gun&mdash;something soft. Those
+      last two days had seemed months in spite of Cast Up by the Sea, wherein he
+      was reading about Mother Lee and her terrible wrecking bonfire. He had
+      gone up and down the stairs perhaps a hundred times in those two days, and
+      often from the day nursery, where he slept now, had stolen into his mother's
+      room, looked at everything, without touching, and on into the
+      dressing-room; and standing on one leg beside the bath, like Slingsby, had
+      whispered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ho, ho, ho! Dog my cats!&rdquo; mysteriously, to bring luck. Then,
+      stealing back, he had opened his mother's wardrobe, and taken a long
+      sniff which seemed to bring him nearer to&mdash;he didn't know what.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had done this just before he stood in the streak of sunlight, debating
+      in which of the several ways he should slide down the banisters. They all
+      seemed silly, and in a sudden languor he began descending the steps one by
+      one. During that descent he could remember his father quite distinctly&mdash;the
+      short grey beard, the deep eyes twinkling, the furrow between them, the
+      funny smile, the thin figure which always seemed so tall to little Jon;
+      but his mother he couldn't see. All that represented her was
+      something swaying with two dark eyes looking back at him; and the scent of
+      her wardrobe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bella was in the hall, drawing aside the big curtains, and opening the
+      front door. Little Jon said, wheedling,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bella!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Master Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know
+      they'd like it best.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean you'd like it best.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon considered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, they would, to please me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bella smiled. &ldquo;Very well, I'll take it out if you'll
+      stay quiet here and not get into mischief before they come.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon sat down on the bottom step, and nodded. Bella came close, and
+      looked him over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get up!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon got up. She scrutinized him behind; he was not green, and his
+      knees seemed clean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;My! Aren't you brown? Give
+      me a kiss!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And little Jon received a peck on his hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What jam?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;I'm so tired of waiting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gooseberry and strawberry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Num! They were his favourites!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she was gone he sat still for quite a minute. It was quiet in the big
+      hall open to its East end so that he could see one of his trees, a brig
+      sailing very slowly across the upper lawn. In the outer hall shadows were
+      slanting from the pillars. Little Jon got up, jumped one of them, and
+      walked round the clump of iris plants which filled the pool of grey-white
+      marble in the centre. The flowers were pretty, but only smelled a very
+      little. He stood in the open doorway and looked out. Suppose!&mdash;suppose
+      they didn't come! He had waited so long that he felt he could not
+      bear that, and his attention slid at once from such finality to the dust
+      motes in the bluish sunlight coming in: Thrusting his hand up, he tried to
+      catch some. Bella ought to have dusted that piece of air! But perhaps they
+      weren't dust&mdash;only what sunlight was made of, and he looked to
+      see whether the sunlight out of doors was the same. It was not. He had
+      said he would stay quiet in the hall, but he simply couldn't any
+      more; and crossing the gravel of the drive he lay down on the grass
+      beyond. Pulling six daisies he named them carefully, Sir Lamorac, Sir
+      Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Sir Palimedes, Sir Bors, Sir Gawain, and fought
+      them in couples till only Sir Lamorac, whom he had selected for a
+      specially stout stalk, had his head on, and even he, after three
+      encounters, looked worn and waggly. A beetle was moving slowly in the
+      grass, which almost wanted cutting. Every blade was a small tree, round
+      whose trunk the beetle had to glide. Little Jon stretched out Sir Lamorac,
+      feet foremost, and stirred the creature up. It scuttled painfully. Little
+      Jon laughed, lost interest, and sighed. His heart felt empty. He turned
+      over and lay on his back. There was a scent of honey from the lime trees
+      in flower, and in the sky the blue was beautiful, with a few white clouds
+      which looked and perhaps tasted like lemon ice. He could hear Bob playing:
+      &ldquo;Way down upon de Suwannee ribber&rdquo; on his concertina, and it
+      made him nice and sad. He turned over again and put his ear to the ground&mdash;Indians
+      could hear things coming ever so far&mdash;but he could hear nothing&mdash;only
+      the concertina! And almost instantly he did hear a grinding sound, a faint
+      toot. Yes! it was a car&mdash;coming&mdash;coming! Up he jumped. Should he
+      wait in the porch, or rush upstairs, and as they came in, shout: &ldquo;Look!&rdquo;
+      and slide slowly down the banisters, head foremost? Should he? The car
+      turned in at the drive. It was too late! And he only waited, jumping up
+      and down in his excitement. The car came quickly, whirred, and stopped.
+      His father got out, exactly like life. He bent down and little Jon bobbed
+      up&mdash;they bumped. His father said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bless us! Well, old man, you are brown!&rdquo; Just as he would;
+      and the sense of expectation&mdash;of something wanted&mdash;bubbled
+      unextinguished in little Jon. Then, with a long, shy look he saw his
+      mother, in a blue dress, with a blue motor scarf over her cap and hair,
+      smiling. He jumped as high as ever he could, twined his legs behind her
+      back, and hugged. He heard her gasp, and felt her hugging back. His eyes,
+      very dark blue just then, looked into hers, very dark brown, till her lips
+      closed on his eyebrow, and, squeezing with all his might, he heard her
+      creak and laugh, and say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are strong, Jon!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He slid down at that, and rushed into the hall, dragging her by the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was eating his jam beneath the oak tree, he noticed things about
+      his mother that he had never seemed to see before, her cheeks for instance
+      were creamy, there were silver threads in her dark goldy hair, her throat
+      had no knob in it like Bella's, and she went in and out softly. He
+      noticed, too, some little lines running away from the corners of her eyes,
+      and a nice darkness under them. She was ever so beautiful, more beautiful
+      than &ldquo;Da&rdquo; or Mademoiselle, or &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; June or
+      even &ldquo;Auntie&rdquo; Holly, to whom he had taken a fancy; even more
+      beautiful than Bella, who had pink cheeks and came out too suddenly in
+      places. This new beautifulness of his mother had a kind of particular
+      importance, and he ate less than he had expected to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When tea was over his father wanted him to walk round the gardens. He had
+      a long conversation with his father about things in general, avoiding his
+      private life&mdash;Sir Lamorac, the Austrians, and the emptiness he had
+      felt these last three days, now so suddenly filled up. His father told him
+      of a place called Glensofantrim, where he and his mother had been; and of
+      the little people who came out of the ground there when it was very quiet.
+      Little Jon came to a halt, with his heels apart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you really believe they do, Daddy?&rdquo; &ldquo;No, Jon, but I
+      thought you might.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're younger than I; and they're fairies.&rdquo;
+      Little Jon squared the dimple in his chin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe in fairies. I never see any.&rdquo; &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo;
+      said his father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His father smiled his funny smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; she only sees Pan.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's Pan?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Goaty God who skips about in wild and beautiful places.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was he in Glensofantrim?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mum said so.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon took his heels up, and led on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; I only saw Venus Anadyomene.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon reflected; Venus was in his book about the Greeks and Trojans.
+      Then Anna was her Christian and Dyomene her surname?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it appeared, on inquiry, that it was one word, which meant rising from
+      the foam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she rise from the foam in Glensofantrim?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; every day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is she like, Daddy?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like Mum.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Then she must be...&rdquo; but he stopped at that, rushed at a
+      wall, scrambled up, and promptly scrambled down again. The discovery that
+      his mother was beautiful was one which he felt must absolutely be kept to
+      himself. His father's cigar, however, took so long to smoke, that at
+      last he was compelled to say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see what Mum's brought home. Do you mind, Daddy?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pitched the motive low, to absolve him from unmanliness, and was a
+      little disconcerted when his father looked at him right through, heaved an
+      important sigh, and answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, old man, you go and love her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went, with a pretence of slowness, and then rushed, to make up. He
+      entered her bedroom from his own, the door being open. She was still
+      kneeling before a trunk, and he stood close to her, quite still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knelt up straight, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I'd just come and see.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having given and received another hug, he mounted the window-seat, and
+      tucking his legs up under him watched her unpack. He derived a pleasure
+      from the operation such as he had not yet known, partly because she was
+      taking out things which looked suspicious, and partly because he liked to
+      look at her. She moved differently from anybody else, especially from
+      Bella; she was certainly the refinedest-looking person he had ever seen.
+      She finished the trunk at last, and knelt down in front of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you missed us, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon nodded, and having thus admitted his feelings, continued to
+      nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you had 'Auntie' June?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! she had a man with a cough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother's face changed, and looked almost angry. He added
+      hastily:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a poor man, Mum; he coughed awfully; I&mdash;I liked him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother put her hands behind his waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You like everybody, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon considered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up to a point,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;Auntie June took me to church
+      one Sunday.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To church? Oh!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wanted to see how it would affect me.&rdquo; &ldquo;And did it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I came over all funny, so she took me home again very quick. I
+      wasn't sick after all. I went to bed and had hot brandy and water,
+      and read The Boys of Beechwood. It was scrumptious.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother bit her lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When was that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! about&mdash;a long time ago&mdash;I wanted her to take me
+      again, but she wouldn't. You and Daddy never go to church, do you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, we don't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, dear, we both of us went when we were little. Perhaps we went
+      when we were too little.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said little Jon, &ldquo;it's dangerous.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall judge for yourself about all those things as you grow up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon replied in a calculating manner:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to grow up, much. I don't want to go to
+      school.&rdquo; A sudden overwhelming desire to say something more, to say
+      what he really felt, turned him red. &ldquo;I&mdash;I want to stay with
+      you, and be your lover, Mum.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then with an instinct to improve the situation, he added quickly &ldquo;I
+      don't want to go to bed to-night, either. I'm simply tired of
+      going to bed, every night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you had any more nightmares?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only about one. May I leave the door open into your room to-night,
+      Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, just a little.&rdquo; Little Jon heaved a sigh of
+      satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you see in Glensofantrim?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing but beauty, darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What exactly is beauty?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What exactly is&mdash;Oh! Jon, that's a poser.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can I see it, for instance?&rdquo; His mother got up, and sat
+      beside him. &ldquo;You do, every day. The sky is beautiful, the stars, and
+      moonlit nights, and then the birds, the flowers, the trees&mdash;they're
+      all beautiful. Look out of the window&mdash;there's beauty for you,
+      Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, that's the view. Is that all?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All? no. The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with
+      their foam flying back.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you rise from it every day, Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother smiled. &ldquo;Well, we bathed.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; he said mysteriously, &ldquo;you're it,
+      really, and all the rest is make-believe.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sighed, laughed, said: &ldquo;Oh! Jon!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon said critically:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think Bella beautiful, for instance? I hardly do.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bella is young; that's something.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you look younger, Mum. If you bump against Bella she hurts.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe 'Da' was beautiful, when I come
+      to think of it; and Mademoiselle's almost ugly.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mademoiselle has a very nice face.&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh! yes; nice. I
+      love your little rays, Mum.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rays?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon put his finger to the outer corner of her eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Those? But they're a sign of age.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They come when you smile.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they usen't to.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! well, I like them. Do you love me, Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do&mdash;I do love you, darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ever so?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ever so!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More than I thought you did?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much&mdash;much more.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, so do I; so that makes it even.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conscious that he had never in his life so given himself away, he felt a
+      sudden reaction to the manliness of Sir Lamorac, Dick Needham, Huck Finn,
+      and other heroes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I show you a thing or two?&rdquo; he said; and slipping out
+      of her arms, he stood on his head. Then, fired by her obvious admiration,
+      he mounted the bed, and threw himself head foremost from his feet on to
+      his back, without touching anything with his hands. He did this several
+      times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening, having inspected what they had brought, he stayed up to
+      dinner, sitting between them at the little round table they used when they
+      were alone. He was extremely excited. His mother wore a French-grey dress,
+      with creamy lace made out of little scriggly roses, round her neck, which
+      was browner than the lace. He kept looking at her, till at last his father's
+      funny smile made him suddenly attentive to his slice of pineapple. It was
+      later than he had ever stayed up, when he went to bed. His mother went up
+      with him, and he undressed very slowly so as to keep her there. When at
+      last he had nothing on but his pyjamas, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Promise you won't go while I say my prayers!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I promise.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kneeling down and plunging his face into the bed, little Jon hurried up,
+      under his breath, opening one eye now and then, to see her standing
+      perfectly still with a smile on her face. &ldquo;Our Father&rdquo;&mdash;so
+      went his last prayer, &ldquo;which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mum, thy
+      Kingdom Mum&mdash;on Earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily
+      Mum and forgive us our trespasses on earth as it is in heaven and trespass
+      against us, for thine is the evil the power and the glory for ever and
+      ever. Amum! Look out!&rdquo; He sprang, and for a long minute remained in
+      her arms. Once in bed, he continued to hold her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't shut the door any more than that, will you? Are you
+      going to be long, Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go down and play to Daddy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! well, I shall hear you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope not; you must go to sleep.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can sleep any night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, this is just a night like any other.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! no&mdash;it's extra special.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On extra special nights one always sleeps soundest.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if I go to sleep, Mum, I shan't hear you come up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, when I do, I'll come in and give you a kiss, then if
+      you're awake you'll know, and if you're not you'll
+      still know you've had one.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon sighed, &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;I suppose I
+      must put up with that. Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was her name that Daddy believes in? Venus Anna Diomedes?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! my angel! Anadyomene.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! but I like my name for you much better.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is yours, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon answered shyly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guinevere! it's out of the Round Table&mdash;I've only
+      just thought of it, only of course her hair was down.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother's eyes, looking past him, seemed to float.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't forget to come, Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not if you'll go to sleep.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a bargain, then.&rdquo; And little Jon screwed up his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt her lips on his forehead, heard her footsteps; opened his eyes to
+      see her gliding through the doorway, and, sighing, screwed them up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Time began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some ten minutes of it he tried loyally to sleep, counting a great
+      number of thistles in a row, &ldquo;Da's&rdquo; old recipe for
+      bringing slumber. He seemed to have been hours counting. It must, he
+      thought, be nearly time for her to come up now. He threw the bedclothes
+      back. &ldquo;I'm hot!&rdquo; he said, and his voice sounded funny in
+      the darkness, like someone else's. Why didn't she come? He sat
+      up. He must look! He got out of bed, went to the window and pulled the
+      curtain a slice aside. It wasn't dark, but he couldn't tell
+      whether because of daylight or the moon, which was very big. It had a
+      funny, wicked face, as if laughing at him, and he did not want to look at
+      it. Then, remembering that his mother had said moonlit nights were
+      beautiful, he continued to stare out in a general way. The trees threw
+      thick shadows, the lawn looked like spilt milk, and a long, long way he
+      could see; oh! very far; right over the world, and it all looked different
+      and swimmy. There was a lovely smell, too, in his open window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'I wish I had a dove like Noah!' he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The moony moon was round and bright, It shone and shone and made it
+      light.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that rhyme, which came into his head all at once, he became
+      conscious of music, very soft-lovely! Mum playing! He bethought himself of
+      a macaroon he had, laid up in his chest of drawers, and, getting it, came
+      back to the window. He leaned out, now munching, now holding his jaws to
+      hear the music better. &ldquo;Da&rdquo; used to say that angels played on
+      harps in heaven; but it wasn't half so lovely as Mum playing in the
+      moony night, with him eating a macaroon. A cockchafer buzzed by, a moth
+      flew in his face, the music stopped, and little Jon drew his head in. She
+      must be coming! He didn't want to be found awake. He got back into
+      bed and pulled the clothes nearly over his head; but he had left a streak
+      of moonlight coming in. It fell across the floor, near the foot of the
+      bed, and he watched it moving ever so slowly towards him, as if it were
+      alive. The music began again, but he could only just hear it now; sleepy
+      music, pretty&mdash;sleepy&mdash;music&mdash;sleepy&mdash;slee.....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And time slipped by, the music rose, fell, ceased; the moonbeam crept
+      towards his face. Little Jon turned in his sleep till he lay on his back,
+      with one brown fist still grasping the bedclothes. The corners of his eyes
+      twitched&mdash;he had begun to dream. He dreamed he was drinking milk out
+      of a pan that was the moon, opposite a great black cat which watched him
+      with a funny smile like his father's. He heard it whisper: &ldquo;Don't
+      drink too much!&rdquo; It was the cat's milk, of course, and he put
+      out his hand amicably to stroke the creature; but it was no longer there;
+      the pan had become a bed, in which he was lying, and when he tried to get
+      out he couldn't find the edge; he couldn't find it&mdash;he&mdash;he&mdash;couldn't
+      get out! It was dreadful!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He whimpered in his sleep. The bed had begun to go round too; it was
+      outside him and inside him; going round and round, and getting fiery, and
+      Mother Lee out of Cast up by the Sea was stirring it! Oh! so horrible she
+      looked! Faster and faster!&mdash;till he and the bed and Mother Lee and
+      the moon and the cat were all one wheel going round and round and up and
+      up&mdash;awful&mdash;awful&mdash;awful!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrieked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A voice saying: &ldquo;Darling, darling!&rdquo; got through the wheel, and
+      he awoke, standing on his bed, with his eyes wide open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was his mother, with her hair like Guinevere's, and, clutching
+      her, he buried his face in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! oh!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right, treasure. You're awake now. There!
+      There! It's nothing!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But little Jon continued to say: &ldquo;Oh! oh!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice went on, velvety in his ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the moonlight, sweetheart, coming on your face.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon burbled into her nightgown
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said it was beautiful. Oh!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not to sleep in, Jon. Who let it in? Did you draw the curtains?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to see the time; I&mdash;I looked out, I&mdash;I heard you
+      playing, Mum; I&mdash;I ate my macaroon.&rdquo; But he was growing slowly
+      comforted; and the instinct to excuse his fear revived within him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother Lee went round in me and got all fiery,&rdquo; he mumbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Jon, what can you expect if you eat macaroons after you've
+      gone to bed?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one, Mum; it made the music ever so more beautiful. I was
+      waiting for you&mdash;I nearly thought it was to-morrow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My ducky, it's only just eleven now.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon was silent, rubbing his nose on her neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mum, is Daddy in your room?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not to-night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can I come?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you wish, my precious.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Half himself again, little Jon drew back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look different, Mum; ever so younger.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my hair, darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon laid hold of it, thick, dark gold, with a few silver threads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like it,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;I like you best of all like this.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Taking her hand, he had begun dragging her towards the door. He shut it as
+      they passed, with a sigh of relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which side of the bed do you like, Mum?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The left side.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Wasting no time, giving her no chance to change her mind, little Jon got
+      into the bed, which seemed much softer than his own. He heaved another
+      sigh, screwed his head into the pillow and lay examining the battle of
+      chariots and swords and spears which always went on outside blankets,
+      where the little hairs stood up against the light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It wasn't anything, really, was it?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From before her glass his mother answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing but the moon and your imagination heated up. You mustn't
+      get so excited, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, still not quite in possession of his nerves, little Jon answered
+      boastfully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't afraid, really, of course!&rdquo; And again he lay
+      watching the spears and chariots. It all seemed very long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Mum, do hurry up!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darling, I have to plait my hair.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! not to-night. You'll only have to unplait it again
+      to-morrow. I'm sleepy now; if you don't come, I shan't
+      be sleepy soon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother stood up white and flowey before the winged mirror: he could
+      see three of her, with her neck turned and her hair bright under the
+      light, and her dark eyes smiling. It was unnecessary, and he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do come, Mum; I'm waiting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, my love, I'll come.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Jon closed his eyes. Everything was turning out most satisfactory,
+      only she must hurry up! He felt the bed shake, she was getting in. And,
+      still with his eyes closed, he said sleepily: &ldquo;It's nice, isn't
+      it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard her voice say something, felt her lips touching his nose, and,
+      snuggling up beside her who lay awake and loved him with her thoughts, he
+      fell into the dreamless sleep, which rounded off his past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0095" id="link2H_4_0095">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TO LET
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;From out the fatal loins of those two foes
+     A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.&rdquo;
+                             &mdash;Romeo and Juliet.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      TO CHARLES SCRIBNER <a name="link2H_PARTc1" id="link2H_PARTc1">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0097" id="link2H_4_0097">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;ENCOUNTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was staying,
+      in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the intention of visiting
+      a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and looking into
+      the Future. He walked. Since the War he never took a cab if he could help
+      it. Their drivers were, in his view, an uncivil lot, though now that the
+      War was over and supply beginning to exceed demand again, getting more
+      civil in accordance with the custom of human nature. Still, he had not
+      forgiven them, deeply identifying them with gloomy memories, and now,
+      dimly, like all members, of their class, with revolution. The considerable
+      anxiety he had passed through during the War, and the more considerable
+      anxiety he had since undergone in the Peace, had produced psychological
+      consequences in a tenacious nature. He had, mentally, so frequently
+      experienced ruin, that he had ceased to believe in its material
+      probability. Paying away four thousand a year in income and super tax, one
+      could not very well be worse off! A fortune of a quarter of a million,
+      encumbered only by a wife and one daughter, and very diversely invested,
+      afforded substantial guarantee even against that &ldquo;wildcat notion&rdquo;
+      a levy on capital. And as to confiscation of war profits, he was entirely
+      in favour of it, for he had none, and &ldquo;serve the beggars right!&rdquo;
+      The price of pictures, moreover, had, if anything, gone up, and he had
+      done better with his collection since the War began than ever before.
+      Air-raids, also, had acted beneficially on a spirit congenitally cautious,
+      and hardened a character already dogged. To be in danger of being entirely
+      dispersed inclined one to be less apprehensive of the more partial
+      dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while the habit of condemning
+      the impudence of the Germans had led naturally to condemning that of
+      Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of his soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked. There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet him
+      at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past two.
+      It was good for him to walk&mdash;his liver was a little constricted, and
+      his nerves rather on edge. His wife was always out when she was in Town,
+      and his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all over the place like most young
+      women since the War. Still, he must be thankful that she had been too
+      young to do anything in that War itself. Not, of course, that he had not
+      supported the War from its inception, with all his soul, but between that
+      and supporting it with the bodies of his wife and daughter, there had been
+      a gap fixed by something old-fashioned within him which abhorred emotional
+      extravagance. He had, for instance, strongly objected to Annette, so
+      attractive, and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her native France, her
+      &ldquo;chere patrie&rdquo; as, under the stimulus of war, she had begun to
+      call it, to nurse her &ldquo;braves poilus,&rdquo; forsooth! Ruining her
+      health and her looks! As if she were really a nurse! He had put a stopper
+      on it. Let her do needlework for them at home, or knit! She had not gone,
+      therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since. A bad tendency
+      of hers to mock at him, not openly, but in continual little ways, had
+      grown. As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed problem whether or not
+      she should go to school. She was better away from her mother in her war
+      mood, from the chance of air-raids, and the impetus to do extravagant
+      things; so he had placed her in a seminary as far West as had seemed to
+      him compatible with excellence, and had missed her horribly. Fleur! He had
+      never regretted the somewhat outlandish name by which at her birth he had
+      decided so suddenly to call her&mdash;marked concession though it had been
+      to the French. Fleur! A pretty name&mdash;a pretty child! But restless&mdash;too
+      restless; and wilful! Knowing her power too over her father! Soames often
+      reflected on the mistake it was to dote on his daughter. To get old and
+      dote! Sixty-five! He was getting on; but he didn't feel it, for,
+      fortunately perhaps, considering Annette's youth and good looks, his
+      second marriage had turned out a cool affair. He had known but one real
+      passion in his life&mdash;for that first wife of his&mdash;Irene. Yes, and
+      that fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who had gone off with her, was looking
+      very shaky, they said. No wonder, at seventy-two, after twenty years of a
+      third marriage!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the Row.
+      A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house in Park Lane
+      which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and the little
+      house in Montpellier Square where thirty-five years ago he had enjoyed his
+      first edition of matrimony. Now, after twenty years of his second edition,
+      that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous existence&mdash;which had
+      ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he had hoped for. For many
+      years he had ceased regretting, even vaguely, the son who had not been
+      born; Fleur filled the bill in his heart. After all, she bore his name;
+      and he was not looking forward at all to the time when she would change
+      it. Indeed, if he ever thought of such a calamity, it was seasoned by the
+      vague feeling that he could make her rich enough to purchase perhaps and
+      extinguish the name of the fellow who married her&mdash;why not, since, as
+      it seemed, women were equal to men nowadays? And Soames, secretly
+      convinced that they were not, passed his curved hand over his face
+      vigorously, till it reached the comfort of his chin. Thanks to abstemious
+      habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his nose was pale and thin, his
+      grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight unimpaired. A slight stoop
+      closened and corrected the expansion given to his face by the heightening
+      of his forehead in the recession of his grey hair. Little change had Time
+      wrought in the &ldquo;warmest&rdquo; of the young Forsytes, as the last of
+      the old Forsytes&mdash;Timothy-now in his hundred and first year, would
+      have phrased it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had given
+      up top hats&mdash;it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days
+      like these. Plane-trees! His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid&mdash;the
+      Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that Goya
+      picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his
+      spot. The fellow had impressed him&mdash;great range, real genius! Highly
+      as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished
+      with him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first; oh,
+      yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had&mdash;as never before&mdash;commissioned
+      a copy of a fresco painting called &ldquo;La Vendimia,&rdquo; wherein was
+      the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his
+      daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather poor it
+      was&mdash;you couldn't copy Goya. He would still look at it,
+      however, if his daughter were not there, for the sake of something
+      irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the
+      width between the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.
+      Curious that Fleur should have dark eyes, when his own were grey&mdash;no
+      pure Forsyte had brown eyes&mdash;and her mother's blue! But of
+      course her grandmother Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner. No greater change in
+      all England than in the Row! Born almost within hail of it, he could
+      remember it from 1860 on. Brought there as a child between the crinolines
+      to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with a cavalry
+      seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top hats; the
+      leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in a long red
+      waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs on several strings,
+      and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles spaniels, Italian
+      greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline&mdash;you never saw them now.
+      You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working people sitting in
+      dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young bouncing females in pot
+      hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials charging up and down on
+      dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there, little girls on ponies, or old
+      gentlemen jogging their livers, or an orderly trying a great galumphing
+      cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no
+      gossip&mdash;nothing; only the trees the same&mdash;the trees indifferent
+      to the generations and declensions of mankind. A democratic England&mdash;dishevelled,
+      hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an apex. And that something
+      fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over within him. Gone forever, the
+      close borough of rank and polish! Wealth there was&mdash;oh, yes! wealth&mdash;he
+      himself was a richer man than his father had ever been; but manners,
+      flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing,
+      petrol-smelling Cheerio. Little half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste
+      lurking here and there, dispersed and chetif, as Annette would say; but
+      nothing ever again firm and coherent to look up to. And into this new
+      hurly-burly of bad manners and loose morals his daughter&mdash;flower of
+      his life&mdash;was flung! And when those Labour chaps got power&mdash;if
+      they ever did&mdash;the worst was yet to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed out under the archway, at last no longer&mdash;thank goodness!&mdash;disfigured
+      by the gungrey of its search-light. 'They'd better put a
+      search-light on to where they're all going,' he thought,
+      'and light up their precious democracy!' And he directed his
+      steps along the Club fronts of Piccadilly. George Forsyte, of course,
+      would be sitting in the bay window of the Iseeum. The chap was so big now
+      that he was there nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic,
+      humorous eye noting the decline of men and things. And Soames hurried,
+      ever constitutionally uneasy beneath his cousin's glance. George,
+      who, as he had heard, had written a letter signed &ldquo;Patriot&rdquo; in
+      the middle of the War, complaining of the Government's hysteria in
+      docking the oats of race-horses. Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous, neat,
+      clean-shaven, with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of
+      the best hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand. Well, he didn't
+      change! And for perhaps the first time in his life Soames felt a kind of
+      sympathy tapping in his waistcoat for that sardonic kinsman. With his
+      weight, his perfectly parted hair, and bull-like gaze, he was a guarantee
+      that the old order would take some shifting yet. He saw George move the
+      pink paper as if inviting him to ascend&mdash;the chap must want to ask
+      something about his property. It was still under Soames' control;
+      for in the adoption of a sleeping partnership at that painful period
+      twenty years back when he had divorced Irene, Soames had found himself
+      almost insensibly retaining control of all purely Forsyte affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in. Since the death of
+      his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite known
+      what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide&mdash;the Iseeum
+      Club had seemed more respectable to Soames. George, too, he knew, had sown
+      the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the joys of the
+      table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight down, and
+      owning, as he said, &ldquo;just one or two old screws to give me an
+      interest in life.&rdquo; He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay
+      window without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to
+      feel up there. George put out a well-kept hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't seen you since the War,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;How's
+      your wife?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said Soames coldly, &ldquo;well enough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George's fleshy face, and
+      gloated from his eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Belgian chap, Profond,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is a member here
+      now. He's a rum customer.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite!&rdquo; muttered Soames. &ldquo;What did you want to see me
+      about?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment. I suppose he's
+      made his Will.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up&mdash;last of the
+      old lot; he's a hundred, you know. They say he's like a mummy.
+      Where are you goin' to put him? He ought to have a pyramid by
+      rights.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook his head. &ldquo;Highgate, the family vault.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere
+      else. They say he still takes an interest in food. He might last on, you
+      know. Don't we get anything for the old Forsytes? Ten of them&mdash;average
+      age eighty-eight&mdash;I worked it out. That ought to be equal to
+      triplets.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that all?&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;I must be getting on.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer.
+      &ldquo;Yes, that's all: Look him up in his mausoleum&mdash;the old
+      chap might want to prophesy.&rdquo; The grin died on the rich curves of
+      his face, and he added: &ldquo;Haven't you attorneys invented a way
+      yet of dodging this damned income tax? It hits the fixed inherited income
+      like the very deuce. I used to have two thousand five hundred a year; now
+      I've got a beggarly fifteen hundred, and the price of living
+      doubled.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; murmured Soames, &ldquo;the turf's in danger.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over George's face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they brought me up to do nothing, and
+      here I am in the sear and yellow, getting poorer every day. These Labour
+      chaps mean to have the lot before they've done. What are you going
+      to do for a living when it comes? I shall work a six-hour day teaching
+      politicians how to see a joke. Take my tip, Soames; go into Parliament,
+      make sure of your four hundred&mdash;and employ me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his cousin's
+      words. He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George always a
+      drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began, it was he&mdash;the
+      worker and the saver&mdash;who would be looted! That was the negation of
+      all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could civilization
+      be built on any other? He did not think so. Well, they wouldn't
+      confiscate his pictures, for they wouldn't know their worth. But
+      what would they be worth, if these maniacs once began to milk capital? A
+      drug on the market. 'I don't care about myself,' he
+      thought; 'I could live on five hundred a year, and never know the
+      difference, at my age.' But Fleur! This fortune, so widely invested,
+      these treasures so carefully chosen and amassed, were all for&mdash;her.
+      And if it should turn out that he couldn't give or leave them to her&mdash;well,
+      life had no meaning, and what was the use of going in to look at this
+      crazy, futuristic stuff with the view of seeing whether it had any future?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his shilling,
+      picked up a catalogue, and entered. Some ten persons were prowling round.
+      Soames took steps and came on what looked to him like a lamp-post bent by
+      collision with a motor omnibus. It was advanced some three paces from the
+      wall, and was described in his catalogue as &ldquo;Jupiter.&rdquo; He
+      examined it with curiosity, having recently turned some of his attention
+      to sculpture. 'If that's Jupiter,' he thought, 'I
+      wonder what Juno's like.' And suddenly he saw her, opposite.
+      She appeared to him like nothing so much as a pump with two handles,
+      lightly clad in snow. He was still gazing at her, when two of the prowlers
+      halted on his left. &ldquo;Epatant!&rdquo; he heard one say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jargon!&rdquo; growled Soames to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other's boyish voice replied
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Missed it, old bean; he's pulling your leg. When Jove and
+      Juno created he them, he was saying: 'I'll see how much these
+      fools will swallow.' And they've lapped up the lot.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You young duffer! Vospovitch is an innovator. Don't you see
+      that he's brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic art,
+      of music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was
+      bound to. People are tired&mdash;the bottom's tumbled out of
+      sentiment.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'm quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty.
+      I was through the War. You've dropped your handkerchief, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him. He took it with some
+      natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose. It had the right scent&mdash;of
+      distant Eau de Cologne&mdash;and his initials in a corner. Slightly
+      reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man's face. It had rather
+      fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush growing out of it
+      on each side, and small lively eyes, above a normally dressed appearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; he said; and moved by a sort of irritation,
+      added: &ldquo;Glad to hear you like beauty; that's rare, nowadays.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dote on it,&rdquo; said the young man; &ldquo;but you and I are
+      the last of the old guard, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you really care for pictures,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;here's
+      my card. I can show you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you're
+      down the river and care to look in.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Awfully nice of you, sir. I'll drop in like a bird. My name's
+      Mont-Michael.&rdquo; And he took off his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in
+      response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had
+      a purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look&mdash;as
+      if he were a poet!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went
+      and sat down in an alcove. What had possessed him to give his card to a
+      rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that? And Fleur,
+      always at the back of his thoughts, started out like a filigree figure
+      from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove was
+      a large canvas with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on it, and
+      nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat. He looked at
+      his catalogue: &ldquo;No. 32 'The Future Town'&mdash;Paul
+      Post.&rdquo; 'I suppose that's satiric too,' he thought.
+      'What a thing!' But his second impulse was more cautious. It
+      did not do to condemn hurriedly. There had been those stripey, streaky
+      creations of Monet's, which had turned out such trumps; and then the
+      stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even since the Post-Impressionists
+      there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed at. During the
+      thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life, indeed, he had marked
+      so many &ldquo;movements,&rdquo; seen the tides of taste and technique so
+      ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything except that there
+      was money to be made out of every change of fashion. This too might quite
+      well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the
+      market. He got up and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with
+      the eyes of other people. Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a
+      sunset, till some one passing said: &ldquo;He's got the airplanes
+      wonderfully, don't you think!&rdquo; Below the tomato blobs was a
+      band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could assign no
+      meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring: &ldquo;What
+      expression he gets with his foreground!&rdquo; Expression? Of what? Soames
+      went back to his seat. The thing was &ldquo;rich,&rdquo; as his father
+      would have said, and he wouldn't give a damn for it. Expression! Ah!
+      they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent. So it
+      was coming here too, was it? He remembered the first wave of influenza in
+      1887&mdash;or '8&mdash;hatched in China, so they said. He wondered
+      where this&mdash;this Expressionism had been hatched. The thing was a
+      regular disease!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and
+      the &ldquo;Future Town.&rdquo; Their backs were turned; but very suddenly
+      Soames put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward,
+      gazed through the slit between. No mistaking that back, elegant as ever
+      though the hair above had gone grey. Irene! His divorced wife&mdash;Irene!
+      And this, no doubt, was&mdash;her son&mdash;by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte&mdash;their
+      boy, six months older than his own girl! And mumbling over in his mind the
+      bitter days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat
+      down again. She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was
+      still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if
+      fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor of
+      them, had never seen them smile. Grudgingly he admitted her still
+      beautiful and in figure almost as young as ever. And how that boy smiled
+      back at her! Emotion squeezed Soames' heart. The sight infringed his
+      sense of justice. He grudged her that boy's smile&mdash;it went
+      beyond what Fleur gave him, and it was undeserved. Their son might have
+      been his son; Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept
+      straight! He lowered his catalogue. If she saw him, all the better! A
+      reminder of her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew
+      nothing of it, would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis
+      which surely must soon or late visit her! Then, half-conscious that such a
+      thought was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took out his
+      watch. Past four! Fleur was late. She had gone to his niece Imogen
+      Cardigan's, and there they would keep her smoking cigarettes and
+      gossiping, and that. He heard the boy laugh, and say eagerly: &ldquo;I
+      say, Mum, is this by one of Auntie June's lame ducks?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul Post&mdash;I believe it is, darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her use it.
+      And then she saw him. His eyes must have had in them something of George
+      Forsyte's sardonic look; for her gloved hand crisped the folds of
+      her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went stony. She moved on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a caution,&rdquo; said the boy, catching her arm again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames stared after them. That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte chin,
+      and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a glass of old
+      sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair. Better than they
+      deserved&mdash;those two! They passed from his view into the next room,
+      and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but saw it not. A little
+      smile snarled up his lips. He was despising the vehemence of his own
+      feelings after all these years. Ghosts! And yet as one grew old&mdash;was
+      there anything but what was ghost-like left? Yes, there was Fleur! He
+      fixed his eyes on the entrance. She was due; but she would keep him
+      waiting, of course! And suddenly he became aware of a sort of human breeze&mdash;a
+      short, slight form clad in a sea-green djibbah with a metal belt and a
+      fillet binding unruly red-gold hair all streaked with grey. She was
+      talking to the Gallery attendants, and something familiar riveted his gaze&mdash;in
+      her eyes, her chin, her hair, her spirit&mdash;something which suggested a
+      thin Skye terrier just before its dinner. Surely June Forsyte! His cousin
+      June&mdash;and coming straight to his recess! She sat down beside him,
+      deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil note. Soames sat
+      unmoving. A confounded thing, cousinship! &ldquo;Disgusting!&rdquo; he
+      heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of an overhearing
+      stranger, she looked at him. The worst had happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soames!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames turned his head a very little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How are you?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Haven't seen you for
+      twenty years.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Whatever made you come here?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My sins,&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;What stuff!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stuff? Oh, yes&mdash;of course; it hasn't arrived yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It never will,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;it must be making a dead
+      loss.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it is.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How d'you know?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my Gallery.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours? What on earth makes you run a show like this?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't treat Art as if it were grocery.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames pointed to the Future Town. &ldquo;Look at that! Who's going
+      to live in a town like that, or with it on his walls?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June contemplated the picture for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a vision,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The deuce!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence, then June rose. 'Crazylooking creature!' he
+      thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you'll find your young
+      stepbrother here with a woman I used to know. If you take my advice, you'll
+      close this exhibition.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June looked back at him. &ldquo;Oh! You Forsyte!&rdquo; she said, and
+      moved on. About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was
+      a look of dangerous decisions. Forsyte! Of course, he was a Forsyte! And
+      so was she! But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought Bosinney
+      into his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June and never
+      would! And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a Gallery!... And
+      suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of his own family. The
+      old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many years; there was no
+      clearing-house for news. What had they all done in the War? Young Roger's
+      boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's second son killed; young
+      Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or whatever they gave them.
+      They had all joined up somehow, he believed. That boy of Jolyon's
+      and Irene's, he supposed, had been too young; his own generation, of
+      course, too old, though Giles Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross&mdash;and
+      Jesse Hayman been a special constable&mdash;those &ldquo;Dromios&rdquo;
+      had always been of a sporting type! As for himself, he had given a motor
+      ambulance, read the papers till he was sick of them, passed through much
+      anxiety, bought no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't
+      know what more he could have done at his age. Indeed, thinking it over, it
+      struck him that he and his family had taken this war very differently to
+      that affair with the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the
+      resources of the Empire. In that old war, of course, his nephew Val Dartie
+      had been wounded, that fellow Jolyon's first son had died of
+      enteric, &ldquo;the Dromios&rdquo; had gone out on horses, and June had
+      been a nurse; but all that had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in
+      this war everybody had done &ldquo;their bit,&rdquo; so far as he could
+      make out, as a matter of course. It seemed to show the growth of something
+      or other&mdash;or perhaps the decline of something else. Had the Forsytes
+      become less individual, or more Imperial, or less provincial? Or was it
+      simply that one hated Germans?... Why didn't Fleur come, so that he
+      could get away? He saw those three return together from the other room and
+      pass back along the far side of the screen. The boy was standing before
+      the Juno now. And, suddenly, on the other side of her, Soames saw&mdash;his
+      daughter, with eyebrows raised, as well they might be. He could see her
+      eyes glint sideways at the boy, and the boy look back at her. Then Irene
+      slipped her hand through his arm, and drew him on. Soames saw him glancing
+      round, and Fleur looking after them as the three went out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A voice said cheerfully: &ldquo;Bit thick, isn't it, sir?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing.
+      Soames nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know what we're coming to.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! That's all right, sir,&rdquo; answered the young man
+      cheerfully; &ldquo;they don't either.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur's voice said: &ldquo;Hallo, Father! Here you are!&rdquo;
+      precisely as if he had been keeping her waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Soames, looking her up and down, &ldquo;you're
+      a punctual sort of young woman!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and colour,
+      with short, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes were set in
+      whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and yet in repose were
+      almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids, held over them in a
+      sort of suspense. She had a charming profile, and nothing of her father in
+      her face save a decided chin. Aware that his expression was softening as
+      he looked at her, Soames frowned to preserve the unemotionalism proper to
+      a Forsyte. He knew she was only too inclined to take advantage of his
+      weakness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who was that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He picked up my handkerchief. We talked about the pictures.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not going to buy that, Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Soames grimly; &ldquo;nor that Juno you've
+      been looking at.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur dragged at his arm. &ldquo;Oh! Let's go! It's a ghastly
+      show.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner. But
+      Soames had hung out a board marked &ldquo;Trespassers will be prosecuted,&rdquo;
+      and he barely acknowledged the young fellow's salute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said in the street, &ldquo;whom did you meet at
+      Imogen's?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; muttered Soames; &ldquo;that chap! What does your aunt
+      see in him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. He looks pretty deep&mdash;mother says she
+      likes him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames grunted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cousin Val and his wife were there, too.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;I thought they were back in South
+      Africa.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no! They've sold their farm. Cousin Val is going to train
+      race-horses on the Sussex Downs. They've got a jolly old
+      manor-house; they asked me down there.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him. &ldquo;What's his
+      wife like now?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very quiet, but nice, I think.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames coughed again. &ldquo;He's a rackety chap, your Cousin Val.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! no, Father; they're awfully devoted. I promised to go&mdash;Saturday
+      to Wednesday next.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Training race-horses!&rdquo; said Soames. It was extravagant, but
+      not the reason for his distaste. Why the deuce couldn't his nephew
+      have stayed out in South Africa? His own divorce had been bad enough,
+      without his nephew's marriage to the daughter of the co-respondent;
+      a half-sister too of June, and of that boy whom Fleur had just been
+      looking at from under the pump-handle. If he didn't look out, she
+      would come to know all about that old disgrace! Unpleasant things! They
+      were round him this afternoon like a swarm of bees!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like it!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see the race-horses,&rdquo; murmured Fleur; &ldquo;and
+      they've promised I shall ride. Cousin Val can't walk much, you
+      know; but he can ride perfectly. He's going to show me their
+      gallops.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Racing!&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;It's a pity the War didn't
+      knock that on the head. He's taking after his father, I'm
+      afraid.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know anything about his father.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Soames, grimly. &ldquo;He took an interest in
+      horses and broke his neck in Paris, walking down-stairs. Good riddance for
+      your aunt.&rdquo; He frowned, recollecting the inquiry into those stairs
+      which he had attended in Paris six years ago, because Montague Dartie
+      could not attend it himself&mdash;perfectly normal stairs in a house where
+      they played baccarat. Either his winnings or the way he had celebrated
+      them had gone to his brother-in-law's head. The French procedure had
+      been very loose; he had had a lot of trouble with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sound from Fleur distracted his attention. &ldquo;Look! The people who
+      were in the Gallery with us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What people?&rdquo; muttered Soames, who knew perfectly well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think that woman's beautiful.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come into this pastry-cook's,&rdquo; said Soames abruptly,
+      and tightening his grip on her arm he turned into a confectioner's.
+      It was&mdash;for him&mdash;a surprising thing to do, and he said rather
+      anxiously: &ldquo;What will you have?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I don't want anything. I had a cocktail and a tremendous
+      lunch.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must have something now we're here,&rdquo; muttered
+      Soames, keeping hold of her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two teas,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;and two of those nougat things.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no sooner was his body seated than his soul sprang up. Those three&mdash;those
+      three were coming in! He heard Irene say something to her boy, and his
+      answer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! no, Mum; this place is all right. My stunt.&rdquo; And the
+      three sat down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment, most awkward of his existence, crowded with ghosts and
+      shadows from his past, in presence of the only two women he had ever loved&mdash;his
+      divorced wife and his daughter by her successor&mdash;Soames was not so
+      much afraid of them as of his cousin June. She might make a scene&mdash;she
+      might introduce those two children&mdash;she was capable of anything. He
+      bit too hastily at the nougat, and it stuck to his plate. Working at it
+      with his finger, he glanced at Fleur. She was masticating dreamily, but
+      her eyes were on the boy. The Forsyte in him said: &ldquo;Think, feel, and
+      you're done for!&rdquo; And he wiggled his finger desperately.
+      Plate! Did Jolyon wear a plate? Did that woman wear a plate? Time had been
+      when he had seen her wearing nothing! That was something, anyway, which
+      had never been stolen from him. And she knew it, though she might sit
+      there calm and self-possessed, as if she had never been his wife. An acid
+      humour stirred in his Forsyte blood; a subtle pain divided by hair's
+      breadth from pleasure. If only June did not suddenly bring her hornets
+      about his ears! The boy was talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, Auntie June&rdquo;&mdash;so he called his half-sister
+      &ldquo;Auntie,&rdquo; did he?&mdash;well, she must be fifty, if she was a
+      day!&mdash;&ldquo;it's jolly good of you to encourage them. Only&mdash;hang
+      it all!&rdquo; Soames stole a glance. Irene's startled eyes were
+      bent watchfully on her boy. She&mdash;she had these devotions&mdash;for
+      Bosinney&mdash;for that boy's father&mdash;for this boy! He touched
+      Fleur's arm, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, have you had enough?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One more, Father, please.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She would be sick! He went to the counter to pay. When he turned round
+      again he saw Fleur standing near the door, holding a handkerchief which
+      the boy had evidently just handed to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;F. F.,&rdquo; he heard her say. &ldquo;Fleur Forsyte&mdash;it's
+      mine all right. Thank you ever so.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good God! She had caught the trick from what he'd told her in the
+      Gallery&mdash;monkey!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forsyte? Why&mdash;that's my name too. Perhaps we're
+      cousins.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really! We must be. There aren't any others. I live at
+      Mapledurham; where do you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robin Hill.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Question and answer had been so rapid that all was over before he could
+      lift a finger. He saw Irene's face alive with startled feeling, gave
+      the slightest shake of his head, and slipped his arm through Fleur's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't you hear, Father? Isn't it queer&mdash;our name's
+      the same. Are we cousins?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Forsyte? Distant,
+      perhaps.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name's Jolyon, sir. Jon, for short.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Ah!&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;Yes. Distant. How are you? Very
+      good of you. Good-bye!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks awfully,&rdquo; Fleur was saying. &ldquo;Au revoir!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Au revoir!&rdquo; he heard the boy reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0098" id="link2H_4_0098">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Emerging from the &ldquo;pastry-cook's,&rdquo; Soames' first
+      impulse was to vent his nerves by saying to his daughter: 'Dropping
+      your hand-kerchief!' to which her reply might well be: 'I
+      picked that up from you!' His second impulse therefore was to let
+      sleeping dogs lie. But she would surely question him. He gave her a
+      sidelong look, and found she was giving him the same. She said softly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don't you like those cousins, Father?&rdquo; Soames
+      lifted the corner of his lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made you think that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cela se voit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'That sees itself!' What a way of putting it! After twenty
+      years of a French wife Soames had still little sympathy with her language;
+      a theatrical affair and connected in his mind with all the refinements of
+      domestic irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must know them; and you didn't make a sign. I saw them
+      looking at you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've never seen the boy in my life,&rdquo; replied Soames
+      with perfect truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; but you've seen the others, dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames gave her another look. What had she picked up? Had her Aunt
+      Winifred, or Imogen, or Val Dartie and his wife, been talking? Every
+      breath of the old scandal had been carefully kept from her at home, and
+      Winifred warned many times that he wouldn't have a whisper of it
+      reach her for the world. So far as she ought to know, he had never been
+      married before. But her dark eyes, whose southern glint and clearness
+      often almost frightened him, met his with perfect innocence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;your grandfather and his brother had a
+      quarrel. The two families don't know each other.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How romantic!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Now, what does she mean by that?' he thought. The word was to
+      him extravagant and dangerous&mdash;it was as if she had said: &ldquo;How
+      jolly!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they'll continue not to know each, other,&rdquo; he
+      added, but instantly regretted the challenge in those words. Fleur was
+      smiling. In this age, when young people prided themselves on going their
+      own ways and paying no attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had
+      said the very thing to excite her wilfulness. Then, recollecting the
+      expression on Irene's face, he breathed again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of a quarrel?&rdquo; he heard Fleur say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About a house. It's ancient history for you. Your grandfather
+      died the day you were born. He was ninety.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ninety? Are there many Forsytes besides those in the Red Book?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;They're all
+      dispersed now. The old ones are dead, except Timothy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur clasped her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Timothy? Isn't that delicious?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Soames. It offended him that she should
+      think &ldquo;Timothy&rdquo; delicious&mdash;a kind of insult to his breed.
+      This new generation mocked at anything solid and tenacious. &ldquo;You go
+      and see the old boy. He might want to prophesy.&rdquo; Ah! If Timothy
+      could see the disquiet England of his great-nephews and great-nieces, he
+      would certainly give tongue. And involuntarily he glanced up at the
+      Iseeum; yes&mdash;George was still in the window, with the same pink paper
+      in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is Robin Hill, Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Robin Hill! Robin Hill, round which all that tragedy had centred! What did
+      she want to know for?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Surrey,&rdquo; he muttered; &ldquo;not far from Richmond. Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the house there?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What house?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That they quarrelled about.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. But what's all that to do with you? We're going
+      home to-morrow&mdash;you'd better be thinking about your frocks.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bless you! They're all thought about. A family feud? It's
+      like the Bible, or Mark Twain&mdash;awfully exciting. What did you do in
+      the feud, Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never you mind.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! But if I'm to keep it up?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who said you were to keep it up?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You, darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I? I said it had nothing to do with you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what I think, you know; so that's all right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was too sharp for him; fine, as Annette sometimes called her. Nothing
+      for it but to distract her attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a bit of rosaline point in here,&rdquo; he said,
+      stopping before a shop, &ldquo;that I thought you might like.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he had paid for it and they had resumed their progress, Fleur said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think that boy's mother is the most beautiful
+      woman of her age you've ever seen?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shivered. Uncanny, the way she stuck to it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that I noticed her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear, I saw the corner of your eye.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see everything&mdash;and a great deal more, it seems to me!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's her husband like? He must be your first cousin, if
+      your fathers were brothers.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dead, for all I know,&rdquo; said Soames, with sudden vehemence.
+      &ldquo;I haven't seen him for twenty years.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A painter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's quite jolly.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words: &ldquo;If you want to please me you'll put those people
+      out of your head,&rdquo; sprang to Soames' lips, but he choked them
+      back&mdash;he must not let her see his feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He once insulted me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her quick eyes rested on his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see! You didn't avenge it, and it rankles. Poor Father! You
+      let me have a go!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really like lying in the dark with a mosquito hovering above his
+      face. Such pertinacity in Fleur was new to him, and, as they reached the
+      hotel, he said grimly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did my best. And that's enough about these people. I'm
+      going up till dinner.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall sit here.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a parting look at her extended in a chair&mdash;a look
+      half-resentful, half-adoring&mdash;Soames moved into the lift and was
+      transported to their suite on the fourth floor. He stood by the window of
+      the sitting-room which gave view over Hyde Park, and drummed a finger on
+      its pane. His feelings were confused, tetchy, troubled. The throb of that
+      old wound, scarred over by Time and new interests, was mingled with
+      displeasure and anxiety, and a slight pain in his chest where that nougat
+      stuff had disagreed. Had Annette come in? Not that she was any good to him
+      in such a difficulty. Whenever she had questioned him about his first
+      marriage, he had always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it
+      had been the great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself but
+      domestic makeshift. She had always kept the grudge of that up her sleeve,
+      as it were, and used it commercially. He listened. A sound&mdash;the vague
+      murmur of a woman's movements&mdash;was coming through the door. She
+      was in. He tapped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I,&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had been changing her frock, and was still imperfectly clothed; a
+      striking figure before her glass. There was a certain magnificence about
+      her arms, shoulders, hair, which had darkened since he first knew her,
+      about the turn of her neck, the silkiness of her garments, her
+      dark-lashed, greyblue eyes&mdash;she was certainly as handsome at forty as
+      she had ever been. A fine possession, an excellent housekeeper, a sensible
+      and affectionate enough mother. If only she weren't always so
+      frankly cynical about the relations between them! Soames, who had no more
+      real affection for her than she had for him, suffered from a kind of
+      English grievance in that she had never dropped even the thinnest veil of
+      sentiment over their partnership. Like most of his countrymen and women,
+      he held the view that marriage should be based on mutual love, but that
+      when from a marriage love had disappeared, or, been found never to have
+      really existed&mdash;so that it was manifestly not based on love&mdash;you
+      must not admit it. There it was, and the love was not&mdash;but there you
+      were, and must continue to be! Thus you had it both ways, and were not
+      tarred with cynicism, realism, and immorality like the French. Moreover,
+      it was necessary in the interests of property. He knew that she knew that
+      they both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her
+      not to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never
+      understand what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.
+      He said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whom have you got at 'The Shelter' next week?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette went on touching her lips delicately with salve&mdash;he always
+      wished she wouldn't do that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your sister Winifred, and the Car-r-digans&rdquo;&mdash;she took up
+      a tiny stick of black&mdash;&ldquo;and Prosper Profond.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That Belgian chap? Why him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette turned her neck lazily, touched one eyelash, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He amuses Winifred.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want some one to amuse Fleur; she's restive.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;R-restive?&rdquo; repeated Annette. &ldquo;Is it the first time you
+      see that, my friend? She was born r-restive, as you call it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Would she never get that affected roll out of her r's?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He touched the dress she had taken off, and asked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you been doing?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette looked at him, reflected in her glass. Her just-brightened lips
+      smiled, rather full, rather ironical.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enjoying myself,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; answered Soames glumly. &ldquo;Ribbandry, I suppose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his word for all that incomprehensible running in and out of shops
+      that women went in for. &ldquo;Has Fleur got her summer dresses?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't ask if I have mine.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't care whether I do or not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite right. Well, she has; and I have mine&mdash;terribly
+      expensive.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm!&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;What does that chap Profond
+      do in England?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette raised the eyebrows she had just finished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He yachts.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;he's a sleepy chap.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sometimes,&rdquo; answered Annette, and her face had a sort of
+      quiet enjoyment. &ldquo;But sometimes very amusing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's got a touch of the tar-brush about him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette stretched herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tar-brush?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;What is that? His mother was
+      Armenienne.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's it, then,&rdquo; muttered Soames. &ldquo;Does he know
+      anything about pictures?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He knows about everything&mdash;a man of the world.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, get some one for Fleur. I want to distract her. She's
+      going off on Saturday to Val Dartie and his wife; I don't like it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the reason could not be explained without going into family history,
+      Soames merely answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Racketing about. There's too much of it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like that little Mrs. Val; she is very quiet and clever.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know nothing of her except&mdash;This thing's new.&rdquo;
+      And Soames took up a creation from the bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette received it from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you hook me?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames hooked. Glancing once over her shoulder into the glass, he saw the
+      expression on her face, faintly amused, faintly contemptuous, as much as
+      to say: &ldquo;Thanks! You will never learn!&rdquo; No, thank God, he wasn't
+      a Frenchman! He finished with a jerk, and the words: &ldquo;It's too
+      low here.&rdquo; And he went to the door, with the wish to get away from
+      her and go down to Fleur again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette stayed a powder-puff, and said with startling suddenness
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Que tu es grossier!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew the expression&mdash;he had reason to. The first time she had used
+      it he had thought it meant &ldquo;What a grocer you are!&rdquo; and had
+      not known whether to be relieved or not when better informed. He resented
+      the word&mdash;he was not coarse! If he was coarse, what was that chap in
+      the room beyond his, who made those horrible noises in the morning when he
+      cleared his throat, or those people in the Lounge who thought it well-bred
+      to say nothing but what the whole world could hear at the top of their
+      voices&mdash;quacking inanity! Coarse, because he had said her dress was
+      low! Well, so it was! He went out without reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where he had
+      left her. She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot in silk
+      stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming. Her eyes showed
+      it too&mdash;they went off like that sometimes. And then, in a moment, she
+      would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a monkey. And she knew
+      so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen. What was that odious word?
+      Flapper! Dreadful young creatures&mdash;squealing and squawking and
+      showing their legs! The worst of them bad dreams, the best of them
+      powdered angels! Fleur was not a flapper, not one of those slangy,
+      ill-bred young females. And yet she was frighteningly self-willed, and
+      full of life, and determined to enjoy it. Enjoy! The word brought no
+      puritan terror to Soames; but it brought the terror suited to his
+      temperament. He had always been afraid to enjoy to-day for fear he might
+      not enjoy tomorrow so much. And it was terrifying to feel that his
+      daughter was divested of that safeguard. The very way she sat in that
+      chair showed it&mdash;lost in her dream. He had never been lost in a dream
+      himself&mdash;there was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it
+      from he did not know! Certainly not from Annette! And yet Annette, as a
+      young girl, when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look.
+      Well, she had lost it now!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down at a
+      writing-table. Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to write as if she
+      had not time to breathe before she got her letter written. And suddenly
+      she saw him. The air of desperate absorption vanished, she smiled, waved a
+      kiss, made a pretty face as if she were a little puzzled and a little
+      bored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah! She was &ldquo;fine&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;fine!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0099" id="link2H_4_0099">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;AT ROBIN HILL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin
+      Hill, quietly going into his affairs. He did everything quietly now,
+      because his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked
+      the idea of dying. He had never realised how much till one day, two years
+      ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms, and been told:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any moment, on any overstrain.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had taken it with a smile&mdash;the natural Forsyte reaction against an
+      unpleasant truth. But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the way
+      home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over him. To leave
+      Irene, his boy, his home, his work&mdash;though he did little enough work
+      now! To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable state, for
+      such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind stirring
+      leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass. Of such
+      nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he never
+      could, and must still hover on the hope that he might see again those he
+      loved! To realise this was to endure very poignant spiritual anguish.
+      Before he reached home that day he had determined to keep it from Irene.
+      He would have to be more careful than man had ever been, for the least
+      thing would give it away and make her as wretched as himself, almost. His
+      doctor had passed him sound in other respects, and seventy was nothing of
+      an age&mdash;he would last a long time yet, if he could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the full
+      the subtler side of character. Naturally not abrupt, except when nervously
+      excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate. The sad patience of old
+      people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a smile which his lips
+      preserved even in private. He devised continually all manner of cover to
+      conceal his enforced lack of exertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the Simple
+      Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no
+      coffee in it. In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in his
+      condition could, under the rose of his mild irony. Secure from discovery,
+      since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had spent the fine May day
+      quietly arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow without
+      inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final polish to his terrestrial
+      state. Having docketed and enclosed it in his father's old Chinese
+      cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words outside: &ldquo;Key
+      of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the exact state of me, J.
+      F.,&rdquo; and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be always about
+      him, in case of accident. Then, ringing for tea, he went out to have it
+      under the old oak-tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little
+      more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought
+      habitually, like other people, of other things. He thought of his son now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
+      Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his dead
+      half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed to avoid
+      the evil and contain the good of the Public School system, may or may not
+      contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in April perfectly
+      ignorant of what he wanted to become. The War, which had promised to go on
+      for ever, had ended just as he was about to join the Army, six months
+      before his time. It had taken him ever since to get used to the idea that
+      he could now choose for himself. He had held with his father several
+      discussions, from which, under a cheery show of being ready for anything&mdash;except,
+      of course, the Church, Army, Law, Stage, Stock Exchange, Medicine,
+      Business, and Engineering&mdash;Jolyon had gathered rather clearly that
+      Jon wanted to go in for nothing. He himself had felt exactly like that at
+      the same age. With him that pleasant vacuity had soon been ended by an
+      early marriage, and its unhappy consequences. Forced to become an
+      underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity before his
+      artistic talent had outcropped. But having&mdash;as the simple say&mdash;&ldquo;learned&rdquo;
+      his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that Jon would never be a
+      painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his aversion from everything
+      else meant that he was going to be a writer. Holding, however, the view
+      that experience was necessary even for that profession, there seemed to
+      Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for Jon, but University, travel, and
+      perhaps the eating of dinners for the Bar. After that one would see, or
+      more probably one would not. In face of these proffered allurements,
+      however, Jon had remained undecided.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether the
+      world had really changed. People said that it was a new age. With the
+      profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived that under
+      slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it had been.
+      Mankind was still divided into two species: The few who had &ldquo;speculation&rdquo;
+      in their souls, and the many who had none, with a belt of hybrids like
+      himself in the middle. Jon appeared to have speculation; it seemed to his
+      father a bad lookout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard the
+      boy say, a fortnight ago: &ldquo;I should like to try farming, Dad; if it
+      won't cost you too much. It seems to be about the only sort of life
+      that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and of course that's
+      out of the question for me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first
+      Jolyon in 1760. It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no
+      doubt, you may grow a better turnip than he did.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little dashed, Jon had answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it,
+      you'll do more good than most men, which is little enough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it. I
+      give him four years. Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to his
+      daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near them on
+      the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice. Holly's answer had
+      been enthusiastic. There was an excellent man quite close; she and Val
+      would love Jon to live with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was due to go to-morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of the
+      old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
+      thirty-two years. The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day older! So
+      young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the whitey-grey-green
+      of its thick rough trunk. A tree of memories, which would live on hundreds
+      of years yet, unless some barbarian cut it down&mdash;would see old
+      England out at the pace things were going! He remembered a night three
+      years before, when, looking from his window, with his arm close round
+      Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane hovering, it seemed, right over
+      the old tree. Next day they had found a bomb hole in a field on Gage's
+      farm. That was before he knew that he was under sentence of death. He
+      could almost have wished the bomb had finished him. It would have saved a
+      lot of hanging about, many hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach.
+      He had counted on living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more,
+      when Irene would be seventy. As it was, she would miss him. Still there
+      was Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who adored his
+      mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under that tree, where old Jolyon&mdash;waiting for Irene to come to him
+      across the lawn&mdash;had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
+      whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better
+      close his own eyes and drift away. There was something undignified in
+      parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein he
+      regretted two things only&mdash;the long division between his father and
+      himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union with Irene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
+      Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and his
+      heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again. Spring!
+      Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was still young
+      enough to love beauty! Blackbirds sang recklessly in the shrubbery,
+      swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened; and over the
+      fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage, burnished by the level
+      sunlight, away to where the distant &ldquo;smoke-bush&rdquo; blue was
+      trailed along the horizon. Irene's flowers in their narrow beds had
+      startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of gay life.
+      Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had known how to
+      get that startling little ego into each painted flower, and bird, and
+      beast&mdash;the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of life as
+      well. They were the fellows! 'I've made nothing that will
+      live!' thought Jolyon; 'I've been an amateur&mdash;a
+      mere lover, not a creator. Still, I shall leave Jon behind me when I go.'
+      What luck that the boy had not been caught by that ghastly war! He might
+      so easily have been killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the
+      Transvaal. Jon would do something some day&mdash;if the Age didn't
+      spoil him&mdash;an imaginative chap! His whim to take up farming was but a
+      bit of sentiment, and about as likely to last. And just then he saw them
+      coming up the field: Irene and the boy; walking from the station, with
+      their arms linked. And getting up, he strolled down through the new rose
+      garden to meet them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window. She sat
+      there without speaking till he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, my love?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We had an encounter to-day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With whom?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soames.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames! He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two years;
+      conscious that it was bad for him. And, now, his heart moved in a
+      disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within his chest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene went on quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
+      confectioner's where we had tea.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How did he look?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grey; but otherwise much the same.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the daughter?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty. At least, Jon thought so.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon's heart side-slipped again. His wife's face had a
+      strained and puzzled look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't-?&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief and
+      he picked it up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it
+      was.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it
+      from him. He'll find out some day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard
+      judgment. When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your
+      mother if she had done what I have?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of the
+      tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the prisoned
+      grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or passion&mdash;knew
+      nothing at all, as yet!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have you told him?&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you
+      had never cared much for your family, or they for you. I expect he will be
+      asking you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon smiled. &ldquo;This promises to take the place of air-raids,&rdquo;
+      he said. &ldquo;After all, one misses them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene looked up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've known it would come some day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered her with sudden energy:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan't do that,
+      even in thought. He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's
+      put to him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
+      otherwise.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet, Jolyon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was like her&mdash;she had no foresight, and never went to meet
+      trouble. Still&mdash;who knew?&mdash;she might be right. It was ill going
+      against a mother's instinct. It might be well to let the boy go on,
+      if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by which he
+      could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing,
+      had deepened his charity. All the same, one must take precautions&mdash;every
+      precaution possible! And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake
+      turning over those precautions. He must write to Holly, telling her that
+      Jon knew nothing as yet of family history. Holly was discreet, she would
+      make sure of her husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter
+      with him when he went to-morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate died
+      out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for Jolyon in
+      the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so rounded off and
+      polished....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the prey
+      of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, &ldquo;love at
+      first sight!&rdquo; He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of
+      those dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno&mdash;a conviction that
+      this was his 'dream'. so that what followed had seemed to him
+      at once natural and miraculous. Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough
+      for one who was terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a
+      homoeopathic Age, when boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in
+      early life till sex was almost abolished, Jon was singularly
+      old-fashioned. His modern school took boys only, and his holidays had been
+      spent at Robin Hill with boy friends, or his parents alone. He had never,
+      therefore, been inoculated against the germs of love by small doses of the
+      poison. And now in the dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay
+      awake, featuring Fleur&mdash;as they called it&mdash;recalling her words,
+      especially that &ldquo;Au revoir!&rdquo; so soft and sprightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
+      shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out
+      through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass.
+      'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was mysteriously
+      white out of doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to
+      chirp. 'I'll go down into the coppice,' he thought. He
+      ran down through the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and
+      passed into the coppice. Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the
+      larch-trees there was mystery&mdash;the air, as it were, composed of that
+      romantic quality. Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells
+      in the sharpening light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at
+      Mapleduram&mdash;a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find
+      it in the atlas presently. He would write to her. But would she answer?
+      Oh! She must. She had said &ldquo;Au revoir!&rdquo; Not good-bye! What
+      luck that she had dropped her handkerchief! He would never have known her
+      but for that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the more
+      amazing his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm
+      thronged his head; words jostled to be joined together; he was on the
+      verge of a poem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned
+      to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out
+      of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open,
+      he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate
+      all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to mortal
+      soul-even-to his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0100" id="link2H_4_0100">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;THE MAUSOLEUM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving
+      their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of
+      &ldquo;Timothy's&rdquo; on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's
+      soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept
+      the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose
+      windows are only opened to air it twice a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box, a
+      series of layers in the last of which was Timothy. One did not reach him,
+      or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of old-time habit
+      or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon and ask after
+      their surviving uncle. Such were Francie, now quite emancipated from God
+      (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old Nicholas, and
+      Winifred Dartie from her &ldquo;man of the world.&rdquo; But, after all,
+      everybody was emancipated now, or said they were&mdash;perhaps not quite
+      the same thing!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on the
+      morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of seeing
+      Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a faint demonstration within him
+      while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep of
+      that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one
+      dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and out
+      of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened with,
+      fardels of family gossip; the house of the &ldquo;old people&rdquo; of
+      another century, another age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of Smither&mdash;still corseted up to the armpits because the
+      new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been
+      considered &ldquo;nice&rdquo; by Aunts Juley and Hester&mdash;brought a
+      pale friendliness to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully
+      arranged to old pattern in every detail, an invaluable servant&mdash;none
+      such left&mdash;smiling back at him, with the words: &ldquo;Why! it's
+      Mr. Soames, after all this time! And how are you, sir? Mr. Timothy will be
+      so pleased to know you've been.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's
+      a wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It would
+      please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how he relishes
+      a baked apple still. But he's quite deaf. And a mercy, I always
+      think. For what we should have done with him in the air-raids, I don't
+      know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;What did you do with him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the
+      cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would never have
+      done to let him know there was a war on. As I said to Cook, 'If Mr.
+      Timothy rings, they may do what they like&mdash;I'm going up. My
+      dear mistresses would have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody
+      going to him.' But he slept through them all beautiful. And the one
+      in the daytime he was having his bath. It was a mercy, because he might
+      have noticed the people in the street all looking up&mdash;he often looks
+      out of the window.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite!&rdquo; murmured Soames. Smither was getting garrulous!
+      &ldquo;I just want to look round and see if there's anything to be
+      done.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything except a smell
+      of mice in the dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of. It's
+      funny they should be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not
+      coming down, just before the War. But they're nasty little things;
+      you never know where they'll take you next.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he leave his bed?&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window
+      in the morning, not to risk a change of air. And he's quite
+      comfortable in himself; has his Will out every day regular. It's a
+      great consolation to him&mdash;that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything
+      to say to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Smither coloured up above her corsets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be an occasion!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Shall I take you
+      round the house, sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you go to him,&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;I can go round the
+      house by myself.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt that he
+      was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so saturated with the
+      past. When Smither, creaking with excitement, had left him, Soames entered
+      the dining-room and sniffed. In his opinion it wasn't mice, but
+      incipient wood-rot, and he examined the panelling. Whether it was worth a
+      coat of paint, at Timothy's age, he was not sure. The room had
+      always been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile curled
+      Soames' lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted the oak
+      dado; a heavy metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling divided by
+      imitation beams. The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a bargain, one
+      day at Jobson's sixty years ago&mdash;three Snyder &ldquo;still
+      lifes,&rdquo; two faintly coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather
+      charming, which bore the initials &ldquo;J. R.&rdquo;&mdash;Timothy had
+      always believed they might turn out to be Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who
+      admired them, had discovered that they were only John Robinson; and a
+      doubtful Morland of a white pony being shod. Deep-red plush curtains, ten
+      high-backed dark mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey
+      carpet, and a mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such
+      was an apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body
+      since he was four years old. He looked especially at the two drawings, and
+      thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study. He did not
+      remember ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor to ceiling
+      with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity. One wall seemed
+      devoted to educational books, which Timothy's firm had published two
+      generations back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book. Soames
+      read their titles and shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same
+      books as used to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane,
+      from which he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had
+      gone out together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The third
+      wall he approached with more excitement. Here, surely, Timothy's own
+      taste would be found. It was. The books were dummies. The fourth wall was
+      all heavily curtained window. And turned toward it was a large chair with
+      a mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy of
+      The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come down,
+      as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still. In a
+      corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy, deeply
+      convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and permanently
+      upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday afternoon in
+      1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with Juley and
+      Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was always
+      taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too.
+      Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least from
+      one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it
+      emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a
+      daddy-long-legs which had died on it in latitude 44.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Mausoleum!' he thought. 'George was right!' And
+      he went out and up the stairs. On the half-landing he stopped before the
+      case of stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They
+      looked not a day older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If the case
+      were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing would
+      crumble, he suspected. It wouldn't be worth putting that into the
+      sale! And suddenly he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann&mdash;dear old
+      Aunt Ann&mdash;holding him by the hand in front of that case and saying:
+      &ldquo;Look, Soamey! Aren't they bright and pretty, dear little
+      humming-birds!&rdquo; Soames remembered his own answer: &ldquo;They don't
+      hum, Auntie.&rdquo; He must have been six, in a black velveteen suit with
+      a light-blue collar-he remembered that suit well! Aunt Ann with her
+      ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave old aquiline smile&mdash;a
+      fine old lady, Aunt Ann! He moved on up to the drawing-room door. There on
+      each side of it were the groups of miniatures. Those he would certainly
+      buy in! The miniatures of his four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin
+      adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy. They had all been
+      painted by a young lady friend of the family at a time, 1830, about, when
+      miniatures were considered very genteel, and lasting too, painted as they
+      were on ivory. Many a time had he heard the tale of that young lady:
+      &ldquo;Very talented, my dear; she had quite a weakness for Swithin, and
+      very soon after she went into a consumption and died: so like Keats&mdash;we
+      often spoke of it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan&mdash;quite a small
+      child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
+      waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on heaven.
+      Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been rather like that&mdash;a
+      wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must have had talent, and miniatures
+      always had a certain back-watered cachet of their own, little subject to
+      the currents of competition on aesthetic Change. Soames opened the
+      drawing-room door. The room was dusted, the furniture uncovered, the
+      curtains drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still dwelt there patiently
+      waiting. And a thought came to him: When Timothy died&mdash;why not? Would
+      it not be almost a duty to preserve this house&mdash;like Carlyle's&mdash;and
+      put up a tablet, and show it? &ldquo;Specimen of mid-Victorian abode&mdash;entrance,
+      one shilling, with catalogue.&rdquo; After all, it was the completest
+      thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of to-day. Perfect in its
+      special taste and culture, if, that is, he took down and carried over to
+      his own collection the four Barbizon pictures he had given them. The still
+      sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned with red flowers and ferns;
+      the crewel-worked fire-screen before the cast-iron grate; the mahogany
+      cupboard with glass windows, full of little knickknacks; the beaded
+      footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey, Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's
+      Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in a bookshelf row;
+      the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full of family relics:
+      Hester's first fan; the buckles of their mother's father's
+      shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant's tusk,
+      sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in jute; a
+      yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it, recording God
+      knew what! And the pictures crowding on the walls&mdash;all water-colours
+      save those four Barbizons looking like the foreigners they were, and
+      doubtful customers at that&mdash;pictures bright and illustrative, &ldquo;Telling
+      the Bees,&rdquo; &ldquo;Hey for the Ferry!&rdquo; and two in the style of
+      Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin. Oh! many,
+      many pictures at which Soames had gazed a thousand times in supercilious
+      fascination; a marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt frames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed as
+      ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it. And the
+      gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one side of the
+      fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
+      Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on the
+      other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light, for
+      Aunt Hester. Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them sitting
+      there. Ah! and the atmosphere&mdash;even now, of too many stuffs and
+      washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings.
+      'No,' he thought, 'there's nothing like it left;
+      it ought to be preserved.' And, by George, they might laugh at it,
+      but for a standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness
+      of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day hollow&mdash;to-day
+      with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its cross-legged,
+      bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down to the waist if you
+      took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr within each Forsyte but hardly
+      his idea of a lady), with their feet, too, screwed round the legs of their
+      chairs while they ate, and their &ldquo;So longs,&rdquo; and their &ldquo;Old
+      Beans,&rdquo; and their laughter&mdash;girls who gave him the shudders
+      whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed,
+      capable, older women who managed life and gave him the shudders too. No!
+      his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or very much
+      their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and reverence for
+      past and future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
+      upstairs. He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order
+      of the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls. At the
+      top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors. Which of them was
+      Timothy's? And he listened. A sound, as of a child slowly dragging a
+      hobby-horse about, came to his ears. That must be Timothy! He tapped, and
+      a door was opened by Smither, very red in the face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him to
+      attend. If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see him
+      through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
+      impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
+      affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the window,
+      a distance of some twelve feet. The lower part of his square face, no
+      longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as short as it
+      could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where the hair was also
+      quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a good yellow. One hand
+      held a stout stick, and the other grasped the skirt of his Jaeger
+      dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked ankles and
+      feet thrust into Jaeger slippers. The expression on his face was that of a
+      crossed child, intent on something that he has not got. Each time he
+      turned he stumped the stick, and then dragged it, as if to show that he
+      could do without it:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He still looks strong,&rdquo; said Soames under his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, sir. You should see him take his bath&mdash;it's
+      wonderful; he does enjoy it so.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight. Timothy had resumed his
+      babyhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he take any interest in things generally?&rdquo; he said, also
+      loud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, sir; his food and his Will. It's quite a sight to
+      see him turn it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every now
+      and then he asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a slate for him&mdash;very
+      large. Of course, I always write the same, what they were when he last
+      took notice, in 1914. We got the doctor to forbid him to read the paper
+      when the War broke out. Oh! he did take on about that at first. But he
+      soon came round, because he knew it tired him; and he's a wonder to
+      conserve energy as he used to call it when my dear mistresses were alive,
+      bless their hearts! How he did go on at them about that; they were always
+      so active, if you remember, Mr. Soames.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would happen if I were to go in?&rdquo; asked Soames: &ldquo;Would
+      he remember me? I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in 1907.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! that, sir,&rdquo; replied Smither doubtfully, &ldquo;I couldn't
+      take on me to say. I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his
+      age.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn, said in a
+      loud voice: &ldquo;Uncle Timothy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soames,&rdquo; cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out
+      his hand, &ldquo;Soames Forsyte!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the
+      floor, he continued his walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It doesn't seem to work,&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; replied Smither, rather crestfallen; &ldquo;you
+      see, he hasn't finished his walk. It always was one thing at a time
+      with him. I expect he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the
+      gas, and a pretty job I shall have to make him understand.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he ought to have a man about him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Smither held up her hands. &ldquo;A man! Oh! no. Cook and me can manage
+      perfectly. A strange man about would send him crazy in no time. And my
+      mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house. Besides, we're
+      so&mdash;proud of him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose the doctor comes?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every morning. He makes special terms for such a quantity, and Mr.
+      Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to
+      put out his tongue.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Soames, turning away, &ldquo;it's rather
+      sad and painful to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! sir,&rdquo; returned Smither anxiously, &ldquo;you mustn't
+      think that. Now that he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys
+      his life, really he does. As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man
+      than he ever was. You see, when he's not walkin', or takin'
+      his bath, he's eatin', and when he's not eatin',
+      he's sleepin'. and there it is. There isn't an ache or a
+      care about him anywhere.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;there's something in that. I'll
+      go down. By the way, let me see his Will.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under
+      his pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I only want to know if it's the one I made,&rdquo; said
+      Soames; &ldquo;you take a look at its date some time, and let me know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and
+      Cook witnessed, you remember, and there's our names on it still, and
+      we've only done it once.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; said Soames. He did remember. Smither and Jane had
+      been proper witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they
+      might have no interest in Timothy's death. It had been&mdash;he
+      fully admitted&mdash;an almost improper precaution, but Timothy had wished
+      it, and, after all, Aunt Hester had provided for them amply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;good-bye, Smither. Look after
+      him, and if he should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me
+      know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that. It's been
+      such a pleasant change to see you. Cook will be quite excited when I tell
+      her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs. He stood for fully two minutes
+      by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many times. 'So it
+      all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins again. Poor
+      old chap!' And he listened, if perchance the sound of Timothy
+      trailing his hobby-horse might come down the well of the stairs; or some
+      ghost of an old face show over the bannisters, and an old voice say:
+      'Why, it's dear Soames, and we were only saying that we hadn't
+      seen him for a week!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing&mdash;nothing! Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a
+      sunbeam through the fanlight over the door. The little old house! A
+      mausoleum! And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0101" id="link2H_4_0101">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;THE NATIVE HEATH
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+          &ldquo;His foot's upon his native heath,
+           His name's&mdash;Val Dartie.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his age,
+      set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old manor-house he
+      had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs. His destination was
+      Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn of 1899, when he
+      stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire. He paused at the door to
+      give his wife a kiss, and put a flask of port into his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes looking into
+      his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe. He should be moderate; Holly was
+      always right&mdash;she had a natural aptitude. It did not seem so
+      remarkable to him, perhaps, as it might to others, that&mdash;half Dartie
+      as he was&mdash;he should have been perfectly faithful to his young first
+      cousin during the twenty years since he married her romantically out in
+      the Boer War; and faithful without any feeling of sacrifice or boredom&mdash;she
+      was so quick, so slyly always a little in front of his mood. Being first
+      cousins they had decided, rather needlessly, to have no children; and,
+      though a little sallower, she had kept her looks, her slimness, and the
+      colour of her dark hair. Val particularly admired the life of her own she
+      carried on, besides carrying on his, and riding better every year. She
+      kept up her music, she read an awful lot&mdash;novels, poetry, all sorts
+      of stuff. Out on their farm in Cape colony she had looked after all the
+      &ldquo;nigger&rdquo; babies and women in a miraculous manner. She was, in
+      fact, clever; yet made no fuss about it, and had no &ldquo;side.&rdquo;
+      Though not remarkable for humility, Val had come to have the feeling that
+      she was his superior, and he did not grudge it&mdash;a great tribute. It
+      might be noted that he never looked at Holly without her knowing of it,
+      but that she looked at him sometimes unawares.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so on the
+      platform, though she was going to the station with him, to drive the car
+      back. Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles inseparable
+      from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened in the Boer War,
+      had probably saved his life in the War just past, Val was still much as he
+      had been in the days of his courtship; his smile as wide and charming, his
+      eyelashes, if anything, thicker and darker, his eyes screwed up under
+      them, as bright a grey, his freckles rather deeper, his hair a little
+      grizzled at the sides. He gave the impression of one who has lived
+      actively with horses in a sunny climate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When is young Jon coming?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there anything you want for him? I could bring it down on
+      Saturday.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur&mdash;one-forty.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new country on
+      bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects heaven at every hole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's a young woman who knows her way about,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;I say, has it struck you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Holly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Soames and your Dad&mdash;bit awkward, isn't it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be
+      said, of course. It's only for five days, Val.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stable secret! Righto!&rdquo; If Holly thought it safe, it was.
+      Glancing slyly round at him, she said: &ldquo;Did you notice how
+      beautifully she asked herself?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, she did. What do you think of her, Val?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she got
+      her monkey up, I should say.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm wondering,&rdquo; Holly murmured, &ldquo;whether she is
+      the modern young woman. One feels at sea coming home into all this.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You? You get the hang of things so quick.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You keep one in the know,&rdquo; said Val encouraged. &ldquo;What
+      do you think of that Belgian fellow, Profond?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he's rather 'a good devil.'&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family. In fact,
+      our family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying a
+      Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first. Our grandfathers
+      would have had fits!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So would anybody's, my dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This car,&rdquo; Val said suddenly, &ldquo;wants rousing; she doesn't
+      get her hind legs under her uphill. I shall have to give her her head on
+      the slope if I'm to catch that train.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really
+      sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his guidance
+      compared with its running under that of Holly was always noticeable. He
+      caught the train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can.
+      Good-bye, darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; called Holly, and kissed her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between thoughts
+      of Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim
+      memory of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square book,
+      all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and shape of
+      horses. The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a certain strain
+      of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie hankering for a
+      Nutter. On getting back to England, after the profitable sale of his South
+      African farm and stud, and observing that the sun seldom shone, Val had
+      said to himself: &ldquo;I've absolutely got to have an interest in
+      life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting's not enough,
+      I'll breed and I'll train.&rdquo; With just that extra pinch
+      of shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country,
+      Val had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They were all hypnotised
+      by fashion and high price. He should buy for looks, and let names go hang!
+      And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain of
+      blood! Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in
+      this damned climate which makes one go round in a ring. All the same, I
+      must have a strain of Mayfly blood.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of those quiet
+      meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather than into
+      the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His twenty years
+      of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he had been bred,
+      had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and given him a queer
+      and rather blighting eye over what he called &ldquo;the silly haw-haw&rdquo;
+      of some Englishmen, the &ldquo;flapping cockatoory&rdquo; of some
+      English-women&mdash;Holly had none of that and Holly was his model.
+      Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a
+      transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a
+      Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Val Dartie? How's Mrs. Val Dartie? She's well, I
+      hope.&rdquo; And he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister
+      Imogen's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prosper Profond&mdash;I met you at lunch,&rdquo; said the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How are you?&rdquo; murmured Val.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm very well,&rdquo; replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with
+      a certain inimitable slowness. &ldquo;A good devil,&rdquo; Holly had
+      called him. Well! He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped,
+      pointed beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes,
+      unexpectedly intelligent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here's a gentleman wants to know you&mdash;cousin of yours&mdash;Mr.
+      George Forsyde.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
+      lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
+      remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at
+      the Iseeum Club.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I used to go racing with your father,&rdquo; George was saying:
+      &ldquo;How's the stud? Like to buy one of my screws?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen out of
+      breeding. They believed in nothing over here, not even in horses. George
+      Forsyte, Prosper Profond! The devil himself was not more disillusioned
+      than those two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't know you were a racing man,&rdquo; he said to Monsieur
+      Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not. I don't care for it. I'm a yachtin'
+      man. I don't care for yachtin' either, but I like to see my
+      friends. I've got some lunch, Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if
+      you'd like to 'ave some; not much&mdash;just a small one&mdash;in
+      my car.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said Val; &ldquo;very good of you. I'll come
+      along in about quarter of an hour.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Over there. Mr. Forsyde's comin',&rdquo; and Monsieur
+      Profond &ldquo;poinded&rdquo; with a yellow-gloved finger; &ldquo;small
+      car, with a small lunch&rdquo;; he moved on, groomed, sleepy, and remote,
+      George Forsyte following, neat, huge, and with his jesting air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly. George Forsyte, of course, was an
+      old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val felt extremely
+      young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which those two had laughed.
+      The animal had lost reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That 'small' mare&rdquo;&mdash;he seemed to hear the
+      voice of Monsieur Profond&mdash;&ldquo;what do you see in her?&mdash;we
+      must all die!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still! The Mayfly strain&mdash;was
+      it any better than any other? He might just as well have a flutter with
+      his money instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, by gum!&rdquo; he muttered suddenly, &ldquo;if it's no
+      good breeding horses, it's no good doing anything. What did I come
+      for? I'll buy her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the
+      stand. Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers looking as
+      if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their lives; tall,
+      flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women; young men with an
+      air as if trying to take it seriously&mdash;two or three of them with only
+      one arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Life over here's a game!' thought Val. 'Muffin
+      bell rings, horses run, money changes hands; ring again, run again, money
+      changes back.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to watch
+      the Mayfly filly canter down. She moved well; and he made his way over to
+      the &ldquo;small&rdquo; car. The &ldquo;small&rdquo; lunch was the sort a
+      man dreams of but seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond
+      walked back with him to the paddock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your wife's a nice woman,&rdquo; was his surprising remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nicest woman I know,&rdquo; returned Val dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond; &ldquo;she has a nice face. I
+      admire nice women.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct in the
+      heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small
+      cruise.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks,&rdquo; said Val, in arms again, &ldquo;she hates the sea.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why do you yacht?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Belgian's eyes smiled. &ldquo;Oh! I don't know. I've
+      done everything; it's the last thing I'm doin'.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It must be d-d expensive. I should want more reason than that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a heavy lower
+      lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm an easy-goin' man,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you in the War?&rdquo; asked Val.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es. I've done that too. I was gassed; it was a small bit
+      unpleasant.&rdquo; He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity, as
+      if he had caught it from his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether his saying &ldquo;small&rdquo; when he ought to have said &ldquo;little&rdquo;
+      was genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
+      evidently capable of anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
+      Monsieur Profond said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You goin' to bid?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val nodded. With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of faith.
+      Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the forethought of
+      a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year to which was added
+      the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her grand-father, Val was not
+      flush of capital that he could touch, having spent most of what he had
+      realised from his South African farm on his establishment in Sussex. And
+      very soon he was thinking: 'Dash it! she's going beyond me!'
+      His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he dropped out of the bidding. The
+      Mayfly filly passed under the hammer at seven hundred and fifty guineas.
+      He was turning away vexed when the slow voice of Monsieur Profond said in
+      his ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want
+      her; you take her and give her to your wife.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour in
+      his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I made a small lot of money in the War,&rdquo; began Monsieur
+      Profond in answer to that look. &ldquo;I 'ad armament shares. I like
+      to give it away. I'm always makin' money. I want very small
+      lot myself. I like my friends to 'ave it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll buy her of you at the price you gave,&rdquo; said Val
+      with sudden resolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond. &ldquo;You take her. I don'
+      want her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hang it! one doesn't&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo; smiled Monsieur Profond. &ldquo;I'm a friend
+      of your family.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars,&rdquo; said
+      Val impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you
+      like with her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So long as she's yours,&rdquo; said Val. &ldquo;I don't
+      mind that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right,&rdquo; murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val watched; he might be &ldquo;a good devil,&rdquo; but then again he
+      might not. He saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no
+      more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
+      Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering the
+      three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague Dartie,
+      till almost happily released by a French staircase. It was to her a
+      vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from South Africa
+      after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and to have taken a
+      fancy to his wife. Winifred, who in the late seventies, before her
+      marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom, pleasure, and fashion,
+      confessed her youth outclassed by the donzellas of the day. They seemed,
+      for instance, to regard marriage as an incident, and Winifred sometimes
+      regretted that she had not done the same; a second, third, fourth incident
+      might have secured her a partner of less dazzling inebriety; though, after
+      all, he had left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a colonel and
+      unharmed by the War)&mdash;none of whom had been divorced as yet. The
+      steadiness of her children often amazed one who remembered their father;
+      but, as she was fond of believing, they were really all Forsytes,
+      favouring herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen. Her brother's
+      &ldquo;little girl&rdquo; Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred. The child was as
+      restless as any of these modern young women&mdash;&ldquo;She's a
+      small flame in a draught,&rdquo; Prosper Profond had said one day after
+      dinner&mdash;but she did not flap, or talk at the top of her voice. The
+      steady Forsyteism in Winifred's own character instinctively resented
+      the feeling in the air, the modern girl's habits and her motto:
+      &ldquo;All's much of a muchness! Spend, to-morrow we shall be poor!&rdquo;
+      She found it a saving grace in Fleur that, having set her heart on a
+      thing, she had no change of heart until she got it&mdash;though&mdash;what
+      happened after, Fleur was, of course, too young to have made evident. The
+      child was a &ldquo;very pretty little thing,&rdquo; too, and quite a
+      credit to take about, with her mother's French taste and gift for
+      wearing clothes; everybody turned to look at Fleur&mdash;great
+      consideration to Winifred, a lover of the style and distinction which had
+      so cruelly deceived her in the case of Montague Dartie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning, Winifred
+      dwelt on the family skeleton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene, Val&mdash;it's
+      old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing about it&mdash;making
+      a fuss. Your Uncle Soames is very particular about that. So you'll
+      be careful.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! But it's dashed awkward&mdash;Holly's young
+      half-brother is coming to live with us while he learns farming. He's
+      there already.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Winifred. &ldquo;That is a gaff! What is he like?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only saw him once&mdash;at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909;
+      he was naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes&mdash;a jolly little
+      chap.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred thought that &ldquo;rather nice,&rdquo; and added comfortably:
+      &ldquo;Well, Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with
+      it. I shan't tell your uncle. It'll only bother him. It's
+      a great comfort to have you back, my dear boy, now that I'm getting
+      on.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Getting on! Why! you're as young as ever. That chap Profond,
+      Mother, is he all right?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prosper Profond! Oh! the most amusing man I know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's so like him,&rdquo; murmured Winifred. &ldquo;He does
+      all sorts of things.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Val shrewdly, &ldquo;our family haven't
+      been too lucky with that kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted
+      for us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute before
+      she answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! well! He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and left her for
+      his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0102" id="link2H_4_0102">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;JON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen deeply in
+      love, fortunately with something of her own, for the object of her passion
+      was the prospect in front of her windows, the cool clear light on the
+      green Downs. It was England again, at last! England more beautiful than
+      she had dreamed. Chance had, in fact, guided the Val Darties to a spot
+      where the South Downs had real charm when the sun shone. Holly had enough
+      of her father's eye to apprehend the rare quality of their outlines
+      and chalky radiance; to go up there by the ravine-like lane and wander
+      along toward Chanctonbury or Amberley, was still a delight which she
+      hardly attempted to share with Val, whose admiration of Nature was
+      confused by a Forsyte's instinct for getting something out of it,
+      such as the condition of the turf for his horses' exercise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she promised
+      herself that the first use she would make of Jon would be to take him up
+      there, and show him &ldquo;the view&rdquo; under this May-day sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a motherliness not
+      exhausted by Val. A three-day visit to Robin Hill, soon after their
+      arrival home, had yielded no sight of him&mdash;he was still at school; so
+      that her recollection, like Val's, was of a little sunny-haired boy,
+      striped blue and yellow, down by the pond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad, embarrassing.
+      Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's courtship; the
+      ageing of her father, not seen for twenty years, something funereal in his
+      ironic gentleness which did not escape one who had much subtle instinct;
+      above all, the presence of her stepmother, whom she could still vaguely
+      remember as the &ldquo;lady in grey&rdquo; of days when she was little and
+      grandfather alive and Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because that intruder
+      gave her music lessons&mdash;all these confused and tantalised a spirit
+      which had longed to find Robin Hill untroubled. But Holly was adept at
+      keeping things to herself, and all had seemed to go quite well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she was sure
+      had trembled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;the War hasn't changed
+      Robin Hill, has it? If only you could have brought Jolly back with you! I
+      say, can you stand this spiritualistic racket? When the oak-tree dies, it
+      dies, I'm afraid.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had let the cat
+      out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Spiritualism&mdash;queer word, when the more they manifest the more
+      they prove that they've got hold of matter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo; said Holly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why! Look at their photographs of auric presences. You must have
+      something material for light and shade to fall on before you can take a
+      photograph. No, it'll end in our calling all matter spirit, or all
+      spirit matter&mdash;I don't know which.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don't you believe in survival, Dad?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face impressed
+      her deeply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death. I've
+      been looking into it a bit. But for the life of me I can't find
+      anything that telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from the
+      storehouse of this world can't account for just as well. Wish I
+      could! Wishes father thought but they don't breed evidence.&rdquo;
+      Holly had pressed her lips again to his forehead with the feeling that it
+      confirmed his theory that all matter was becoming spirit&mdash;his brow
+      felt, somehow, so insubstantial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been watching,
+      unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter from Jon. It was&mdash;she
+      decided&mdash;the prettiest sight she had ever seen. Irene, lost as it
+      were in the letter of her boy, stood at a window where the light fell on
+      her face and her fine grey hair; her lips were moving, smiling, her dark
+      eyes laughing, dancing, and the hand which did not hold the letter was
+      pressed against her breast. Holly withdrew as from a vision of perfect
+      love, convinced that Jon must be nice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in either hand,
+      she was confirmed in her predisposition. He was a little like Jolly, that
+      long-lost idol of her childhood, but eager-looking and less formal, with
+      deeper eyes and brighter-coloured hair, for he wore no hat; altogether a
+      very interesting &ldquo;little&rdquo; brother!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance in
+      the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him home,
+      instead of his driving her. Shouldn't he have a shot? They hadn't
+      a car at Robin Hill since the War, of course, and he had only driven once,
+      and landed up a bank, so she oughtn't to mind his trying. His laugh,
+      soft and infectious, was very attractive, though that word, she had heard,
+      was now quite old-fashioned. When they reached the house he pulled out a
+      crumpled letter which she read while he was washing&mdash;a quite short
+      letter, which must have cost her father many a pang to write.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY DEAR,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of
+      family history. His mother and I think he is too young at present. The boy
+      is very dear, and the apple of her eye. Verbum sapientibus,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your loving father,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;J. F.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur was
+      coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up the hill.
+      They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit grown over with
+      brambles and goosepenny. Milkwort and liverwort starred the green slope,
+      the larks sang, and thrushes in the brake, and now and then a gull
+      flighting inland would wheel very white against the paling sky, where the
+      vague moon was coming up. Delicious fragrance came to them, as if little
+      invisible creatures were running and treading scent out of the blades of
+      grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, this is wonderful! There's no fat on it at all. Gull's
+      flight and sheep-bells.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'. You're a
+      poet, my dear!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Golly! No go!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try! I used to at your age.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you? Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so
+      rotten. Have you any of yours for me to see?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; Holly murmured, &ldquo;I've been married
+      nineteen years. I only wrote verses when I wanted to be.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she
+      could see was a charming colour. Was Jon &ldquo;touched in the wind,&rdquo;
+      then, as Val would have called it? Already? But, if so, all the better, he
+      would take no notice of young Fleur. Besides, on Monday he would begin his
+      farming. And she smiled. Was it Burns who followed the plough, or only
+      Piers Plowman? Nearly every young man and most young women seemed to be
+      poets now, judging from the number of their books she had read out in
+      South Africa, importing them from Hatchus and Bumphards; and quite good&mdash;oh!
+      quite; much better than she had been herself! But then poetry had only
+      really come in since her day&mdash;with motor-cars. Another long talk
+      after dinner over a wood fire in the low hall, and there seemed little
+      left to know about Jon except anything of real importance. Holly parted
+      from him at his bedroom door, having seen twice over that he had
+      everything, with the conviction that she would love him, and Val would
+      like him. He was eager, but did not gush; he was a splendid listener,
+      sympathetic, reticent about himself. He evidently loved their father, and
+      adored his mother. He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games.
+      He saved moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them
+      out of doors in screws of paper sooner than kill them. In a word, he was
+      amiable. She went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer horribly if
+      anybody hurt him; but who would hurt him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of paper and a
+      pencil, writing his first &ldquo;real poem&rdquo; by the light of a candle
+      because there was not enough moon to see by, only enough to make the night
+      seem fluttery and as if engraved on silver. Just the night for Fleur to
+      walk, and turn her eyes, and lead on-over the hills and far away. And Jon,
+      deeply furrowed in his ingenuous brow, made marks on the paper and rubbed
+      them out and wrote them in again, and did all that was necessary for the
+      completion of a work of art; and he had a feeling such as the winds of
+      Spring must have, trying their first songs among the coming blossom. Jon
+      was one of those boys (not many) in whom a home-trained love of beauty had
+      survived school life. He had had to keep it to himself, of course, so that
+      not even the drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and
+      clear within him. And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the
+      night was winged. But he kept it, all the same. It was a &ldquo;beast,&rdquo;
+      but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible. And he
+      thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show
+      it to Mother.' He slept terribly well, when he did sleep,
+      overwhelmed by novelty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0103" id="link2H_4_0103">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.&mdash;FLEUR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered, all
+      that had been told Jon was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: &ldquo;We've
+      got a youngster staying with us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore in a
+      manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired. They were thus
+      introduced by Holly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours,
+      Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong sunlight, was
+      so confounded by the providential nature of this miracle, that he had time
+      to hear Fleur say calmly: &ldquo;Oh, how do you do?&rdquo; as if he had
+      never seen her, and to understand dimly from the quickest imaginable
+      little movement of her head that he never had seen her. He bowed therefore
+      over her hand in an intoxicated manner, and became more silent than the
+      grave. He knew better than to speak. Once in his early life, surprised
+      reading by a nightlight, he had said fatuously &ldquo;I was just turning
+      over the leaves, Mum,&rdquo; and his mother had replied: &ldquo;Jon, never
+      tell stories, because of your face nobody will ever believe them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
+      success of spoken untruth. He listened therefore to Fleur's swift
+      and rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with scones
+      and jam, and got away as soon as might be. They say that in delirium
+      tremens you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which suddenly changes
+      shape and position. Jon saw the fixed object; it had dark eyes and
+      passably dark hair, and changed its position, but never its shape. The
+      knowledge that between him and that object there was already a secret
+      understanding (however impossible to understand) thrilled him so that he
+      waited feverishly, and began to copy out his poem&mdash;which of course he
+      would never dare to&mdash;show her&mdash;till the sound of horses'
+      hoofs roused him, and, leaning from his window, he saw her riding forth
+      with Val. It was clear that she wasted no time, but the sight filled him
+      with grief. He wasted his. If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy,
+      he might have been asked to go too. And from his window he sat and watched
+      them disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge
+      once more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down. 'Silly
+      brute!' he thought; 'I always miss my chances.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why couldn't he be self-confident and ready? And, leaning his chin
+      on his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her. A week-end
+      was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it. Did he know any
+      one except himself who would have been such a flat? He did not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He dressed for dinner early, and was first down. He would miss no more.
+      But he missed Fleur, who came down last. He sat opposite her at dinner,
+      and it was terrible&mdash;impossible to say anything for fear of saying
+      the wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her in the only
+      natural way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one with whom in fancy
+      he had already been over the hills and far away; conscious, too, all the
+      time, that he must seem to her, to all of them, a dumb gawk. Yes, it was
+      terrible! And she was talking so well&mdash;swooping with swift wing this
+      way and that. Wonderful how she had learned an art which he found so
+      disgustingly difficult. She must think him hopeless indeed!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister's eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged
+      him at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and eager,
+      seeming to say, &ldquo;Oh! for goodness' sake!&rdquo; obliged him to
+      look at Val, where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet&mdash;that, at
+      least, had no eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon is going to be a farmer,&rdquo; he heard Holly say; &ldquo;a
+      farmer and a poet.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow just
+      like their father's, laughed, and felt better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val recounted the incident of Monsieur Prosper Profond; nothing could have
+      been more favourable, for, in relating it, he regarded Holly, who in turn
+      regarded him, while Fleur seemed to be regarding with a slight frown some
+      thought of her own, and Jon was really free to look at her at last. She
+      had on a white frock, very simple and well made; her arms were bare, and
+      her hair had a white rose in it. In just that swift moment of free vision,
+      after such intense discomfort, Jon saw her sublimated, as one sees in the
+      dark a slender white fruit-tree; caught her like a verse of poetry flashed
+      before the eyes of the mind, or a tune which floats out in the distance
+      and dies. He wondered giddily how old she was&mdash;she seemed so much
+      more self-possessed and experienced than himself. Why mustn't he say
+      they had met? He remembered suddenly his mother's face; puzzled,
+      hurt-looking, when she answered: &ldquo;Yes, they're relations, but
+      we don't know them.&rdquo; Impossible that his mother, who loved
+      beauty, should not admire Fleur if she did know her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone with Val after dinner, he sipped port deferentially and answered the
+      advances of this new-found brother-in-law. As to riding (always the first
+      consideration with Val) he could have the young chestnut, saddle and
+      unsaddle it himself, and generally look after it when he brought it in.
+      Jon said he was accustomed to all that at home, and saw that he had gone
+      up one in his host's estimation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur,&rdquo; said Val, &ldquo;can't ride much yet, but she's
+      keen. Of course, her father doesn't know a horse from a cart-wheel.
+      Does your Dad ride?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He used to; but now he's&mdash;you know, he's&mdash;&rdquo;
+      He stopped, so hating the word &ldquo;old.&rdquo; His father was old, and
+      yet not old; no&mdash;never!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite,&rdquo; muttered Val. &ldquo;I used to know your brother up
+      at Oxford, ages ago, the one who died in the Boer War. We had a fight in
+      New College Gardens. That was a queer business,&rdquo; he added, musing;
+      &ldquo;a good deal came out of it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon's eyes opened wide; all was pushing him toward historical
+      research, when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come along, you two,&rdquo; and he rose, his heart pushing him
+      toward something far more modern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur having declared that it was &ldquo;simply too wonderful to stay
+      indoors,&rdquo; they all went out. Moonlight was frosting the dew, and an
+      old sundial threw a long shadow. Two box hedges at right angles, dark and
+      square, barred off the orchard. Fleur turned through that angled opening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come on!&rdquo; she called. Jon glanced at the others, and
+      followed. She was running among the trees like a ghost. All was lovely and
+      foamlike above her, and there was a scent of old trunks, and of nettles.
+      She vanished. He thought he had lost her, then almost ran into her
+      standing quite still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it jolly?&rdquo; she cried, and Jon answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She reached up, twisted off a blossom and, twirling it in her fingers,
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose I can call you Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think so just.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right! But you know there's a feud between our families?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon stammered: &ldquo;Feud? Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's ever so romantic and silly. That's why I pretended
+      we hadn't met. Shall we get up early to-morrow morning and go for a
+      walk before breakfast and have it out? I hate being slow about things, don't
+      you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon murmured a rapturous assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six o'clock, then. I think your mother's beautiful&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon said fervently: &ldquo;Yes, she is.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love all kinds of beauty,&rdquo; went on Fleur, &ldquo;when it's
+      exciting. I don't like Greek things a bit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! Not Euripides?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Euripides? Oh! no, I can't bear Greek plays; they're so
+      long. I think beauty's always swift. I like to look at one picture,
+      for instance, and then run off. I can't bear a lot of things
+      together. Look!&rdquo; She held up her blossom in the moonlight. &ldquo;That's
+      better than all the orchard, I think.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, suddenly, with her other hand she caught Jon's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of all things in the world, don't you think caution's
+      the most awful? Smell the moonlight!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She thrust the blossom against his face; Jon agreed giddily that of all
+      things in the world caution was the worst, and bending over, kissed the
+      hand which held his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's nice and old-fashioned,&rdquo; said Fleur calmly.
+      &ldquo;You're frightfully silent, Jon. Still I like silence when it's
+      swift.&rdquo; She let go his hand. &ldquo;Did you think I dropped my
+      handkerchief on purpose?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; cried Jon, intensely shocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I did, of course. Let's get back, or they'll
+      think we're doing this on purpose too.&rdquo; And again she ran like
+      a ghost among the trees. Jon followed, with love in his heart, Spring in
+      his heart, and over all the moonlit white unearthly blossom. They came out
+      where they had gone in, Fleur walking demurely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's quite wonderful in there,&rdquo; she said dreamily to
+      Holly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon preserved silence, hoping against hope that she might be thinking it
+      swift.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She bade him a casual and demure good-night, which made him think he had
+      been dreaming....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her bedroom Fleur had flung off her gown, and, wrapped in a shapeless
+      garment, with the white flower still in her hair, she looked like a
+      mousme, sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing by candlelight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DEAREST CHERRY,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe I'm in love. I've got it in the neck, only
+      the feeling is really lower down. He's a second cousin-such a child,
+      about six months older and ten years younger than I am. Boys always fall
+      in love with their seniors, and girls with their juniors or with old men
+      of forty. Don't laugh, but his eyes are the truest things I ever
+      saw; and he's quite divinely silent! We had a most romantic first
+      meeting in London under the Vospovitch Juno. And now he's sleeping
+      in the next room and the moonlight's on the blossom; and to-morrow
+      morning, before anybody's awake, we're going to walk off into
+      Down fairyland. There's a feud between our families, which makes it
+      really exciting. Yes! and I may have to use subterfuge and come on you for
+      invitations&mdash;if so, you'll know why! My father doesn't
+      want us to know each other, but I can't help that. Life's too
+      short. He's got the most beautiful mother, with lovely silvery hair
+      and a young face with dark eyes. I'm staying with his sister&mdash;who
+      married my cousin; it's all mixed up, but I mean to pump her
+      to-morrow. We've often talked about love being a spoil-sport; well,
+      that's all tosh, it's the beginning of sport, and the sooner
+      you feel it, my dear, the better for you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon (not simplified spelling, but short for Jolyon, which is a name
+      in my family, they say) is the sort that lights up and goes out; about
+      five feet ten, still growing, and I believe he's going to be a poet.
+      If you laugh at me I've done with you forever. I perceive all sorts
+      of difficulties, but you know when I really want a thing I get it. One of
+      the chief effects of love is that you see the air sort of inhabited, like
+      seeing a face in the moon; and you feel&mdash;you feel dancey and soft at
+      the same time, with a funny sensation&mdash;like a continual first sniff
+      of orange&mdash;blossom&mdash;Just above your stays. This is my first, and
+      I feel as if it were going to be my last, which is absurd, of course, by
+      all the laws of Nature and morality. If you mock me I will smite you, and
+      if you tell anybody I will never forgive you. So much so, that I almost
+      don't think I'll send this letter. Anyway, I'll sleep
+      over it. So good-night, my Cherry&mdash;oh!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;FLEUR.&rdquo; <a name="link2H_4_0104" id="link2H_4_0104">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.&mdash;IDYLL ON GRASS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When those two young Forsytes emerged from the chine lane, and set their
+      faces east toward the sun, there was not a cloud in heaven, and the Downs
+      were dewy. They had come at a good bat up the slope and were a little out
+      of breath; if they had anything to say they did not say it, but marched in
+      the early awkwardness of unbreakfasted morning under the songs of the
+      larks. The stealing out had been fun, but with the freedom of the tops the
+      sense of conspiracy ceased, and gave place to dumbness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've made one blooming error,&rdquo; said Fleur, when they
+      had gone half a mile. &ldquo;I'm hungry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon produced a stick of chocolate. They shared it and their tongues were
+      loosened. They discussed the nature of their homes and previous
+      existences, which had a kind of fascinating unreality up on that lonely
+      height. There remained but one thing solid in Jon's past&mdash;his
+      mother; but one thing solid in Fleur's&mdash;her father; and of
+      these figures, as though seen in the distance with disapproving faces,
+      they spoke little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Down dipped and rose again toward Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of far
+      sea came into view, a sparrow-hawk hovered in the sun's eye so that
+      the blood-nourished brown of his wings gleamed nearly red. Jon had a
+      passion for birds, and an aptitude for sitting very still to watch them;
+      keen-sighted, and with a memory for what interested him, on birds he was
+      almost worth listening to. But in Chanctonbury Ring there were none&mdash;its
+      great beech temple was empty of life, and almost chilly at this early
+      hour; they came out willingly again into the sun on the far side. It was
+      Fleur's turn now. She spoke of dogs, and the way people treated
+      them. It was wicked to keep them on chains! She would like to flog people
+      who did that. Jon was astonished to find her so humanitarian. She knew a
+      dog, it seemed, which some farmer near her home kept chained up at the end
+      of his chicken run, in all weathers, till it had almost lost its voice
+      from barking!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the misery is,&rdquo; she said vehemently, &ldquo;that if the
+      poor thing didn't bark at every one who passes it wouldn't be
+      kept there. I do think men are cunning brutes. I've let it go twice,
+      on the sly; it's nearly bitten me both times, and then it goes
+      simply mad with joy; but it always runs back home at last, and they chain
+      it up again. If I had my way, I'd chain that man up.&rdquo; Jon saw
+      her teeth and her eyes gleam. &ldquo;I'd brand him on his forehead
+      with the word 'Brute'. that would teach him!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon agreed that it would be a good remedy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's their sense of property,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;which
+      makes people chain things. The last generation thought of nothing but
+      property; and that's why there was the War.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Fleur, &ldquo;I never thought of that. Your people
+      and mine quarrelled about property. And anyway we've all got it&mdash;at
+      least, I suppose your people have.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, luckily; I don't suppose I shall be any good at
+      making money.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you were, I don't believe I should like you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon slipped his hand tremulously under her arm. Fleur looked straight
+      before her and chanted:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon, Jon, the farmer's son, Stole a pig, and away he run!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon's arm crept round her waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is rather sudden,&rdquo; said Fleur calmly; &ldquo;do you
+      often do it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon dropped his arm. But when she laughed his arm stole back again; and
+      Fleur began to sing:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O who will oer the downs so free, O who will with me ride? O who
+      will up and follow me&mdash;-&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sing, Jon!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon sang. The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning church
+      far away over in Steyning. They went on from tune to tune, till Fleur
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God! I am hungry now!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I am sorry!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked round into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon, you're rather a darling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she pressed his hand against her waist. Jon almost reeled from
+      happiness. A yellow-and-white dog coursing a hare startled them apart.
+      They watched the two vanish down the slope, till Fleur said with a sigh:
+      &ldquo;He'll never catch it, thank goodness! What's the time?
+      Mine's stopped. I never wound it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon looked at his watch. &ldquo;By Jove!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;mine's
+      stopped; too.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked on again, but only hand in hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the grass is dry,&rdquo; said Fleur, &ldquo;let's sit down
+      for half a minute.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon took off his coat, and they shared it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smell! Actually wild thyme!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his arm round her waist again, they sat some minutes in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are goats!&rdquo; cried Fleur, jumping up; &ldquo;we shall be
+      most fearfully late, and look so silly, and put them on their guard. Look
+      here, Jon We only came out to get an appetite for breakfast, and lost our
+      way. See?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's serious; there'll be a stopper put on us. Are you
+      a good liar?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe not very; but I can try.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur frowned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I realize that they don't
+      mean us to be friends.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told you why.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that's silly.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; but you don't know my father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose he's fearfully fond of you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, I'm an only child. And so are you&mdash;of your
+      mother. Isn't it a bore? There's so much expected of one. By
+      the time they've done expecting, one's as good as dead.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; muttered Jon, &ldquo;life's beastly short. One
+      wants to live forever, and know everything.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And love everybody?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; cried Jon; &ldquo;I only want to love once&mdash;you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed! You're coming on! Oh! Look! There's the
+      chalk-pit; we can't be very far now. Let's run.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon followed, wondering fearfully if he had offended her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chalk-pit was full of sunshine and the murmuration of bees. Fleur
+      flung back her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;in case of accidents, you may give me
+      one kiss, Jon,&rdquo; and she pushed her cheek forward. With ecstasy he
+      kissed that hot soft cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, remember! We lost our way; and leave it to me as much as you
+      can. I'm going to be rather beastly to you; it's safer; try
+      and be beastly to me!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon shook his head. &ldquo;That's impossible.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just to please me; till five o'clock, at all events.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anybody will be able to see through it,&rdquo; said Jon gloomily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, do your best. Look! There they are! Wave your hat! Oh! you
+      haven't got one. Well, I'll cooee! Get a little away from me,
+      and look sulky.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Five minutes later, entering the house and doing his utmost to look sulky,
+      Jon heard her clear voice in the dining-room:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I'm simply ravenous! He's going to be a farmer&mdash;and
+      he loses his way! The boy's an idiot!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0105" id="link2H_4_0105">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX. GOYA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Lunch was over and Soames mounted to the picture-gallery in his house near
+      Mapleduram. He had what Annette called &ldquo;a grief.&rdquo; Fleur was
+      not yet home. She had been expected on Wednesday; had wired that it would
+      be Friday; and again on Friday that it would be Sunday afternoon; and here
+      were her aunt, and her cousins the Cardigans, and this fellow Profond, and
+      everything flat as a pancake for the want of her. He stood before his
+      Gauguin&mdash;sorest point of his collection. He had bought the ugly great
+      thing with two early Matisses before the War, because there was such a
+      fuss about those Post-Impressionist chaps. He was wondering whether
+      Profond would take them off his hands&mdash;the fellow seemed not to know
+      what to do with his money&mdash;when he heard his sister's voice
+      say: &ldquo;I think that's a horrid thing, Soames,&rdquo; and saw
+      that Winifred had followed him up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! you do?&rdquo; he said dryly; &ldquo;I gave five hundred for
+      it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fancy! Women aren't made like that even if they are black.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames uttered a glum laugh. &ldquo;You didn't come up to tell me
+      that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Do you know that Jolyon's boy is staying with Val and his
+      wife?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames spun round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; drawled Winifred; &ldquo;he's gone to live with
+      them there while he learns farming.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames had turned away, but her voice pursued him as he walked up and
+      down. &ldquo;I warned Val that neither of them was to be spoken to about
+      old matters.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why didn't you tell me before?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred shrugged her substantial shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur does what she likes. You've always spoiled her.
+      Besides, my dear boy, what's the harm?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The harm!&rdquo; muttered Soames. &ldquo;Why, she&mdash;&rdquo; he
+      checked himself. The Juno, the handkerchief, Fleur's eyes, her
+      questions, and now this delay in her return&mdash;the symptoms seemed to
+      him so sinister that, faithful to his nature, he could not part with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you take too much care,&rdquo; said Winifred. &ldquo;If I
+      were you, I should tell her of that old matter. It's no good
+      thinking that girls in these days are as they used to be. Where they pick
+      up their knowledge I can't tell, but they seem to know everything.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over Soames' face, closely composed, passed a sort of spasm, and
+      Winifred added hastily:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't like to speak of it, I could for you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook his head. Unless there was absolute necessity the thought
+      that his adored daughter should learn of that old scandal hurt his pride
+      too much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;not yet. Never if I can help it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense, my dear. Think what people are!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Twenty years is a long time,&rdquo; muttered Soames. &ldquo;Outside
+      our family, who's likely to remember?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred was silenced. She inclined more and more to that peace and
+      quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in her youth. And,
+      since pictures always depressed her, she soon went down again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya and
+      the copy of the fresco &ldquo;La Vendimia.&rdquo; His acquisition of the
+      real Goya rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested interests
+      and passions which mesh the bright-winged fly of human life. The real Goya's
+      noble owner's ancestor had come into possession of it during some
+      Spanish war&mdash;it was in a word loot. The noble owner had remained in
+      ignorance of its value until in the nineties an enterprising critic
+      discovered that a Spanish painter named Goya was a genius. It was only a
+      fair Goya, but almost unique in England, and the noble owner became a
+      marked man. Having many possessions and that aristocratic culture which,
+      independent of mere sensuous enjoyment, is founded on the sounder
+      principle that one must know everything and be fearfully interested in
+      life, he had fully intended to keep an article which contributed to his
+      reputation while he was alive, and to leave it to the nation after he was
+      dead. Fortunately for Soames, the House of Lords was violently attacked in
+      1909, and the noble owner became alarmed and angry. 'If,' he
+      said to himself, 'they think they can have it both ways they are
+      very much mistaken. So long as they leave me in quiet enjoyment the nation
+      can have some of my pictures at my death. But if the nation is going to
+      bait me, and rob me like this, I'm damned if I won't sell the
+      lot. They can't have my private property and my public spirit-both.'
+      He brooded in this fashion for several months till one morning, after
+      reading the speech of a certain statesman, he telegraphed to his agent to
+      come down and bring Bodkin. On going over the collection Bodkin, than
+      whose opinion on market values none was more sought, pronounced that with
+      a free hand to sell to America, Germany, and other places where there was
+      an interest in art, a lot more money could be made than by selling in
+      England. The noble owner's public spirit&mdash;he said&mdash;was
+      well known but the pictures were unique. The noble owner put this opinion
+      in his pipe and smoked it for a year. At the end of that time he read
+      another speech by the same statesman, and telegraphed to his agents:
+      &ldquo;Give Bodkin a free hand.&rdquo; It was at this juncture that Bodkin
+      conceived the idea which saved the Goya and two other unique pictures for
+      the native country of the noble owner. With one hand Bodkin proffered the
+      pictures to the foreign market, with the other he formed a list of private
+      British collectors. Having obtained what he considered the highest
+      possible bids from across the seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the
+      private British collectors, and invited them, of their public spirit, to
+      outbid. In three instances (including the Goya) out of twenty-one he was
+      successful. And why? One of the private collectors made buttons&mdash;he
+      had made so many that he desired that his wife should be called Lady
+      &ldquo;Buttons.&rdquo; He therefore bought a unique picture at great cost,
+      and gave it to the nation. It was &ldquo;part,&rdquo; his friends said,
+      &ldquo;of his general game.&rdquo; The second of the private collectors
+      was an Americophobe, and bought an unique picture to &ldquo;spite the
+      damned Yanks.&rdquo; The third of the private collectors was Soames, who&mdash;more
+      sober than either of the, others&mdash;bought after a visit to Madrid,
+      because he was certain that Goya was still on the up grade. Goya was not
+      booming at the moment, but he would come again; and, looking at that
+      portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque in its directness, but with its own queer
+      sharp beauty of paint, he was perfectly satisfied still that he had made
+      no error, heavy though the price had been&mdash;heaviest he had ever paid.
+      And next to it was hanging the copy of &ldquo;La Vendimia.&rdquo; There
+      she was&mdash;the little wretch&mdash;looking back at him in her dreamy
+      mood, the mood he loved best because he felt so much safer when she looked
+      like that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his nostrils,
+      and a voice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That Belgian chap, whose mother&mdash;as if Flemish blood were not enough&mdash;had
+      been Armenian! Subduing a natural irritation, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you a judge of pictures?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I've got a few myself.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any Post-Impressionists?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es, I rather like them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think of this?&rdquo; said Soames, pointing to the
+      Gauguin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rather fine, I think,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;do you want to sell
+      it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames checked his instinctive &ldquo;Not particularly&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      would not chaffer with this alien.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want for it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I gave.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond. &ldquo;I'll be glad
+      to take that small picture. Post-Impressionists&mdash;they're awful
+      dead, but they're amusin'. I don' care for pictures
+      much, but I've got some, just a small lot.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you care for?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty
+      nuts.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're young,&rdquo; said Soames. If the fellow must make a
+      generalization, he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked
+      solidity!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don' worry,&rdquo; replied Monsieur Profond smiling;
+      &ldquo;we're born, and we die. Half the world's starvin'.
+      I feed a small lot of babies out in my mother's country; but what's
+      the use? Might as well throw my money in the river.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya. He didn't
+      know what the fellow wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall I make my cheque for?&rdquo; pursued Monsieur Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five hundred,&rdquo; said Soames shortly; &ldquo;but I don't
+      want you to take it if you don't care for it more than that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's all right,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond; &ldquo;I'll
+      be 'appy to 'ave that picture.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold. Soames
+      watched the process uneasily. How on earth had the fellow known that he
+      wanted to sell that picture? Monsieur Profond held out the cheque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The English are awful funny about pictures,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;So
+      are the French, so are my people. They're all awful funny.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand you,&rdquo; said Soames stiffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like hats,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond enigmatically,
+      &ldquo;small or large, turnin' up or down&mdash;just the fashion.
+      Awful funny.&rdquo; And, smiling, he drifted out of the gallery again,
+      blue and solid like the smoke of his excellent cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
+      ownership had been called in question. 'He's a cosmopolitan,'
+      he thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette,
+      and saunter down the lawn toward the river. What his wife saw in the
+      fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak her
+      language; and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have
+      called a &ldquo;small doubt&rdquo; whether Annette was not too handsome to
+      be walking with any one so &ldquo;cosmopolitan.&rdquo; Even at that
+      distance he could see the blue fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out
+      in the quiet sunlight; and his grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat&mdash;the
+      fellow was a dandy! And he could see the quick turn of his wife's
+      head, so very straight on her desirable neck and shoulders. That turn of
+      her neck always seemed to him a little too showy, and in the &ldquo;Queen
+      of all I survey&rdquo; manner&mdash;not quite distinguished. He watched
+      them walk along the path at the bottom of the garden. A young man in
+      flannels joined them down there&mdash;a Sunday caller no doubt, from up
+      the river. He went back to his Goya. He was still staring at that replica
+      of Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news, when his wife's
+      voice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Michael Mont, Soames. You invited him to see your pictures.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne.
+      Jolly day, isn't it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his
+      visitor. The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly&mdash;he
+      seemed always grinning. Why didn't he grow the rest of those idiotic
+      little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon? What on
+      earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with these
+      tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers? Ugh! Affected young idiots! In
+      other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very clean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Happy to see you!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became
+      transfixed. &ldquo;I say!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;'some'
+      picture!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to the
+      Goya copy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said dryly, &ldquo;that's not a Goya. It's
+      a copy. I had it painted because it reminded me of my daughter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jove! I thought I knew the face, sir. Is she here?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She'll be in after tea,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Shall we go
+      round the pictures?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Soames began that round which never tired him. He had not anticipated
+      much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an original, but as
+      they passed from section to section, period to period, he was startled by
+      the young man's frank and relevant remarks. Natively shrewd himself,
+      and even sensuous beneath his mask, Soames had not spent thirty-eight
+      years over his one hobby without knowing something more about pictures
+      than their market values. He was, as it were, the missing link between the
+      artist and the commercial public. Art for art's sake and all that,
+      of course, was cant. But aesthetics and good taste were necessary. The
+      appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what gave a work of art
+      its permanent market value, or in other words made it &ldquo;a work of
+      art.&rdquo; There was no real cleavage. And he was sufficiently accustomed
+      to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by one who did not
+      hesitate to say of Mauve: &ldquo;Good old haystacks!&rdquo; or of James
+      Maris: &ldquo;Didn't he just paint and paper 'em! Mathew was
+      the real swell, sir; you could dig into his surfaces!&rdquo; It was after
+      the young man had whistled before a Whistler, with the words, &ldquo;D'you
+      think he ever really saw a naked woman, sir?&rdquo; that Soames remarked:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I, sir? I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that. Then
+      in the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock Exchange, snug and
+      warm and just noisy enough. But the Peace knocked that, shares seem off,
+      don't they? I've only been demobbed about a year. What do you
+      recommend, sir?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you got money?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; answered the young man, &ldquo;I've got a
+      father; I kept him alive during the War, so he's bound to keep me
+      alive now. Though, of course, there's the question whether he ought
+      to be allowed to hang on to his property. What do you think about that,
+      sir?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet. He's
+      got land, you know; it's a fatal disease.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my real Goya,&rdquo; said Soames dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By George! He was a swell. I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled
+      me middle stump. A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace.
+      He made no compromise with the public taste. That old boy was 'some'
+      explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day. Couldn't
+      he just paint! He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you think?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no Velasquez,&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man stared. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;only nations or
+      profiteers can afford him, I suppose. I say, why shouldn't all the
+      bankrupt nations sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the
+      profiteers by force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture
+      by an Old Master&mdash;see schedule&mdash;must hang it in a public
+      gallery? There seems something in that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall we go down to tea?&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull. 'He's
+      not dense,' thought Soames, following him off the premises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original &ldquo;line,&rdquo;
+      and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to admiration
+      the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the inglenook below.
+      He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice to the sunlight
+      filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of brass, the
+      old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea; justice to
+      Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the fair Spaniard
+      in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that rare type; to
+      Winifred's grey-haired, corseted solidity; to Soames, of a certain
+      grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the vivacious Michael Mont, pointed
+      in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance, growing a little
+      stout; to Prosper Profond, with his expression as who should say, &ldquo;Well,
+      Mr. Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small party?&rdquo;
+      finally, to Jack Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity
+      betraying the moving principle: &ldquo;I'm English, and I live to be
+      fit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly one
+      day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man&mdash;they
+      were so dull&mdash;should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had
+      so destroyed all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to
+      rest with ten thousand other Englishmen without knowing the difference
+      from the one she had chosen to repose beside. &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she would
+      say of him, in her &ldquo;amusing&rdquo; way, &ldquo;Jack keeps himself so
+      fearfully fit; he's never had a day's illness in his life. He
+      went right through the War without a finger-ache. You really can't
+      imagine how fit he is!&rdquo; Indeed, he was so &ldquo;fit&rdquo; that he
+      couldn't see when she was flirting, which was such a comfort in a
+      way. All the same she was quite fond of him, so far as one could be of a
+      sports-machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after his pattern.
+      Her eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with Prosper Profond.
+      There was no &ldquo;small&rdquo; sport or game which Monsieur Profond had
+      not played at too, it seemed, from skittles to tarpon-fishing, and worn
+      out every one. Imogen would sometimes wish that they had worn out Jack,
+      who continued to play at them and talk of them with the simple zeal of a
+      school-girl learning hockey; at the age of Great-uncle Timothy she well
+      knew that Jack would be playing carpet golf in her bedroom, and &ldquo;wiping
+      somebody's eye.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was telling them now how he had &ldquo;pipped the pro&mdash;a charmin'
+      fellow, playin' a very good game,&rdquo; at the last hole this
+      morning; and how he had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying
+      to incite Prosper Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea&mdash;do
+      him good&mdash;&ldquo;keep him fit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what's the use of keepin' fit?&rdquo; said Monsieur
+      Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; murmured Michael Mont, &ldquo;what do you keep fit
+      for?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jack,&rdquo; cried Imogen, enchanted, &ldquo;what do you keep fit
+      for?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jack Cardigan stared with all his health. The questions were like the buzz
+      of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away. During the War,
+      of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that it was over he either
+      did not know, or shrank in delicacy from explanation of his moving
+      principle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he's right,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly,
+      &ldquo;there's nothin' left but keepin' fit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed unanswered,
+      but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;That's the great discovery of
+      the War. We all thought we were progressing&mdash;now we know we're
+      only changing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the worse,&rdquo; said Monsieur Profond genially.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How you are cheerful, Prosper!&rdquo; murmured Annette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You come and play tennis!&rdquo; said Jack Cardigan; &ldquo;you've
+      got the hump. We'll soon take that down. D'you play, Mr. Mont?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hit the ball about, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of preparation
+      for the future which guided his existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When Fleur comes&mdash;&rdquo; he heard Jack Cardigan say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah! and why didn't she come? He passed through drawing-room, hall,
+      and porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car. All
+      was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the air. There
+      were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by the sunlight.
+      Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had waited in such agony
+      with her life and her mother's balanced in his hands, came to him
+      sharply. He had saved her then, to be the flower of his life. And now! was
+      she going to give him trouble&mdash;pain&mdash;give him trouble? He did
+      not like the look of things! A blackbird broke in on his reverie with an
+      evening song&mdash;a great big fellow up in that acacia-tree. Soames had
+      taken quite an interest in his birds of late years; he and Fleur would
+      walk round and watch them; her eyes were sharp as needles, and she knew
+      every nest. He saw her dog, a retriever, lying on the drive in a patch of
+      sunlight, and called to him. &ldquo;Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!&rdquo;
+      The dog came slowly with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid a
+      pat on his head. The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur for
+      him; no more, no less. 'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too
+      fond!' He was like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea. Uninsured
+      again&mdash;as in that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb
+      and jealous in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman&mdash;his
+      first wife&mdash;the mother of this infernal boy. Ah! There was the car at
+      last! It drew up, it had luggage, but no Fleur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Walking all those miles? Soames stared. The man's face had the
+      beginning of a smile on it. What was he grinning at? And very quickly he
+      turned, saying, &ldquo;All right, Sims!&rdquo; and went into the house. He
+      mounted to the picture-gallery once more. He had from there a view of the
+      river bank, and stood with his eyes fixed on it, oblivious of the fact
+      that it would be an hour at least before her figure showed there. Walking
+      up! And that fellow's grin! The boy&mdash;! He turned abruptly from
+      the window. He couldn't spy on her. If she wanted to keep things
+      from him&mdash;she must; he could not spy on her. His heart felt empty,
+      and bitterness mounted from it into his very mouth. The staccato shouts of
+      Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball, the laugh of young Mont rose in the
+      stillness and came in. He hoped they were making that chap Profond run.
+      And the girl in &ldquo;La Vendimia&rdquo; stood with her arm akimbo and
+      her dreamy eyes looking past him. 'I've done all I could for
+      you,' he thought, 'since you were no higher than my knee. You
+      aren't going to&mdash;to&mdash;hurt me, are you?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to tone
+      down. 'There's no real life in it,' thought Soames.
+      'Why doesn't she come?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0106" id="link2H_4_0106">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.&mdash;TRIO
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth
+      generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end prolonged unto the
+      ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to
+      snapping-point. Never had Fleur been so &ldquo;fine,&rdquo; Holly so
+      watchful, Val so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed. What he
+      learned of farming in that week might have been balanced on the point of a
+      penknife and puffed off. He, whose nature was essentially averse from
+      intrigue, and whose adoration of Fleur disposed him to think that any need
+      for concealing it was &ldquo;skittles,&rdquo; chafed and fretted, yet
+      obeyed, taking what relief he could in the few moments when they were
+      alone. On Thursday, while they were standing in the bay window of the
+      drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if
+      you were to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me
+      down, and just get back here by the last train, after. You were going home
+      anyway, weren't you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything to be with you,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;only why need I
+      pretend&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me. It's
+      serious about our people. We've simply got to be secret at present,
+      if we want to be together.&rdquo; The door was opened, and she added
+      loudly: &ldquo;You are a duffer, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge about
+      a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning out of
+      his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of Paddington
+      station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger-nail tapping on his
+      door. He rushed to it and listened. Again the sound. It was a nail. He
+      opened. Oh! What a lovely thing came in!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to show you my fancy dress,&rdquo; it said, and struck an
+      attitude at the foot of his bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door. The apparition wore
+      white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a wine-coloured
+      dress, fulled out below its slender waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a fan
+      which touched its head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This ought to be a basket of grapes,&rdquo; it whispered, &ldquo;but
+      I haven't got it here. It's my Goya dress. And this is the
+      attitude in the picture. Do you like it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a dream.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The apparition pirouetted. &ldquo;Touch it, and see.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grape colour,&rdquo; came the whisper, &ldquo;all grapes&mdash;La
+      Vendimia&mdash;the vintage.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up,
+      with adoring eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Jon,&rdquo; it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted
+      again, and, gliding out, was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed. How
+      long he stayed like that he did not know. The little noises&mdash;of the
+      tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling&mdash;as in a dream&mdash;went
+      on about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled and
+      whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air. And his
+      forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place between the
+      brows, like the imprint of a flower. Love filled his soul, that love of
+      boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the
+      down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory&mdash;a
+      searing passion&mdash;a humdrum mateship&mdash;or, once in many times,
+      vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to show
+      what long marches lay between him and his great-great-grandfather, the
+      first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea. Jon was sensitive as a girl, more
+      sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the day; imaginative as one of his
+      half-sister June's &ldquo;lame duck&rdquo; painters; affectionate as
+      a son of his father and his mother naturally would be. And yet, in his
+      inner tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a
+      secret tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination
+      not to know when he was beaten. Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys
+      get a bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark,
+      and been but normally unhappy there. Only with his mother had he, up till
+      then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home to Robin
+      Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said that he must
+      not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never yet kept
+      anything, must not even tell her that they had met again, unless he found
+      that she knew already. So intolerable did this seem to him that he was
+      very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in London. And the
+      first thing his mother said to him was:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's
+      there, Jon. What is she like on second thoughts?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! awfully jolly, Mum.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her arm pressed his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to falsify
+      Fleur's fears and to release his soul. He turned to look at her, but
+      something in her smiling face&mdash;something which only he perhaps would
+      have caught&mdash;stopped the words bubbling up in him. Could fear go with
+      a smile? If so, there was fear in her face. And out of Jon tumbled quite
+      other words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs. Talking fast, he waited
+      for her to come back to Fleur. But she did not. Nor did his father mention
+      her, though of course he, too, must know. What deprivation, and killing of
+      reality was in his silence about Fleur&mdash;when he was so full of her;
+      when his mother was so full of Jon, and his father so full of his mother!
+      And so the trio spent the evening of that Saturday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he liked
+      best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up where his
+      fingers had run through it. He gazed at his mother while she played, but
+      he saw Fleur&mdash;Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the sunlit
+      gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering, stooping,
+      kissing his forehead. Once, while he listened, he forgot himself and
+      glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was Dad looking like
+      that for? The expression on his face was so sad and puzzling. It filled
+      him with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and went and sat on the arm
+      of his father's chair. From there he could not see his face; and
+      again he saw Fleur&mdash;in his mother's hands, slim and white on
+      the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair; and down the
+      long room in the open window where the May night walked outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he went up to bed his mother came into his room. She stood at the
+      window, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
+      wonderfully. I always think they look beautiful under a dropping moon. I
+      wish you had known your grandfather, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you married to father when he was alive?&rdquo; asked Jon
+      suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, dear; he died in '92&mdash;very old&mdash;eighty-five, I
+      think.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is Father like him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One of June's 'lame ducks.' But it's quite
+      good.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm. &ldquo;Tell me about
+      the family quarrel, Mum.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt her arm quivering. &ldquo;No, dear; that's for your Father
+      some day, if he thinks fit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was serious,&rdquo; said Jon, with a catch in his breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; And there was a silence, during which neither knew
+      whether the arm or the hand within it were quivering most.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some people,&rdquo; said Irene softly, &ldquo;think the moon on her
+      back is evil; to me she's always lovely. Look at those cypress
+      shadows! Jon, Father says we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months.
+      Would you like?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp and so
+      confused. Italy with his mother! A fortnight ago it would have been
+      perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that the sudden
+      suggestion had to do with Fleur. He stammered out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes; only&mdash;I don't know. Ought I&mdash;now I've
+      just begun? I'd like to think it over.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice answered, cool and gentle:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, dear; think it over. But better now than when you've
+      begun farming seriously. Italy with you! It would be nice!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think you ought to leave Father?&rdquo; he said feebly,
+      feeling very mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least
+      before you settle down to anything.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes&mdash;he knew&mdash;that
+      his father and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he
+      himself. They wanted to keep him from Fleur. His heart hardened. And, as
+      if she felt that process going on, his mother said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, darling. Have a good sleep and think it over. But it
+      would be lovely!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face. Jon stood
+      feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty little boy; sore
+      because he was not loving, and because he was justified in his own eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed through
+      the dressing-room between it and her husband's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will think it over, Jolyon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better let me tell him, and have done with it. After all,
+      Jon has the instincts of a gentleman. He has only to understand&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only! He can't understand; that's impossible.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe I could have at his age.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene caught his hand. &ldquo;You were always more of a realist than Jon;
+      and never so innocent.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's true,&rdquo; said Jolyon. &ldquo;It's queer, isn't
+      it? You and I would tell our stories to the world without a particle of
+      shame; but our own boy stumps us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've never cared whether the world approves or not.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon would not disapprove of us!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Jolyon, yes. He's in love, I feel he's in love. And
+      he'd say: 'My mother once married without love! How could she
+      have!' It'll seem to him a crime! And so it was!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! why on earth are we born young? Now, if only we were born old
+      and grew younger year by year, we should understand how things happen, and
+      drop all our cursed intolerance. But you know if the boy is really in
+      love, he won't forget, even if he goes to Italy. We're a
+      tenacious breed; and he'll know by instinct why he's being
+      sent. Nothing will really cure him but the shock of being told.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me try, anyway.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon stood a moment without speaking. Between this devil and this deep
+      sea&mdash;the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of losing his
+      wife for two months&mdash;he secretly hoped for the devil; yet if she
+      wished for the deep sea he must put up with it. After all, it would be
+      training for that departure from which there would be no return. And,
+      taking her in his arms, he kissed her eyes, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As you will, my love.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0107" id="link2H_4_0107">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.&mdash;DUET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That &ldquo;small&rdquo; emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened
+      with extinction. Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his
+      time and a full week after, as it seemed to him. He stood at the appointed
+      bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris tweed suit
+      exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart. He read the names
+      of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at last, to avoid being
+      regarded with suspicion by the book-stall clerk. It was called &ldquo;The
+      Heart of the Trail!&rdquo; which must mean something, though it did not
+      seem to. He also bought &ldquo;The Lady's Mirror&rdquo; and &ldquo;The
+      Landsman.&rdquo; Every minute was an hour long, and full of horrid
+      imaginings. After nineteen had passed, he saw her with a bag and a porter
+      wheeling her luggage. She came swiftly; she came cool. She greeted him as
+      if he were a brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First class,&rdquo; she said to the porter, &ldquo;corner seats;
+      opposite.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon admired her frightful self-possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't we get a carriage to ourselves,&rdquo; he whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No good; it's a stopping train. After Maidenhead perhaps.
+      Look natural, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon screwed his features into a scowl. They got in&mdash;with two other
+      beasts!&mdash;oh! heaven! He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his
+      confusion. The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there, and
+      looking as if he knew all about it into the bargain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur hid herself behind &ldquo;The Lady's Mirror.&rdquo; Jon
+      imitated her behind &ldquo;The Landsman.&rdquo; The train started. Fleur
+      let &ldquo;The Lady's Mirror&rdquo; fall and leaned forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's seemed about fifteen days.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look natural,&rdquo; murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of
+      laughter. It hurt him. How could he look natural with Italy hanging over
+      him? He had meant to break it to her gently, but now he blurted it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her lips. &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+      she said. It was all, but it was much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing
+      ready for riposte. It came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must go!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go?&rdquo; said Jon in a strangled voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;two months&mdash;it's ghastly.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Fleur, &ldquo;six weeks. You'll have
+      forgotten me by then. We'll meet in the National Gallery the day
+      after you get back.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose you've forgotten me,&rdquo; he muttered into the
+      noise of the train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some other beast&mdash;&rdquo; murmured Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her foot touched his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No other beast,&rdquo; she said, lifting &ldquo;The Lady's
+      Mirror.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at
+      all.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never let go,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;do you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon shook his head vehemently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Will you write to me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; but you can&mdash;to my Club.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a Club; she was wonderful!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you pump Holly?&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but I got nothing. I didn't dare pump hard.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can it be?&rdquo; cried Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall find out all right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A long silence followed till Fleur said: &ldquo;This is Maidenhead; stand
+      by, Jon!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train stopped. The remaining passenger got out. Fleur drew down her
+      blind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quick!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;Hang out! Look as much of a beast
+      as you can.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he scowled like
+      that! An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the handle. It turned, but
+      the door would not open. The train moved, the young lady darted to another
+      carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What luck!&rdquo; cried Jon. &ldquo;It Jammed.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Fleur; &ldquo;I was holding it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look out for the corridor,&rdquo; she whispered; &ldquo;and&mdash;quick!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips met his. And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten seconds,
+      Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond, that, when he was
+      again sitting opposite that demure figure, he was pale as death. He heard
+      her sigh, and the sound seemed to him the most precious he had ever heard&mdash;an
+      exquisite declaration that he meant something to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six weeks isn't really long,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and you
+      can easily make it six if you keep your head out there, and never seem to
+      think of me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't
+      you see? If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop
+      being ridiculous about it. Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain;
+      there's a girl in a Goya picture at Madrid who's like me,
+      Father says. Only she isn't&mdash;we've got a copy of her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog. &ldquo;I'll
+      make it Spain,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Mother won't mind; she's
+      never been there. And my Father thinks a lot of Goya.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, he's a painter&mdash;isn't he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only water-colour,&rdquo; said Jon, with honesty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to
+      Caversham lock and wait for me. I'll send the car home and we'll
+      walk by the towing-path.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the world well
+      lost, and one eye on the corridor. But the train seemed to run twice as
+      fast now, and its sound was almost lost in that of Jon's sighing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're getting near,&rdquo; said Fleur; &ldquo;the towing-path's
+      awfully exposed. One more! Oh! Jon, don't forget me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon answered with his kiss. And very soon, a flushed, distracted-looking
+      youth could have been seen&mdash;as they say&mdash;leaping from the train
+      and hurrying along the platform, searching his pockets for his ticket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond Caversham
+      lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure of equanimity. If
+      they had to part, he would not make a scene! A breeze by the bright river
+      threw the white side of the willow leaves up into the sunlight, and
+      followed those two with its faint rustle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy,&rdquo; said Fleur.
+      &ldquo;Did you look pretty natural as you went out?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. What is natural?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's natural to you to look seriously happy. When I first saw
+      you I thought you weren't a bit like other people.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly what I thought when I saw you. I knew at once I should
+      never love anybody else.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're absurdly young. And love's young dream is out of
+      date, Jon. Besides, it's awfully wasteful. Think of all the fun you
+      might have. You haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really. And
+      there's me. I wonder!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confusion came on Jon's spirit. How could she say such things just
+      as they were going to part?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you feel like that,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I can't go. I
+      shall tell Mother that I ought to try and work. There's always the
+      condition of the world!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The condition of the world!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;think of the people starving!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur shook her head. &ldquo;No, no, I never, never will make myself
+      miserable for nothing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing! But there's an awful state of things, and of course
+      one ought to help.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, I know all that. But you can't help people, Jon;
+      they're hopeless. When you pull them out they only get into another
+      hole. Look at them, still fighting and plotting and struggling, though
+      they're dying in heaps all the time. Idiots!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aren't you sorry for them?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! sorry&mdash;yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy
+      about it; that's no good.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each other's
+      natures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think people are brutes and idiots,&rdquo; said Fleur stubbornly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think they're poor wretches,&rdquo; said Jon. It was as if
+      they had quarrelled&mdash;and at this supreme and awful moment, with
+      parting visible out there in that last gap of the willows!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon stood still. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs trembled.
+      Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must believe in things,&rdquo; said Jon with a sort of agony;
+      &ldquo;we're all meant to enjoy life.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur laughed. &ldquo;Yes; and that's what you won't do, if
+      you don't take care. But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make
+      yourself wretched. There are lots of people like that, of course.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned. Was it Fleur
+      thus staring at the water? Jon had an unreal feeling as if he were passing
+      through the scene in a book where the lover has to choose between love and
+      duty. But just then she looked round at him. Never was anything so
+      intoxicating as that vivacious look. It acted on him exactly as the tug of
+      a chain acts on a dog&mdash;brought him up to her with his tail wagging
+      and his tongue out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't let's be silly,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;time's
+      too short. Look, Jon, you can just see where I've got to cross the
+      river. There, round the bend, where the woods begin.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the trees&mdash;and
+      felt his heart sink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mustn't dawdle any more. It's no good going beyond
+      the next hedge, it gets all open. Let's get on to it and say
+      good-bye.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge, where the
+      may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street,
+      Piccadilly. Letters there will be quite safe, and I'm almost always
+      up once a week.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon nodded. His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared straight
+      before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-day's the twenty-third of May,&rdquo; said Fleur; &ldquo;on
+      the ninth of July I shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne'
+      at three o'clock; will you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you feel as bad as I it's all right. Let those people
+      pass!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday
+      fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last of them passed the wicket gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Domesticity!&rdquo; said Fleur, and blotted herself against the
+      hawthorn hedge. The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink
+      cluster brushed her cheek. Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, Jon.&rdquo; For a second they stood with hands hard
+      clasped. Then their lips met for the third time, and when they parted
+      Fleur broke away and fled through the wicket gate. Jon stood where she had
+      left him, with his forehead against that pink cluster. Gone! For an
+      eternity&mdash;for seven weeks all but two days! And here he was, wasting
+      the last sight of her! He rushed to the gate. She was walking swiftly on
+      the heels of the straggling children. She turned her head, he saw her hand
+      make a little flitting gesture; then she sped on, and the trailing family
+      blotted her out from his view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words of a comic song&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Paddington groan-worst ever known
+         He gave a sepulchral Paddington groan&mdash;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading station. All
+      the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with &ldquo;The Heart of
+      the Trail&rdquo; open on his knee, knitting in his head a poem so full of
+      feeling that it would not rhyme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0108" id="link2H_4_0108">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII.&mdash;CAPRICE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Fleur sped on. She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and wanted all
+      her wits about her when she got in. She passed the islands, the station,
+      and hotel, and was about to take the ferry, when she saw a skiff with a
+      young man standing up in it, and holding to the bushes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Forsyte,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;let me put you across. I've
+      come on purpose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him in blank amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right, I've been having tea with your people.
+      I thought I'd save you the last bit. It's on my way, I'm
+      just off back to Pangbourne. My name's Mont. I saw you at the
+      picture-gallery&mdash;you remember&mdash;when your father invited me to
+      see his pictures.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Fleur; &ldquo;yes&mdash;the handkerchief.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped down
+      into the skiff. Still emotional, and a little out of breath, she sat
+      silent; not so the young man. She had never heard any one say so much in
+      so short a time. He told her his age, twenty-four; his weight, ten stone
+      eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his sensations
+      under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticized the Juno,
+      mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on the Goya copy,
+      said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the condition
+      of England; spoke of Monsieur Profond&mdash;or whatever his name was&mdash;as
+      &ldquo;an awful sport&rdquo;; thought her father had some &ldquo;ripping&rdquo;
+      pictures and some rather &ldquo;dug-up&rdquo;; hoped he might row down
+      again and take her on the river because he was quite trustworthy; inquired
+      her opinion of Tchekov, gave her his own; wished they could go to the
+      Russian ballet together some time&mdash;considered the name Fleur Forsyte
+      simply topping; cursed his people for giving him the name of Michael on
+      the top of Mont; outlined his father, and said that if she wanted a good
+      book she should read &ldquo;Job&rdquo;; his father was rather like Job
+      while Job still had land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Job didn't have land,&rdquo; Fleur murmured; &ldquo;he
+      only had flocks and herds and moved on.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; answered Michael Mont, &ldquo;I wish my gov'nor
+      would move on. Not that I want his land. Land's an awful bore in
+      these days, don't you think?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We never have it in my family,&rdquo; said Fleur. &ldquo;We have
+      everything else. I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental
+      farm in Dorset, because we came from there originally, but it cost him
+      more than it made him happy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he sell it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; he kept it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because nobody would buy it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good for the old boy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it wasn't good for him. Father says it soured him. His
+      name was Swithin.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a corking name!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know that we're getting farther off, not nearer? This
+      river flows.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid!&rdquo; cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; &ldquo;it's
+      good to meet a girl who's got wit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look out!&rdquo; cried Fleur. &ldquo;Your scull!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right! It's thick enough to bear a scratch.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mind sculling?&rdquo; said Fleur severely. &ldquo;I want to
+      get in.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Mont; &ldquo;but when you get in, you see, I shan't
+      see you any more to-day. Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on
+      her bed after saying her prayers. Don't you bless the day that gave
+      you a French mother, and a name like yours?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like my name, but Father gave it me. Mother wanted me called
+      Marguerite.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which is absurd. Do you mind calling me M. M. and letting me call
+      you F. F.? It's in the spirit of the age.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't mind anything, so long as I get in.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mont caught a little crab, and answered: &ldquo;That was a nasty one!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please row.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am.&rdquo; And he did for several strokes, looking at her with
+      rueful eagerness. &ldquo;Of course, you know,&rdquo; he ejaculated,
+      pausing, &ldquo;that I came to see you, not your father's pictures.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't row, I shall get out and swim.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really and truly? Then I could come in after you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and grasping
+      his hair with both hands, looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't!&rdquo; cried the irrepressible Mont. &ldquo;I know you're
+      going to say: 'Out, damned hair!'&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand. &ldquo;Good-bye, Mr.
+      M.M.!&rdquo; she called, and was gone among the rose-trees. She looked at
+      her wrist-watch and the windows of the house. It struck her as curiously
+      uninhabited. Past six! The pigeons were just gathering to roost, and
+      sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy feathers, and beyond in a
+      shower on the top boughs of the woods. The click of billiard-balls came
+      from the ingle-nook&mdash;Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a faint rustling, too,
+      from an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in this old English garden.
+      She reached the verandah and was passing in, but stopped at the sound of
+      voices from the drawing-room to her left. Mother! Monsieur Profond! From
+      behind the verandah screen which fenced the ingle-nook she heard these
+      words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't, Annette.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did Father know that he called her mother &ldquo;Annette&rdquo;? Always on
+      the side of her Father&mdash;as children are ever on one side or the other
+      in houses where relations are a little strained&mdash;she stood,
+      uncertain. Her mother was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly metallic
+      voice&mdash;one word she caught: &ldquo;Demain.&rdquo; And Profond's
+      answer: &ldquo;All right.&rdquo; Fleur frowned. A little sound came out
+      into the stillness. Then Profond's voice: &ldquo;I'm takin'
+      a small stroll.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur darted through the window into the morning-room. There he came from
+      the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn; and the click of
+      billiard-balls which, in listening for other sounds, she had ceased to
+      hear, began again. She shook herself, passed into the hall, and opened the
+      drawing-room door. Her mother was sitting on the sofa between the windows,
+      her knees crossed, her head resting on a cushion, her lips half parted,
+      her eyes half closed. She looked extraordinarily handsome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! Here you are, Fleur! Your father is beginning to fuss.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the picture-gallery. Go up!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow? I go up to London with your aunt.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you might be. Will you get me a quite plain parasol?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What colour?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Green. They're all going back, I suppose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, all; you will console your father. Kiss me, then.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead, and went
+      out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in the other corner.
+      She ran up-stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the
+      regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard
+      imposed upon herself. She claimed to regulate her own life, not those of
+      others; besides, an unerring instinct for what was likely to advantage her
+      own case was already at work. In a disturbed domestic atmosphere the heart
+      she had set on Jon would have a better chance. None the less was she
+      offended, as a flower by a crisping wind. If that man had really been
+      kissing her mother it was&mdash;serious, and her father ought to know.
+      &ldquo;Demain!&rdquo; &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; And her mother going up to
+      Town! She turned into her bedroom and hung out of the window to cool her
+      face, which had suddenly grown very hot. Jon must be at the station by
+      now! What did her father know about Jon? Probably everything&mdash;pretty
+      nearly!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time, and
+      ran up to the gallery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens&mdash;the
+      picture he loved best. He did not turn at the sound of the door, but she
+      knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt. She came up softly behind
+      him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his shoulder
+      till her cheek lay against his. It was an advance which had never yet
+      failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo;
+      he said stonily, &ldquo;so you've come!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that all,&rdquo; murmured Fleur, &ldquo;from a bad parent?&rdquo;
+      And she rubbed her cheek against his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and
+      off?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darling, it was very harmless.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Harmless! Much you know what's harmless and what isn't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur dropped her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And she went over to the window-seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet. He
+      looked very grey. 'He has nice small feet,' she thought,
+      catching his eye, at once averted from her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're my only comfort,&rdquo; said Soames suddenly, &ldquo;and
+      you go on like this.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur's heart began to beat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like what, dear?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it, might
+      have been called furtive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what I told you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don't
+      choose to have anything to do with that branch of our family.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames turned on his heel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not going into the reasons,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;you
+      ought to trust me, Fleur!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon, and
+      was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot. Unconsciously she had
+      assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of the other,
+      with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her chest, and its
+      hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her that was not
+      involuted, and yet&mdash;in spite of all&mdash;she retained a certain
+      grace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You knew my wishes,&rdquo; Soames went on, &ldquo;and yet you
+      stayed on there four days. And I suppose that boy came with you to-day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur kept her eyes on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't ask you anything,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;I make
+      no inquisition where you're concerned.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on her
+      hands. The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched, quite
+      still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-balls
+      mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack Cardigan had
+      turned the light up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will it make you any happier,&rdquo; she said suddenly, &ldquo;if I
+      promise you not to see him for say&mdash;the next six weeks?&rdquo; She
+      was not prepared for a sort of tremble in the blankness of his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Six weeks? Six years&mdash;sixty years more like. Don't
+      delude yourself, Fleur; don't delude yourself!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur turned in alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father, what is it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames came close enough to see her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that you're
+      foolish enough to have any feeling beyond caprice. That would be too much!&rdquo;
+      And he laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it is
+      deep! Oh! what is it?' And putting her hand through his arm she said
+      lightly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, of course; caprice. Only, I like my caprices and I don't
+      like yours, dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mine!&rdquo; said Soames bitterly, and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the river.
+      The trees had lost all gaiety of colour. She felt a sudden hunger for Jon's
+      face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again on hers. And pressing
+      her arms tight across her breast she forced out a little light laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O la! la! What a small fuss! as Profond would say. Father, I don't
+      like that man.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing,&rdquo; murmured Fleur; &ldquo;just caprice!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;not caprice!&rdquo; And he tore what
+      was in his hands across. &ldquo;You're right. I don't like him
+      either!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; said Fleur softly. &ldquo;There he goes! I hate his
+      shoes; they don't make any noise.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his side
+      pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced up at the
+      sky, as if saying: &ldquo;I don't think much of that small moon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur drew back. &ldquo;Isn't he a great cat?&rdquo; she whispered;
+      and the sharp click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had
+      capped the cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: &ldquo;In off the
+      red!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in his
+      beard. What was it? Oh! yes, from &ldquo;Rigoletto&rdquo;: &ldquo;Donna a
+      mobile.&rdquo; Just what he would think! She squeezed her father's
+      arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prowling!&rdquo; she muttered, as he turned the corner of the
+      house. It was past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and
+      night-still and lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent
+      clinging on the riverside air. A blackbird suddenly burst out. Jon would
+      be in London by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the Serpentine,
+      thinking of her! A little sound beside her made her turn her eyes; her
+      father was again tearing the paper in his hands. Fleur saw it was a
+      cheque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shan't sell him my Gauguin,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I don't
+      know what your aunt and Imogen see in him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or Mother.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your mother!&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Poor Father!' she thought. 'He never looks happy&mdash;not
+      really happy. I don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall
+      have to, when Jon comes back. Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to dress,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her room she had a fancy to put on her &ldquo;freak&rdquo; dress. It
+      was of gold tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at
+      the ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold
+      shoes, and a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold
+      bells, especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she pealed.
+      When she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could not see her; it
+      even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man Michael Mont would not
+      have a view. But the gong had sounded, and she went down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made a sensation in the drawing-room. Winifred thought it &ldquo;Most
+      amusing.&rdquo; Imogen was enraptured. Jack Cardigan called it &ldquo;stunning,&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;ripping,&rdquo; &ldquo;topping,&rdquo; and &ldquo;corking.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: &ldquo;That's a nice
+      small dress!&rdquo; Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at
+      her, and said nothing. It remained for her father to apply the test of
+      common sense. &ldquo;What did you put on that thing for? You're not
+      going to dance.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Caprice!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred. Jack
+      Cardigan took her mother. Prosper Profond took Imogen. Fleur went in by
+      herself, with her bells jingling....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;small&rdquo; moon had soon dropped down, and May night had
+      fallen soft and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its
+      scents the billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of
+      men and women. Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's
+      white shoulder, fit as a flea; or Timothy in his &ldquo;mausoleum,&rdquo;
+      too old for anything but baby's slumber. For so many lay awake, or
+      dreamed, teased by the criss-cross of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
+      meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see; and
+      the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones. Pheasants in the tall trees of
+      the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the gravel-pit at
+      Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the sparrows of Mayfair,
+      all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind. The Mayfly
+      filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters, scraped at her straw a
+      little; and the few night-flitting things&mdash;bats, moths, owls&mdash;were
+      vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night lay in the brain of
+      all day-time Nature, colourless and still. Men and women, alone, riding
+      the hobby-horses of anxiety or love, burned their wavering tapers of dream
+      and thought into the lonely hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled
+      chime of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
+      leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
+      rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can put
+      a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
+      emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
+      Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world which
+      had once suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not these sounds;
+      her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing from
+      railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious of his
+      forbidden image, and the sound of his voice, which was taboo. And she
+      crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of the riverside night that
+      moment when his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her cheek. Long
+      she leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings at life's
+      candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the lamp
+      on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there is
+      no open flame. But at last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting her
+      bells, drew quickly in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
+      wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken from
+      stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear such
+      sounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Caprice!' he thought. 'I can't tell. She's
+      wilful. What shall I do? Fleur!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And long into the &ldquo;small&rdquo; night he brooded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PARTc2" id="link2H_PARTc2">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART II
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0110" id="link2H_4_0110">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;MOTHER AND SON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly would
+      scarcely have been adequate. He went as a well-natured dog goes for a walk
+      with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on the lawn. He went
+      looking back at it. Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are wont to
+      sulk. But Jon had little sulkiness in his composition. He adored his
+      mother, and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy by his simply
+      saying: &ldquo;I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to
+      Italy so many times; I'd like it new to both of us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fellow was subtle besides being naive. He never forgot that he was
+      going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
+      therefore show no sign of wishing to do so. For one with so enticing a
+      mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
+      companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food, and
+      thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most travelled
+      Englishman. Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound,
+      for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could
+      concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the
+      priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros,
+      cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening
+      plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules,
+      great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a
+      fascinating land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots. Jon,
+      who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not English, was
+      often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen. He felt they
+      had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view of things than
+      himself. He confided to his mother that he must be an unsociable beast&mdash;it
+      was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk about the things people
+      did talk about. To which Irene had replied simply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Jon, I know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating what
+      few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's love.
+      Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly sensitive;
+      and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type of beauty,
+      which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which he now
+      perceived to be no such thing. Her beauty was neither English, French,
+      Spanish, nor Italian&mdash;it was special! He appreciated, too, as never
+      before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not tell, for
+      instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya picture,
+      &ldquo;La Vendimia,&rdquo; or whether she knew that he had slipped back
+      there after lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half an
+      hour, a second and third time. It was not Fleur, of course, but like
+      enough to give him heartache&mdash;so dear to lovers&mdash;remembering her
+      standing at the foot of his bed with her hand held above her head. To keep
+      a postcard reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to
+      look at became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
+      themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy. And his mother's
+      were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly caught, sitting on a
+      sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented garden on the Alhambra
+      hill, whence he ought to have been looking at the view. His mother, he had
+      thought, was examining the potted stocks between the polled acacias, when
+      her voice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to
+      conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol'
+      Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them
+      when he was in Spain in '92.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In '92&mdash;nine years before he had been born! What had been the
+      previous existences of his father and his mother? If they had a right to
+      share in his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts. He
+      looked up at her. But something in her face&mdash;a look of life
+      hard-lived, the mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and
+      suffering-seemed, with its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to
+      make curiosity impertinent. His mother must have had a wonderfully
+      interesting life; she was so beautiful, and so&mdash;so&mdash;but he could
+      not frame what he felt about her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the
+      town, at the plain all green with crops, and the ring of mountains
+      glamorous in sinking sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old
+      Moorish city, full, deep, remote&mdash;his own life as yet such a baby of
+      a thing, hopelessly ignorant and innocent! They said that in those
+      mountains to the West, which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if
+      out of a sea, Phoenicians had dwelt&mdash;a dark, strange, secret race,
+      above the land! His mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret,
+      as that Phoenician past was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and
+      whose children played and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out. He felt
+      aggrieved that she should know all about him and he nothing about her
+      except that she loved him and his father, and was beautiful. His callow
+      ignorance&mdash;he had not even had the advantage of the War, like nearly
+      everybody else!&mdash;made him small in his own eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof of
+      the town&mdash;as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and,
+      long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the hours
+      struck, and forming in his head these lines:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
+      Spanish city darkened under her white stars!
+
+     &ldquo;What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
+      Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
+      Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
+
+     &ldquo;No!  Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
+      Just his cry: 'How long?'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The word &ldquo;deprived&rdquo; seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but
+      &ldquo;bereaved&rdquo; was too final, and no other word of two syllables
+      short-long came to him, which would enable him to keep &ldquo;whose lover's
+      heart is weeping.&rdquo; It was past two by the time he had finished it,
+      and past three before he went to sleep, having said it over to himself at
+      least twenty-four times. Next day he wrote it out and enclosed it in one
+      of those letters to Fleur which he always finished before he went down, so
+      as to have his mind free and companionable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he felt a
+      sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in the eyes,
+      and sickness. The sun had touched him too affectionately. The next three
+      days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled, aching indifference to
+      all except the feel of ice on his forehead and his mother's smile.
+      She never moved from his room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance,
+      which seemed to Jon angelic. But there were moments when he was extremely
+      sorry for himself, and wished terribly that Fleur could see him. Several
+      times he took a poignant imaginary leave of her and of the earth, tears
+      oozing out of his eyes. He even prepared the message he would send to her
+      by his mother&mdash;who would regret to her dying day that she had ever
+      sought to separate them&mdash;his poor mother! He was not slow, however,
+      in perceiving that he had now his excuse for going home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Toward half-past six each evening came a &ldquo;gasgacha&rdquo; of bells&mdash;a
+      cascade of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling back
+      chime on chime. After listening to them on the fourth day he said
+      suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, darling. As soon as you're fit to travel&rdquo;
+      And at once he felt better, and&mdash;meaner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home. Jon's
+      head was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a hat
+      lined by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk and he still
+      walked from choice in the shade. As the long struggle of discretion
+      between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more whether she
+      could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had brought him away
+      from. Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a day in Madrid between
+      their trains, it was but natural to go again to the Prado. Jon was
+      elaborately casual this time before his Goya girl. Now that he was going
+      back to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny. It was his mother who
+      lingered before the picture, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon heard her uneasily. Did she understand? But he felt once more that he
+      was no match for her in self-control and subtlety. She could, in some
+      supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret, feel the pulse of his
+      thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped and feared and wished. It
+      made him terribly uncomfortable and guilty, having, beyond most boys, a
+      conscience. He wished she would be frank with him, he almost hoped for an
+      open struggle. But none came, and steadily, silently, they travelled
+      north. Thus did he first learn how much better than men women play a
+      waiting game. In Paris they had again to pause for a day. Jon was grieved
+      because it lasted two, owing to certain matters in connection with a
+      dressmaker; as if his mother, who looked beautiful in anything, had any
+      need of dresses! The happiest moment of his travel was that when he
+      stepped on to the Folkestone boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon. But you've
+      been very sweet to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon squeezed her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of glamour
+      over the past weeks&mdash;a kind of painful pleasure, such as he had tried
+      to screw into those lines about the voice in the night crying; a feeling
+      such as he had known as a small boy listening avidly to Chopin, yet
+      wanting to cry. And he wondered why it was that he couldn't say to
+      her quite simply what she had said to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were very sweet to me.&rdquo; Odd&mdash;one never could be nice
+      and natural like that! He substituted the words: &ldquo;I expect we shall
+      be sick.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six
+      weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had
+      hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0111" id="link2H_4_0111">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found the
+      solitude at Robin Hill intolerable. A philosopher when he has all that he
+      wants is different from a philosopher when he has not. Accustomed,
+      however, to the idea, if not to the reality of resignation, he would
+      perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter June. He was a &ldquo;lame
+      duck&rdquo; now, and on her conscience. Having achieved&mdash;momentarily&mdash;the
+      rescue of an etcher in low circumstances, which she happened to have in
+      hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had gone.
+      June was living now in a tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick. A
+      Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of responsibility was
+      concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a manner
+      satisfactory to herself and her father. The rent of the Gallery off Cork
+      Street which he had bought for her and her increased income tax happening
+      to balance, it had been quite simple&mdash;she no longer paid him the
+      rent. The Gallery might be expected now at any time, after eighteen years
+      of barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her father would
+      not feel it. Through this device she still had twelve hundred a year, and
+      by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians in a poor way,
+      employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically the same surplus for the
+      relief of genius. After three days at Robin Hill she carried her father
+      back with her to Town. In those three days she had stumbled on the secret
+      he had kept for two years, and had instantly decided to cure him. She
+      knew, in fact, the very man. He had done wonders with. Paul Post&mdash;that
+      painter a little in advance of Futurism; and she was impatient with her
+      father because his eyebrows would go up, and because he had heard of
+      neither. Of course, if he hadn't &ldquo;faith&rdquo; he would never
+      get well! It was absurd not to have faith in the man who had healed Paul
+      Post so that he had only just relapsed, from having overworked, or
+      overlived, himself again. The great thing about this healer was that he
+      relied on Nature. He had made a special study of the symptoms of Nature&mdash;when
+      his patient failed in any natural symptom he supplied the poison which
+      caused it&mdash;and there you were! She was extremely hopeful. Her father
+      had clearly not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and she intended
+      to provide the symptoms. He was&mdash;she felt&mdash;out of touch with the
+      times, which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating. In the little
+      Chiswick house she and the Austrian&mdash;a grateful soul, so devoted to
+      June for rescuing her that she was in danger of decease from overwork&mdash;stimulated
+      Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him for his cure. But they could
+      not keep his eyebrows down; as, for example, when the Austrian woke him at
+      eight o'clock just as he was going to sleep, or June took The Times
+      away from him, because it was unnatural to read &ldquo;that stuff&rdquo;
+      when he ought to be taking an interest in &ldquo;life.&rdquo; He never
+      failed, indeed, to be astonished at her resource, especially in the
+      evenings. For his benefit, as she declared, though he suspected that she
+      also got something out of it, she assembled the Age so far as it was
+      satellite to genius; and with some solemnity it would move up and down the
+      studio before him in the Fox-trot, and that more mental form of dancing&mdash;the
+      One-step&mdash;which so pulled against the music, that Jolyon's
+      eyebrows would be almost lost in his hair from wonder at the strain it
+      must impose on the dancer's will-power. Aware that, hung on the line
+      in the Water Colour Society, he was a back number to those with any
+      pretension to be called artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he
+      could find, and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he had been
+      raised. And when June brought some girl or young man up to him, he would
+      rise humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and think: 'Dear
+      me! This is very dull for them!' Having his father's perennial
+      sympathy with Youth, he used to get very tired from entering into their
+      points of view. But it was all stimulating, and he never failed in
+      admiration of his daughter's indomitable spirit. Even genius itself
+      attended these gatherings now and then, with its nose on one side; and
+      June always introduced it to her father. This, she felt, was exceptionally
+      good for him, for genius was a natural symptom he had never had&mdash;fond
+      as she was of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered
+      whence she got herself&mdash;her red-gold hair, now greyed into a special
+      colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own rather folded
+      and subtilised countenance, her little lithe figure, when he and most of
+      the Forsytes were tall. And he would dwell on the origin of species, and
+      debate whether she might be Danish or Celtic. Celtic, he thought, from her
+      pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs. It was not too much to
+      say that he preferred her to the Age with which she was surrounded,
+      youthful though, for the greater part, it was. She took, however, too much
+      interest in his teeth, for he still had some of those natural symptoms.
+      Her dentist at once found &ldquo;Staphylococcus aureus present in pure
+      culture&rdquo; (which might cause boils, of course), and wanted to take
+      out all the teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of
+      unnatural symptoms. Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in the
+      studio that evening he developed his objections. He had never had any
+      boils, and his own teeth would last his time. Of course&mdash;June
+      admitted&mdash;they would last his time if he didn't have them out!
+      But if he had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would
+      be longer. His recalcitrance&mdash;she said&mdash;was a symptom of his
+      whole attitude; he was taking it lying down. He ought to be fighting. When
+      was he going to see the man who had cured Paul Post? Jolyon was very
+      sorry, but the fact was he was not going to see him. June chafed.
+      Pondridge&mdash;she said&mdash;the healer, was such a fine man, and he had
+      such difficulty in making two ends meet, and getting his theories
+      recognised. It was just such indifference and prejudice as her father
+      manifested which was keeping him back. It would be so splendid for both of
+      them!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I perceive,&rdquo; said Jolyon, &ldquo;that you are trying to kill
+      two birds with one stone.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To cure, you mean!&rdquo; cried June.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear, it's the same thing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June protested. It was unfair to say that without a trial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon thought he might not have the chance, of saying it after.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dad!&rdquo; cried June, &ldquo;you're hopeless.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Jolyon, &ldquo;is a fact, but I wish to remain
+      hopeless as long as possible. I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child.
+      They are quiet at present.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not giving science a chance,&rdquo; cried June.
+      &ldquo;You've no idea how devoted Pondridge is. He puts his science
+      before everything.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just,&rdquo; replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he
+      was reduced, &ldquo;as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh? Art for Art's
+      sake&mdash;Science for the sake of Science. I know those enthusiastic
+      egomaniac gentry. They vivisect you without blinking. I'm enough of
+      a Forsyte to give them the go-by, June.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dad,&rdquo; said June, &ldquo;if you only knew how old-fashioned
+      that sounds! Nobody can afford to be half-hearted nowadays.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid,&rdquo; murmured Jolyon, with his smile, &ldquo;that's
+      the only natural symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me. We
+      are born to be extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though, if you'll
+      forgive my saying so, half the people nowadays who believe they're
+      extreme are really very moderate. I'm getting on as well as I can
+      expect, and I must leave it at that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable character
+      of her father's amiable obstinacy so far as his own freedom of
+      action was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain puzzled
+      Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion. After she had
+      brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp discussion, during which he
+      perceived to the full the fundamental opposition between her active
+      temperament and his wife's passivity. He even gathered that a little
+      soreness still remained from that generation-old struggle between them
+      over the body of Philip Bosinney, in which the passive had so signally
+      triumphed over the active principle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the past from
+      Jon. Sheer opportunism, she called it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which,&rdquo; Jolyon put in mildly, &ldquo;is the working principle
+      of real life, my dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; cried June, &ldquo;you don't really defend her for
+      not telling Jon, Dad. If it were left to you, you would.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will be
+      worse than if we told him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why don't you tell him? It's just sleeping dogs
+      again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; said Jolyon, &ldquo;I wouldn't for the world
+      go against Irene's instinct. He's her boy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours too,&rdquo; cried June.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is a man's instinct compared with a mother's?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think it's very weak of you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say,&rdquo; said Jolyon, &ldquo;I dare say.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her brain.
+      She could not bear sleeping dogs. And there stirred in her a tortuous
+      impulse to push the matter toward decision. Jon ought to be told, so that
+      either his feeling might be nipped in the bud, or, flowering in spite of
+      the past, come to fruition. And she determined to see Fleur, and judge for
+      herself. When June determined on anything, delicacy became a somewhat
+      minor consideration. After all, she was Soames' cousin, and they
+      were both interested in pictures. She would go and tell him that he ought
+      to buy a Paul Post, or perhaps a piece of sculpture by Boris Strumolowski,
+      and of course she would say nothing to her father. She went on the
+      following Sunday, looking so determined that she had some difficulty in
+      getting a cab at Reading station. The river country was lovely in those
+      days of her own month, and June ached at its loveliness. She who had
+      passed through this life without knowing what union was had a love of
+      natural beauty which was almost madness. And when she came to that choice
+      spot where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her cab, because,
+      business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water and the woods. She
+      appeared at his front door, therefore, as a mere pedestrian, and sent in
+      her card. It was in June's character to know that when her nerves
+      were fluttering she was doing something worth while. If one's nerves
+      did not flutter, she was taking the line of least resistance, and knew
+      that nobleness was not obliging her. She was conducted to a drawing-room,
+      which, though not in her style, showed every mark of fastidious elegance.
+      Thinking, 'Too much taste&mdash;too many knick-knacks,' she
+      saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the figure of a girl coming in from
+      the verandah. Clothed in white, and holding some white roses in her hand,
+      she had, reflected in that silvery-grey pool of glass, a vision-like
+      appearance, as if a pretty ghost had come out of the green garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do?&rdquo; said June, turning round. &ldquo;I'm a
+      cousin of your father's.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner's.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With my young stepbrother. Is your father in?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He will be directly. He's only gone for a little walk.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided chin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your name's Fleur, isn't it? I've heard of you
+      from Holly. What do you think of Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered
+      calmly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's quite a nice boy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a bit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'She's cool,' thought June.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly the girl said: &ldquo;I wish you'd tell me why our
+      families don't get on?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer, June
+      was silent; whether because this girl was trying to get something out of
+      her, or simply because what one would do theoretically is not always what
+      one will do when it comes to the point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know,&rdquo; said the girl, &ldquo;the surest way to make
+      people find out the worst is to keep them ignorant. My father's told
+      me it was a quarrel about property. But I don't believe it; we've
+      both got heaps. They wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June flushed. The word applied to her grandfather and father offended her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My grandfather,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;was very generous, and my
+      father is, too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what was it then?&rdquo; repeated the girl: Conscious that
+      this young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined
+      to prevent her, and to get something for herself instead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you want to know?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl smelled at her roses. &ldquo;I only want to know because they won't
+      tell me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it was about property, but there's more than one kind.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That makes it worse. Now I really must know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June's small and resolute face quivered. She was wearing a round
+      cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it. She looked quite young at that
+      moment, rejuvenated by encounter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I saw you drop your handkerchief.
+      Is there anything between you and Jon? Because, if so, you'd better
+      drop that too.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl grew paler, but she smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there were, that isn't the way to make me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have. We
+      may as well be frank.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you come down to tell him that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June laughed. &ldquo;No; I came down to see you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How delightful of you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This girl could fence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm two and a half times your age,&rdquo; said June, &ldquo;but
+      I quite sympathize. It's horrid not to have one's own way.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl smiled again. &ldquo;I really think you might tell me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How the child stuck to her point
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not my secret. But I'll see what I can do, because
+      I think both you and Jon ought to be told. And now I'll say
+      good-bye.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you wait and see Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June shook her head. &ldquo;How can I get over to the other side?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll row you across.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; said June impulsively, &ldquo;next time you're
+      in London, come and see me. This is where I live. I generally have young
+      people in the evening. But I shouldn't tell your father that you're
+      coming.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's
+      awfully pretty and well made. I never thought Soames would have a daughter
+      as pretty as this. She and Jon would make a lovely couple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at work in
+      June. She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took her hand off a
+      scull to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between the meadows
+      and the river, with an ache in her heart. Youth to youth, like the
+      dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them
+      through and through. Her youth! So long ago&mdash;when Phil and she&mdash;And
+      since? Nothing&mdash;no one had been quite what she had wanted. And so she
+      had missed it all. But what a coil was round those two young things, if
+      they really were in love, as Holly would have it&mdash;as her father, and
+      Irene, and Soames himself seemed to dread. What a coil, and what a
+      barrier! And the itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what
+      was overpast, which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one
+      who ever believed that what one wanted was more important than what other
+      people did not want. From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer stillness,
+      she watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the fishes rising;
+      sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how she could force
+      everybody to be happy. Jon and Fleur! Two little lame ducks&mdash;charming
+      callow yellow little ducks! A great pity! Surely something could be done!
+      One must not take such situations lying down. She walked on, and reached a
+      station, hot and cross.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which made
+      many people avoid her, she said to her father:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur. I think she's
+      very attractive. It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is
+      it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began crumbling his
+      bread.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's what you appear to be doing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Do
+      you realise whose daughter she is?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't the dead past bury its dead?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certain things can never be buried.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I disagree,&rdquo; said June. &ldquo;It's that which stands
+      in the way of all happiness and progress. You don't understand the
+      Age, Dad. It's got no use for outgrown things. Why do you think it
+      matters so terribly that Jon should know about his mother? Who pays any
+      attention to that sort of thing now? The marriage laws are just as they
+      were when Soames and Irene couldn't get a divorce, and you had to
+      come in. We've moved, and they haven't. So nobody cares.
+      Marriage without a decent chance of relief is only a sort of slave-owning;
+      people oughtn't to own each other. Everybody sees that now. If Irene
+      broke such laws, what does it matter?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not for me to disagree there,&rdquo; said Jolyon;
+      &ldquo;but that's all quite beside the mark. This is a matter of
+      human feeling.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it is,&rdquo; cried June, &ldquo;the human feeling of
+      those two young things.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; &ldquo;you're
+      talking nonsense.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not. If they prove to be really fond of each other, why
+      should they be made unhappy because of the past?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't lived that past. I have&mdash;through the
+      feelings of my wife; through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one
+      who is devoted can.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If,&rdquo; she said suddenly, &ldquo;she were the daughter of
+      Philip Bosinney, I could understand you better. Irene loved him, she never
+      loved Soames.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman
+      utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid no
+      attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I know
+      him, would mind a love-past. It's the brutality of a union without
+      love. This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's
+      mother as a negro-slave was owned. You can't lay that ghost; don't
+      try to, June! It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and
+      blood of the man who possessed Jon's mother against her will. It's
+      no good mincing words; I want it clear once for all. And now I mustn't
+      talk any more, or I shall have to sit up with this all night.&rdquo; And,
+      putting his hand over his heart, Jolyon turned his back on his daughter
+      and stood looking at the river Thames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her
+      head into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her arm through
+      his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because that
+      was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the obvious
+      fact that the subject was very bad for him. She rubbed her cheek against
+      his shoulder, and said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but
+      pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The peaceful beauty of the
+      afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and poetic.
+      In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine drawn by a
+      grey horse was turning an early field of hay. She watched the grass
+      cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination&mdash;it
+      looked so cool and fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of
+      the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true
+      river song. Alongside, in the deep green water, weeds, like yellow snakes,
+      were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the farther side
+      stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It was an afternoon to
+      dream. And she took out Jon's letters&mdash;not flowery effusions,
+      but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a longing very
+      agreeable to her, and all ending &ldquo;Your devoted J.&rdquo; Fleur was
+      not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but what
+      poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly in
+      those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon. They all
+      belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She enjoyed him
+      in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars could persuade her
+      that she was standing beside him in the centre of the map of Spain; and of
+      an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy sparkle and promise of the day
+      down in the garden, were Jon personified to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his letters,
+      followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with just so much
+      water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey destroyers. Fleur
+      thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and pulled up to the
+      landing-stage. Crossing the lawn, she wondered whether she should tell her
+      father of June's visit. If he learned of it from the butler, he
+      might think it odd if she did not. It gave her, too, another chance to
+      startle out of him the reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the
+      road to meet him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
+      Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with weak
+      lungs. Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part in local
+      affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going up. He could
+      not, however, remain indifferent to this new and dangerous scheme. The
+      site was not half a mile from his own house. He was quite of opinion that
+      the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but this was not the place. It
+      should be done farther away. He took, indeed, an attitude common to all
+      true Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other people was not his
+      affair, and the State should do its business without prejudicing in any
+      way the natural advantages which he had acquired or inherited. Francie,
+      the most free-spirited Forsyte of his generation (except perhaps that
+      fellow Jolyon) had once asked him in her malicious way: &ldquo;Did you
+      ever see the name Forsyte in a subscription list, Soames?&rdquo; That was
+      as it might be, but a Sanatorium would depreciate the neighbourhood, and
+      he should certainly sign the petition which was being got up against it.
+      Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw Fleur coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time down here
+      with her in this summer weather had been making him feel quite young;
+      Annette was always running up to Town for one thing or another, so that he
+      had Fleur to himself almost as much as he could wish. To be sure, young
+      Mont had formed a habit of appearing on his motor-cycle almost every other
+      day. Thank goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his
+      half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl
+      friend of Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring
+      youth or so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music
+      of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a
+      surprised shine on its expressive surface. Annette, even, now and then
+      passed gracefully up and down in the arms of one or other of the young
+      men. And Soames, coming to the drawing-room door, would lift his nose a
+      little sideways, and watch them, waiting to catch a smile from Fleur; then
+      move back to his chair by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The Times or
+      some other collector's price list. To his ever-anxious eyes Fleur
+      showed no signs of remembering that caprice of hers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand within her
+      arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad? She couldn't
+      wait! Guess!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never guess,&rdquo; said Soames uneasily. &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your cousin, June Forsyte.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm. &ldquo;What did she want?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. But it was rather breaking through the feud,
+      wasn't it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Feud? What feud?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The one that exists in your imagination, dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames dropped her arm. Was she mocking, or trying to draw him on?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture,&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't think so. Perhaps it was just family affection.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's only a first cousin once removed,&rdquo; muttered
+      Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the daughter of your enemy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What d'you mean by that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enemy!&rdquo; repeated Soames. &ldquo;It's ancient history. I
+      don't know where you get your notions.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From June Forsyte.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew, or were
+      on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and tenacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you know,&rdquo; he said coldly, &ldquo;why do you plague me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to
+      know more? Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery&mdash;Je
+      m'en fiche, as Profond says?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That chap!&rdquo; said Soames profoundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this summer&mdash;for
+      he had not turned up again. Ever since the Sunday when Fleur had drawn
+      attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had thought of him a good
+      deal, and always in connection with Annette, for no reason, except that
+      she was looking handsomer than for some time past. His possessive
+      instinct, subtle, less formal, more elastic since the War, kept all
+      misgiving underground. As one looks on some American river, quiet and
+      pleasant, knowing that an alligator perhaps is lying in the mud with his
+      snout just raised and indistinguishable from a snag of wood&mdash;so
+      Soames looked on the river of his own existence, subconscious of Monsieur
+      Profond, refusing to see more than the suspicion of his snout. He had at
+      this epoch in his life practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy
+      as his nature would permit. His senses were at rest; his affections found
+      all the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well known,
+      his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a touch of liver
+      now and again; he had not yet begun to worry seriously about what would
+      happen after death, inclining to think that nothing would happen. He
+      resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and to knock the gilt off
+      by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would be, he felt instinctively,
+      perverse and retrogressive. Those two crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's
+      caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level away if he lay on
+      them industriously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested
+      Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father came down to
+      dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll get you one, dear,&rdquo; she had said, and ran
+      upstairs. In the sachet where she sought for it&mdash;an old sachet of
+      very faded silk&mdash;there were two compartments: one held handkerchiefs;
+      the other was buttoned, and contained something flat and hard. By some
+      childish impulse Fleur unbuttoned it. There was a frame and in it a
+      photograph of herself as a little girl. She gazed at it, fascinated, as
+      one is by one's own presentment. It slipped under her fidgeting
+      thumb, and she saw that another photograph was behind. She pressed her own
+      down further, and perceived a face, which she seemed to know, of a young
+      woman, very good-looking, in a very old style of evening dress. Slipping
+      her own photograph up over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went
+      down. Only on the stairs did she identify that face. Surely&mdash;surely
+      Jon's mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in
+      a flurry of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the
+      woman her father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her, perhaps.
+      Then, afraid of showing by her manner that she had lighted on his secret,
+      she refused to think further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief,
+      entered the dining-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I chose the softest, Father.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm!&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;I only use those after a
+      cold. Never mind!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together; recalling
+      the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop&mdash;a
+      look strange and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must have loved that
+      woman very much to have kept her photograph all this time, in spite of
+      having lost her. Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind darted to his
+      relations with her own mother. Had he ever really loved her? She thought
+      not. Jon was the son of the woman he had really loved. Surely, then, he
+      ought not to mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used to.
+      And a sigh of sheer relief was caught in the folds of her nightgown
+      slipping over her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0112" id="link2H_4_0112">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;MEETINGS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had never
+      really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain. The face
+      of the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock&mdash;it
+      looked so wan and old. His father's mask had been forced awry by the
+      emotion of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how much he must
+      have felt their absence. He summoned to his aid the thought: 'Well,
+      I didn't want to go!' It was out of date for Youth to defer to
+      Age. But Jon was by no means typically modern. His father had always been
+      &ldquo;so jolly&rdquo; to him, and to feel that one meant to begin again
+      at once the conduct which his father had suffered six weeks'
+      loneliness to cure was not agreeable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the question, &ldquo;Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike you?&rdquo;
+      his conscience pricked him badly. The great Goya only existed because he
+      had created a face which resembled Fleur's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction; but
+      awoke full of anticipation. It was only the fifth of July, and no meeting
+      was fixed with Fleur until the ninth. He was to have three days at home
+      before going back to farm. Somehow he must contrive to see her!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for trousers,
+      not even the fondest parents can deny. On the second day, therefore, Jon
+      went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by ordering what was
+      indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face toward Piccadilly.
+      Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined Devonshire House. It would
+      be the merest chance that she should be at her Club. But he dawdled down
+      Bond Street with a beating heart, noticing the superiority of all other
+      young men to himself. They wore their clothes with such an air; they had
+      assurance; they were old. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction
+      that Fleur must have forgotten him. Absorbed in his own feeling for her
+      all these weeks, he had mislaid that possibility. The corners of his mouth
+      drooped, his hands felt clammy. Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck
+      of her smile-Fleur incomparable! It was an evil moment. Jon, however, had
+      a great idea that one must be able to face anything. And he braced himself
+      with that dour reflection in front of a bric-a-brac shop. At this
+      high-water mark of what was once the London season, there was nothing to
+      mark it out from any other except a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon
+      moved on, and turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie
+      moving toward the Iseeum Club, to which he had just been elected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo! young man! Where are you off to?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon gushed. &ldquo;I've just been to my tailor's.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val looked him up and down. &ldquo;That's good! I'm going in
+      here to order some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon thanked him. He might get news of her from Val!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men, was
+      seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's which they
+      now entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father
+      with. Bless me! Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from&mdash;let me
+      see&mdash;the year Melton won the Derby. One of my very best customers he
+      was.&rdquo; A faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face. &ldquo;Many's
+      the tip he's given me, to be sure! I suppose he took a couple of
+      hundred of these every week, year in, year out, and never changed his
+      cigarette. Very affable gentleman, brought me a lot of custom. I was sorry
+      he met with that accident. One misses an old customer like him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val smiled. His father's decease had closed an account which had
+      been running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke
+      puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his
+      father's face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in
+      the only halo it had earned. His father had his fame here, anyway&mdash;a
+      man who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and run
+      accounts for ever! To his tobacconist a hero! Even that was some
+      distinction to inherit!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I pay cash,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;how much?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To his son, sir, and cash&mdash;ten and six. I shall never forget
+      Mr. Montague Dartie. I've known him stand talkin' to me half
+      an hour. We don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a
+      hurry. The War was bad for manners, sir&mdash;it was bad for manners. You
+      were in it, I see.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Val, tapping his knee, &ldquo;I got this in the war
+      before. Saved my life, I expect. Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, &ldquo;I don't smoke, you know,&rdquo;
+      and saw the tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to
+      say &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; or &ldquo;Now's your chance, sir!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's right,&rdquo; said Val; &ldquo;keep off it while you
+      can. You'll want it when you take a knock. This is really the same
+      tobacco, then?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all. Wonderful
+      staying power&mdash;the British Empire, I always say.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it
+      monthly. Come on, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity. Except to lunch now and then at the
+      Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London Club. The
+      Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could not, so long as
+      George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his culinary acumen was almost
+      the controlling force. The Club had made a stand against the newly rich,
+      and it had taken all George Forsyte's prestige, and praise of him as
+      a &ldquo;good sportsman,&rdquo; to bring in Prosper Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law entered the
+      dining-room, and attracted by George's forefinger, sat down at their
+      table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with solemn lips
+      and an attractive shyness in his glance. There was an air of privilege
+      around that corner table, as though past masters were eating there. Jon
+      was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere. The waiter, lean in the chaps,
+      pervaded with such free-masonical deference. He seemed to hang on George
+      Forsyte's lips, to watch the gloat in his eye with a kind of
+      sympathy, to follow the movements of the heavy club-marked silver fondly.
+      His liveried arm and confidential voice alarmed Jon, they came so secretly
+      over his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Except for George's &ldquo;Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a
+      deuced good judge of a cigar!&rdquo; neither he nor the other past master
+      took any notice of him, and he was grateful for this. The talk was all
+      about the breeding, points, and prices of horses, and he listened to it
+      vaguely at first, wondering how it was possible to retain so much
+      knowledge in a head. He could not take his eyes off the dark past master&mdash;what
+      he said was so deliberate and discouraging&mdash;such heavy, queer,
+      smiled-out words. Jon was thinking of butterflies, when he heard him say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old Soames! He's too dry a file!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past master
+      went on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His daughter's an attractive small girl. Mr. Soames Forsyde
+      is a bit old-fashioned. I want to see him have a pleasure some day.&rdquo;
+      George Forsyte grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as he looks. He'll
+      never show he's enjoying anything&mdash;they might try and take it
+      from him. Old Soames! Once bit, twice shy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Jon,&rdquo; said Val, hastily, &ldquo;if you've
+      finished, we'll go and have coffee.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who were those?&rdquo; Jon asked, on the stairs. &ldquo;I didn't
+      quite&mdash;-&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's and of
+      my Uncle Soames. He's always been here. The other chap, Profond, is
+      a queer fish. I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you
+      ask me!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon looked at him, startled. &ldquo;But that's awful,&rdquo; he
+      said: &ldquo;I mean&mdash;for Fleur.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very
+      up-to-date.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her mother!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're very green, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon grew red. &ldquo;Mothers,&rdquo; he stammered angrily, &ldquo;are
+      different.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're right,&rdquo; said Val suddenly; &ldquo;but things
+      aren't what they were when I was your age. There's a 'To-morrow
+      we die' feeling. That's what old George meant about my Uncle
+      Soames. He doesn't mean to die to-morrow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon said, quickly: &ldquo;What's the matter between him and my
+      father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stable secret, Jon. Take my advice, and bottle up. You'll do
+      no good by knowing. Have a liqueur?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate the way people keep things from one,&rdquo; he muttered,
+      &ldquo;and then sneer at one for being green.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you can ask Holly. If she won't tell you, you'll
+      believe it's for your own good, I suppose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon got up. &ldquo;I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused. The boy looked so upset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right! See you on Friday.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; murmured Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he did not. This conspiracy of silence made him desperate. It was
+      humiliating to be treated like a child! He retraced his moody steps to
+      Stratton Street. But he would go to her Club now, and find out the worst!
+      To his enquiry the reply was that Miss Forsyte was not in the Club. She
+      might be in perhaps later. She was often in on Monday&mdash;they could not
+      say. Jon said he would call again, and, crossing into the Green Park,
+      flung himself down under a tree. The sun was bright, and a breeze
+      fluttered the leaves of the young lime-tree beneath which he lay; but his
+      heart ached. Such darkness seemed gathered round his happiness. He heard
+      Big Ben chime &ldquo;Three&rdquo; above the traffic. The sound moved
+      something in him, and, taking out a piece of paper, he began to scribble
+      on it with a pencil. He had jotted a stanza, and was searching the grass
+      for another verse, when something hard touched his shoulder-a green
+      parasol. There above him stood Fleur!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They told me you'd been, and were coming back. So I thought
+      you might be out here; and you are&mdash;it's rather wonderful!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Fleur! I thought you'd have forgotten me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I told you that I shouldn't!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon seized her arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's too much luck! Let's get away from this side.&rdquo;
+      He almost dragged her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to
+      find some cover where they could sit and hold each other's hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hasn't anybody cut in?&rdquo; he said, gazing round at her
+      lashes, in suspense above her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a young idiot, but he doesn't count.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I've had sunstroke; I didn't tell you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really! Was it interesting?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. Mother was an angel. Has anything happened to you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing. Except that I think I've found out what's
+      wrong between our families, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His heart began beating very fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father
+      got her instead.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me.
+      Of course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him pretty
+      mad, wouldn't it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon thought for a minute. &ldquo;Not if she loved my father best.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose they were engaged?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I
+      might go cracked, but I shouldn't grudge it you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should. You mustn't ever do that with me, Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My God! Not much!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe that he's ever really cared for my
+      mother.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon was silent. Val's words&mdash;the two past masters in the Club!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, we don't know,&rdquo; went on Fleur; &ldquo;it may
+      have been a great shock. She may have behaved badly to him. People do.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother wouldn't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur shrugged her shoulders. &ldquo;I don't think we know much
+      about our fathers and mothers. We just see them in the light of the way
+      they treat us; but they've treated other people, you know, before we
+      were born-plenty, I expect. You see, they're both old. Look at your
+      father, with three separate families!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't there any place,&rdquo; cried Jon, &ldquo;in all this
+      beastly London where we can be alone?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a taxi.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let's get one, then.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: &ldquo;Are you going back
+      to Robin Hill? I should like to see where you live, Jon. I'm staying
+      with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for dinner. I
+      wouldn't come to the house, of course.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon gazed at her enraptured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan't meet
+      anybody. There's a train at four.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured, official,
+      commercial, or professional, like the working classes, still worked their
+      seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth generation travelled
+      down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class carriage, dusty and sun-warmed,
+      of that too early train. They travelled in blissful silence, holding each
+      other's hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two
+      unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and
+      honeysuckle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Jon&mdash;sure of her now, and without separation before him&mdash;it
+      was a miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along
+      the river Thames. It was love-in-a-mist&mdash;one of those illumined pages
+      of Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they gave each
+      other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and flowers and
+      birds scrolled in among the text&mdash;a happy communing, without
+      afterthought, which lasted thirty-seven minutes. They reached the coppice
+      at the milking hour. Jon would not take her as far as the farmyard; only
+      to where she could see the field leading up to the gardens, and the house
+      beyond. They turned in among the larches, and suddenly, at the winding of
+      the path, came on Irene, sitting on an old log seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves; to
+      moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal dignity.
+      This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his mother. He became
+      suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate thing. To have brought
+      Fleur down openly&mdash;yes! But to sneak her in like this! Consumed with
+      shame, he put on a front as brazen as his nature would permit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother's startled face
+      was changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious. It was she who
+      uttered the first words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm very glad to see you. It was nice of Jon to think of
+      bringing you down to us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We weren't coming to the house,&rdquo; Jon blurted out.
+      &ldquo;I just wanted Fleur to see where I lived.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother said quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you come up and have tea?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard Fleur
+      answer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner. I met Jon by
+      accident, and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his home.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How self-possessed she was!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course; but you must have tea. We'll send you down to the
+      station. My husband will enjoy seeing you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The expression of his mother's eyes, resting on him for a moment,
+      cast Jon down level with the ground&mdash;a true worm. Then she led on,
+      and Fleur followed her. He felt like a child, trailing after those two,
+      who were talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the house up there
+      beyond the trees and the grassy slope. He watched the fencing of their
+      eyes, taking each other in&mdash;the two beings he loved most in the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered in advance
+      all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that tranquil
+      figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant; already he could
+      feel the faint irony which would come into his voice and smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the
+      house. Let's have tea at once&mdash;she has to catch a train. Jon,
+      tell them, dear, and telephone to the Dragon for a car.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his mother
+      had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up into the
+      house. Now he would not see Fleur alone again&mdash;not for a minute, and
+      they had arranged no further meeting! When he returned under cover of the
+      maids and teapots, there was not a trace of awkwardness beneath the tree;
+      it was all within himself, but not the less for that. They were talking of
+      the Gallery off Cork Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We back numbers,&rdquo; his father was saying, &ldquo;are awfully
+      anxious to find out why we can't appreciate the new stuff; you and
+      Jon must tell us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's supposed to be satiric, isn't it?&rdquo; said
+      Fleur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw his father's smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Satiric? Oh! I think it's more than that. What do you say,
+      Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know at all,&rdquo; stammered Jon. His father's
+      face had a sudden grimness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals. Off with their
+      heads, they say&mdash;smash their idols! And let's get back
+      to-nothing! And, by Jove, they've done it! Jon's a poet. He'll
+      be going in, too, and stamping on what's left of us. Property,
+      beauty, sentiment&mdash;all smoke. We mustn't own anything nowadays,
+      not even our feelings. They stand in the way of&mdash;Nothing.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father's words,
+      behind which he felt a meaning that he could not reach. He didn't
+      want to stamp on anything!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing's the god of to-day,&rdquo; continued Jolyon; &ldquo;we're
+      back where the Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Dad,&rdquo; cried Jon suddenly, &ldquo;we only want to live,
+      and we don't know how, because of the Past&mdash;that's all!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By George!&rdquo; said Jolyon, &ldquo;that's profound, Jon.
+      Is it your own? The Past! Old ownerships, old passions, and their
+      aftermath. Let's have cigarettes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly, as if
+      to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes. He lighted his father's
+      and Fleur's, then one for himself. Had he taken the knock that Val
+      had spoken of? The smoke was blue when he had not puffed, grey when he
+      had; he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense of equality it gave
+      him. He was glad no one said: &ldquo;So you've begun!&rdquo; He felt
+      less young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur looked at her watch, and rose. His mother went with her into the
+      house. Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See her into the car, old man,&rdquo; said Jolyon; &ldquo;and when
+      she's gone, ask your mother to come back to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon went. He waited in the hall. He saw her into the car. There was no
+      chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand. He waited all that
+      evening for something to be said to him. Nothing was said. Nothing might
+      have happened. He went up to bed, and in the mirror on his dressing-table
+      met himself. He did not speak, nor did the image; but both looked as if
+      they thought the more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0113" id="link2H_4_0113">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;IN GREEN STREET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous should
+      be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a remark of
+      Fleur's: &ldquo;He's like the hosts of Midian&mdash;he prowls
+      and prowls around&rdquo;; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan:
+      &ldquo;What's the use of keepin' fit?&rdquo; or, more simply,
+      to the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as it was now called.
+      Certain, that Annette was looking particularly handsome, and that Soames&mdash;had
+      sold him a Gauguin and then torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond
+      himself had said: &ldquo;I didn't get that small picture I bought
+      from Mr. Forsyde.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's
+      evergreen little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness
+      which no one mistook for naivete, a word hardly applicable to Monsieur
+      Prosper Profond. Winifred still found him &ldquo;amusing,&rdquo; and would
+      write him little notes saying: &ldquo;Come and have a 'jolly'
+      with us&rdquo;&mdash;it was breath of life to her to keep up with the
+      phrases of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
+      having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in it&mdash;which
+      was unnatural. The English type of disillusionment was familiar enough to
+      Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable circles. It gave a certain
+      cachet or distinction, so that one got something out of it. But to see
+      nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there was nothing in
+      anything, was not English; and that which was not English one could not
+      help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form. It was like
+      having the mood which the War had left, seated&mdash;dark, heavy, smiling,
+      indifferent&mdash;in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that mood
+      talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard. It was, as
+      Jack Cardigan expressed it&mdash;for the English character at large&mdash;&ldquo;a
+      bit too thick&rdquo;&mdash;for if nothing was really worth getting excited
+      about, there were always games, and one could make it so! Even Winifred,
+      ever a Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of such
+      a mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be there.
+      Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country which
+      decently veiled such realities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to dinner
+      that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred's
+      little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of seeing
+      nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with an air of
+      seeing a fire which was not there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond came from the window. He was in full fig, with a white
+      waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Miss Forsyde,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I'm awful pleased
+      to see you. Mr. Forsyde well? I was sayin' to-day I want to see him
+      have some pleasure. He worries.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think so?&rdquo; said Fleur shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Worries,&rdquo; repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur spun round. &ldquo;Shall I tell you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;what
+      would give him pleasure?&rdquo; But the words, &ldquo;To hear that you had
+      cleared out,&rdquo; died at the expression on his face. All his fine white
+      teeth were showing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was hearin' at the Club to-day about his old trouble.&rdquo;
+      Fleur opened her eyes. &ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his statement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before you were born,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;that small business.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share in
+      her father's worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush of nervous
+      curiosity. &ldquo;Tell me what you heard.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why!&rdquo; murmured Monsieur Profond, &ldquo;you know all that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I expect I do. But I should like to know that you haven't
+      heard it all wrong.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His first wife,&rdquo; murmured Monsieur Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Choking back the words, &ldquo;He was never married before,&rdquo; she
+      said: &ldquo;Well, what about her?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. George Forsyde was tellin' me about your father's
+      first wife marryin' his cousin Jolyon afterward. It was a small bit
+      unpleasant, I should think. I saw their boy&mdash;nice boy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur looked up. Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical, before
+      her. That&mdash;the reason! With the most heroic effort of her life so
+      far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure. She could not tell
+      whether he had noticed. And just then Winifred came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most
+      amusing afternoon at the Babies' bazaar.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What babies?&rdquo; said Fleur mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The 'Save the Babies.' I got such a bargain, my dear. A
+      piece of old Armenian work&mdash;from before the Flood. I want your
+      opinion on it, Prosper.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Auntie,&rdquo; whispered Fleur suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the tone in the girl's voice Winifred closed in on her.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter? Aren't you well?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was practically
+      out of hearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before. Is it
+      true that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte's father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had Winifred
+      felt more seriously embarrassed. Her niece's face was so pale, her
+      eyes so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your father didn't wish you to hear,&rdquo; she said, with
+      all the aplomb she could muster. &ldquo;These things will happen. I've
+      often told him he ought to let you know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat
+      her shoulder&mdash;a firm little shoulder, nice and white! She never could
+      help an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who would
+      have to be married, of course&mdash;though not to that boy Jon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've forgotten all about it years and years ago,&rdquo; she
+      said comfortably. &ldquo;Come and have dinner!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Auntie. I don't feel very well. May I go upstairs?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear!&rdquo; murmured Winifred, concerned, &ldquo;you're
+      not taking this to heart? Why, you haven't properly come out yet!
+      That boy's a child!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What boy? I've only got a headache. But I can't stand
+      that man to-night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well,&rdquo; said Winifred, &ldquo;go and lie down. I'll
+      send you some bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond. What business
+      had he to gossip? Though I must say I think it's much better you
+      should know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur smiled. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, and slipped from the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a
+      guttered frightened feeling in her breast. Never in her life as yet had
+      she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what she had
+      set her heart on. The sensations of the afternoon had been full and
+      poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of them had really
+      made her head ache. No wonder her father had hidden that photograph, so
+      secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept it! But could he hate Jon's
+      mother and yet keep her photograph? She pressed her hands over her
+      forehead, trying to see things clearly. Had they told Jon&mdash;had her
+      visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell him? Everything now turned on
+      that! She knew, they all knew, except&mdash;perhaps&mdash;Jon!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard. Jon
+      loved his mother. If they had told him, what would he do? She could not
+      tell. But if they had not told him, should she not&mdash;could she not get
+      him for herself&mdash;get married to him, before he knew? She searched her
+      memories of Robin Hill. His mother's face so passive&mdash;with its
+      dark eyes and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile&mdash;baffled
+      her; and his father's&mdash;kindly, sunken, ironic. Instinctively
+      she felt they would shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from hurting
+      him&mdash;for of course it would hurt him awfully to know!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew. So long as
+      neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still a
+      chance&mdash;freedom to cover one's tracks, and get what her heart
+      was set on. But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation. Every one's
+      hand was against her&mdash;every one's! It was as Jon had said&mdash;he
+      and she just wanted to live and the past was in their way, a past they
+      hadn't shared in, and didn't understand! Oh! What a shame! And
+      suddenly she thought of June. Would she help them? For somehow June had
+      left on her the impression that she would be sympathetic with their love,
+      impatient of obstacle. Then, instinctively, she thought: 'I won't
+      give anything away, though, even to her. I daren't. I mean to have
+      Jon; against them all.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred's pet headache
+      cachets. She swallowed both. Then Winifred herself appeared. Fleur opened
+      her campaign with the words:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn't think I'm
+      in love with that boy. Why, I've hardly seen him!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred, though experienced, was not &ldquo;fine.&rdquo; She accepted the
+      remark with considerable relief. Of course, it was not pleasant for the
+      girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to minimise the
+      matter, a task for which she was eminently qualified, &ldquo;raised&rdquo;
+      fashionably under a comfortable mother and a father whose nerves might not
+      be shaken, and for many years the wife of Montague Dartie. Her description
+      was a masterpiece of understatement. Fleur's father's first
+      wife had been very foolish. There had been a young man who had got run
+      over, and she had left Fleur's father. Then, years after, when it
+      might all have come&mdash;right again, she had taken up with their cousin
+      Jolyon; and, of course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce.
+      Nobody remembered anything of it now, except just the family. And,
+      perhaps, it had all turned out for the best; her father had Fleur; and
+      Jolyon and Irene had been quite happy, they said, and their boy was a nice
+      boy. &ldquo;Val having Holly, too, is a sort of plaster, don't you
+      know?&rdquo; With these soothing words, Winifred patted her niece's
+      shoulder; thought: 'She's a nice, plump little thing!'
+      and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite of his indiscretion, was
+      very &ldquo;amusing&rdquo; this evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under influence of
+      bromide material and spiritual. But then reality came back. Her aunt had
+      left out all that mattered&mdash;all the feeling, the hate, the love, the
+      unforgivingness of passionate hearts. She, who knew so little of life, and
+      had touched only the fringe of love, was yet aware by instinct that words
+      have as little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread it buys.
+      'Poor Father!' she thought. 'Poor me! Poor Jon! But I
+      don't care, I mean to have him!' From the window of her
+      darkened room she saw &ldquo;that man&rdquo; issue from the door below and
+      &ldquo;prowl&rdquo; away. If he and her mother&mdash;how would that affect
+      her chance? Surely it must make her father cling to her more closely, so
+      that he would consent in the end to anything she wanted, or become
+      reconciled the sooner to what she did without his knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with all her
+      might flung it after that disappearing figure. It fell short, but the
+      action did her good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of petrol,
+      not sweet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0114" id="link2H_4_0114">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Soames, coming up to the City, with the intention of calling in at Green
+      Street at the end of his day and taking Fleur back home with him, suffered
+      from rumination. Sleeping partner that he was, he seldom visited the City
+      now, but he still had a room of his own at Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte's,
+      and one special clerk and a half assigned to the management of purely
+      Forsyte affairs. They were somewhat in flux just now&mdash;an auspicious
+      moment for the disposal of house property. And Soames was unloading the
+      estates of his father and Uncle Roger, and to some extent of his Uncle
+      Nicholas. His shrewd and matter-of-course probity in all money concerns
+      had made him something of an autocrat in connection with these trusts. If
+      Soames thought this or thought that, one had better save oneself the
+      bother of thinking too. He guaranteed, as it were, irresponsibility to
+      numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth generations. His fellow
+      trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas, his cousins-in-law
+      Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely's husband, all trusted
+      him; he signed first, and where he signed first they signed after, and
+      nobody was a penny the worse. Just now they were all a good many pennies
+      the better, and Soames was beginning to see the close of certain trusts,
+      except for distribution of the income from securities as gilt-edged as was
+      compatible with the period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect
+      backwater in London, he ruminated. Money was extraordinarily tight; and
+      morality extraordinarily loose! The War had done it. Banks were not
+      lending; people breaking contracts all over the place. There was a feeling
+      in the air and a look on faces that he did not like. The country seemed in
+      for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies. There was satisfaction in the
+      thought that neither he nor his trusts had an investment which could be
+      affected by anything less maniacal than national repudiation or a levy on
+      capital. If Soames had faith, it was in what he called &ldquo;English
+      common sense&rdquo;&mdash;or the power to have things, if not one way then
+      another. He might&mdash;like his father James before him&mdash;say he didn't
+      know what things were coming to, but he never in his heart believed they
+      were. If it rested with him, they wouldn't&mdash;and, after all, he
+      was only an Englishman like any other, so quietly tenacious of what he had
+      that he knew he would never really part with it without something more or
+      less equivalent in exchange. His mind was essentially equilibristic in
+      material matters, and his way of putting the national situation difficult
+      to refute in a world composed of human beings. Take his own case, for
+      example! He was well off. Did that do anybody harm? He did not eat ten
+      meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much as, a poor man. He
+      spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no more water to speak
+      of than the mechanic or the porter. He certainly had pretty things about
+      him, but they had given employment in the making, and somebody must use
+      them. He bought pictures, but Art must be encouraged. He was, in fact, an
+      accidental channel through which money flowed, employing labour. What was
+      there objectionable in that? In his charge money was in quicker and more
+      useful flux than it would be in charge of the State and a lot of slow-fly
+      money-sucking officials. And as to what he saved each year&mdash;it was
+      just as much in flux as what he didn't save, going into Water Board
+      or Council Stocks, or something sound and useful. The State paid him no
+      salary for being trustee of his own or other people's money he did
+      all that for nothing. Therein lay the whole case against nationalisation&mdash;owners
+      of private property were unpaid, and yet had every incentive to quicken up
+      the flux. Under nationalisation&mdash;just the opposite! In a country
+      smarting from officialism he felt that he had a strong case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It particularly annoyed him, entering that backwater of perfect peace, to
+      think that a lot of unscrupulous Trusts and Combinations had been
+      cornering the market in goods of all kinds, and keeping prices at an
+      artificial height. Such abusers of the individualistic system were the
+      ruffians who caused all the trouble, and it was some satisfaction to see
+      them getting into a stew at last lest the whole thing might come down with
+      a run&mdash;and land them in the soup.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The offices of Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte occupied the ground and first
+      floors of a house on the right-hand side; and, ascending to his room,
+      Soames thought: 'Time we had a coat of paint.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His old clerk Gradman was seated, where he always was, at a huge bureau
+      with countless pigeonholes. Half-the-clerk stood beside him, with a broker's
+      note recording investment of the proceeds from sale of the Bryanston
+      Square house, in Roger Forsyte's estate. Soames took it, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vancouver City Stock. H'm. It's down today!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sort of grating ingratiation old Gradman answered him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es; but everything's down, Mr. Soames.&rdquo; And
+      half-the-clerk withdrew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames skewered the document on to a number of other papers and hung up
+      his hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to look at my Will and Marriage Settlement, Gradman.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Gradman, moving to the limit of his swivel chair, drew out two drafts
+      from the bottom lefthand drawer. Recovering his body, he raised his
+      grizzle-haired face, very red from stooping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Copies, Sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames took them. It struck him suddenly how like Gradman was to the stout
+      brindled yard dog they had been wont to keep on his chain at The Shelter,
+      till one day Fleur had come and insisted it should be let loose, so that
+      it had at once bitten the cook and been destroyed. If you let Gradman off
+      his chain, would he bite the cook?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Checking this frivolous fancy, Soames unfolded his Marriage Settlement. He
+      had not looked at it for over eighteen years, not since he remade his Will
+      when his father died and Fleur was born. He wanted to see whether the
+      words &ldquo;during coverture&rdquo; were in. Yes, they were&mdash;odd
+      expression, when you thought of it, and derived perhaps from
+      horse-breeding! Interest on fifteen thousand pounds (which he paid her
+      without deducting income tax) so long as she remained his wife, and
+      afterward during widowhood &ldquo;dum casta&rdquo;&mdash;old-fashioned and
+      rather pointed words, put in to insure the conduct of Fleur's
+      mother. His Will made it up to an annuity of a thousand under the same
+      conditions. All right! He returned the copies to Gradman, who took them
+      without looking up, swung the chair, restored the papers to their drawer,
+      and went on casting up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gradman! I don't like the condition of the country; there are
+      a lot of people about without any common sense. I want to find a way by
+      which I can safeguard Miss Fleur against anything which might arise.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradman wrote the figure &ldquo;2&rdquo; on his blotting-paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;there's a nahsty spirit.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The ordinary restraint against anticipation doesn't meet the
+      case.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nao,&rdquo; said Gradman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose those Labour fellows come in, or worse! It's these
+      people with fixed ideas who are the danger. Look at Ireland!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Gradman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose I were to make a settlement on her at once with myself as
+      beneficiary for life, they couldn't take anything but the interest
+      from me, unless of course they alter the law.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradman moved his head and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;they wouldn't do tha-at!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; muttered Soames; &ldquo;I don't
+      trust them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It'll take two years, sir, to be valid against death duties.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames sniffed. Two years! He was only sixty-five!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not the point. Draw a form of settlement that passes
+      all my property to Miss Fleur's children in equal shares, with
+      antecedent life-interests first to myself and then to her without power of
+      anticipation, and add a clause that in the event of anything happening to
+      divert her life-interest, that interest passes to the trustees, to apply
+      for her benefit, in their absolute discretion.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradman grated: &ldquo;Rather extreme at your age, sir; you lose control.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's my business,&rdquo; said Soames sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradman wrote on a piece of paper: &ldquo;Life-interest&mdash;anticipation&mdash;divert
+      interest&mdash;absolute discretion....&rdquo; and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What trustees? There's young Mr. Kingson; he's a nice
+      steady young fellow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, he might do for one. I must have three. There isn't a
+      Forsyte now who appeals to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not young Mr. Nicholas? He's at the Bar. We've given
+      'im briefs.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He'll never set the Thames on fire,&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A smile oozed out on Gradman's face, greasy from countless
+      mutton-chops, the smile of a man who sits all day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't expect it, at his age, Mr. Soames.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? What is he? Forty?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es, quite a young fellow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, put him in; but I want somebody who'll take a personal
+      interest. There's no one that I can see.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about Mr. Valerius, now he's come home?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Val Dartie? With that father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We-ell,&rdquo; murmured Gradman, &ldquo;he's been dead seven
+      years&mdash;the Statute runs against him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;I don't like the connection.&rdquo;
+      He rose. Gradman said suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they were makin' a levy on capital, they could come on the
+      trustees, sir. So there you'd be just the same. I'd think it
+      over, if I were you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's true,&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;I will. What have you
+      done about that dilapidation notice in Vere Street?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'aven't served it yet. The party's very old.
+      She won't want to go out at her age.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. This spirit of unrest touches every one.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still, I'm lookin' at things broadly, sir. She's
+      eighty-one.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better serve it,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;and see what she says.
+      Oh! and Mr. Timothy? Is everything in order in case of&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got the inventory of his estate all ready; had the
+      furniture and pictures valued so that we know what reserves to put on. I
+      shall be sorry when he goes, though. Dear me! It is a time since I first
+      saw Mr. Timothy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't live for ever,&rdquo; said Soames, taking down his
+      hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nao,&rdquo; said Gradman; &ldquo;but it'll be a pity&mdash;the
+      last of the old family! Shall I take up the matter of that nuisance in Old
+      Compton Street? Those organs&mdash;they're nahsty things.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do. I must call for Miss Fleur and catch the four o'clock.
+      Good-day, Gradman.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-day, Mr. Soames. I hope Miss Fleur&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well enough, but gads about too much.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-es,&rdquo; grated Gradman; &ldquo;she's young.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames went out, musing: &ldquo;Old Gradman! If he were younger I'd
+      put him in the trust. There's nobody I can depend on to take a real
+      interest.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving the bilious and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous peace of
+      that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture! Why can't
+      they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-working
+      Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which could
+      provoke so unpatriotic a thought. But there it was! One never got a moment
+      of real peace. There was always something at the back of everything! And
+      he made his way toward Green Street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two hours later by his watch, Thomas Gradman, stirring in his swivel
+      chair, closed the last drawer of his bureau, and putting into his
+      waistcoat pocket a bunch of keys so fat that they gave him a protuberance
+      on the liver side, brushed his old top hat round with his sleeve, took his
+      umbrella, and descended. Thick, short, and buttoned closely into his old
+      frock coat, he walked toward Covent Garden market. He never missed that
+      daily promenade to the Tube for Highgate, and seldom some critical
+      transaction on the way in connection with vegetables and fruit.
+      Generations might be born, and hats might change, wars be fought, and
+      Forsytes fade away, but Thomas Gradman, faithful and grey, would take his
+      daily walk and buy his daily vegetable. Times were not what they were, and
+      his son had lost a leg, and they never gave him those nice little plaited
+      baskets to carry the stuff in now, and these Tubes were convenient things&mdash;still
+      he mustn't complain; his health was good considering his time of
+      life, and after fifty-four years in the Law he was getting a round eight
+      hundred a year and a little worried of late, because it was mostly
+      collector's commission on the rents, and with all this conversion of
+      Forsyte property going on, it looked like drying up, and the price of
+      living still so high; but it was no good worrying&mdash;&ldquo;The good
+      God made us all&rdquo;&mdash;as he was in the habit of saying; still,
+      house property in London&mdash;he didn't know what Mr. Roger or Mr.
+      James would say if they could see it being sold like this&mdash;seemed to
+      show a lack of faith; but Mr. Soames&mdash;he worried. Life and lives in
+      being and twenty-one years after&mdash;beyond that you couldn't go;
+      still, he kept his health wonderfully&mdash;and Miss Fleur was a pretty
+      little thing&mdash;she was; she'd marry; but lots of people had no
+      children nowadays&mdash;he had had his first child at twenty-two; and Mr.
+      Jolyon, married while he was at Cambridge, had his child the same year&mdash;gracious
+      Peter! That was back in '69, a long time before old Mr. Jolyon&mdash;fine
+      judge of property&mdash;had taken his Will away from Mr. James&mdash;dear,
+      yes! Those were the days when they were buyin' property right and
+      left, and none of this khaki and fallin' over one another to get out
+      of things; and cucumbers at twopence; and a melon&mdash;the old melons,
+      that made your mouth water! Fifty years since he went into Mr. James'
+      office, and Mr. James had said to him: &ldquo;Now, Gradman, you're
+      only a shaver&mdash;you pay attention, and you'll make your five
+      hundred a year before you've done.&rdquo; And he had, and feared
+      God, and served the Forsytes, and kept a vegetable diet at night. And,
+      buying a copy of John Bull&mdash;not that he approved of it, an
+      extravagant affair&mdash;he entered the Tube elevator with his mere
+      brown-paper parcel, and was borne down into the bowels of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0115" id="link2H_4_0115">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On his way to Green Street it occurred to Soames that he ought to go into
+      Dumetrius' in Suffolk Street about the possibility of the Bolderby
+      Old Crome. Almost worth while to have fought the war to have the Bolderby
+      Old Crome, as it were, in flux! Old Bolderby had died, his son and
+      grandson had been killed&mdash;a cousin was coming into the estate, who
+      meant to sell it, some said because of the condition of England, others
+      said because he had asthma.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Dumetrius once got hold of it the price would become prohibitive; it
+      was necessary for Soames to find out whether Dumetrius had got it, before
+      he tried to get it himself. He therefore confined himself to discussing
+      with Dumetrius whether Monticellis would come again now that it was the
+      fashion for a picture to be anything except a picture; and the future of
+      Johns, with a side-slip into Buxton Knights. It was only when leaving that
+      he added: &ldquo;So they're not selling the Bolderby Old Crome,
+      after all?&rdquo; In sheer pride of racial superiority, as he had
+      calculated would be the case, Dumetrius replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I shall get it, Mr. Forsyte, sir!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The flutter of his eyelid fortified Soames in a resolution to write direct
+      to the new Bolderby, suggesting that the only dignified way of dealing
+      with an Old Crome was to avoid dealers. He therefore said, &ldquo;Well,
+      good-day!&rdquo; and went, leaving Dumetrius the wiser.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Green Street he found that Fleur was out and would be all the evening;
+      she was staying one more night in London. He cabbed on dejectedly, and
+      caught his train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached his house about six o'clock. The air was heavy, midges
+      biting, thunder about. Taking his letters he went up to his dressing-room
+      to cleanse himself of London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An uninteresting post. A receipt, a bill for purchases on behalf of Fleur.
+      A circular about an exhibition of etchings. A letter beginning:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SIR,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel it my duty...&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That would be an appeal or something unpleasant. He looked at once for the
+      signature. There was none! Incredulously he turned the page over and
+      examined each corner. Not being a public man, Soames had never yet had an
+      anonymous letter, and his first impulse was to tear it up, as a dangerous
+      thing; his second to read it, as a thing still more dangerous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SIR,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel it my duty to inform you that having no interest in the
+      matter your lady is carrying on with a foreigner&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reaching that word Soames stopped mechanically and examined the postmark.
+      So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in which the Post
+      Office had wrapped it, there was something with a &ldquo;sea&rdquo; at the
+      end and a &ldquo;t&rdquo; in it. Chelsea? No! Battersea? Perhaps! He read
+      on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These foreigners are all the same. Sack the lot. This one meets
+      your lady twice a week. I know it of my own knowledge&mdash;and to see an
+      Englishman put on goes against the grain. You watch it and see if what I
+      say isn't true. I shouldn't meddle if it wasn't a dirty
+      foreigner that's in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yours obedient.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sensation with which Soames dropped the letter was similar to that he
+      would have had entering his bedroom and finding it full of black-beetles.
+      The meanness of anonymity gave a shuddering obscenity to the moment. And
+      the worst of it was that this shadow had been at the back of his mind ever
+      since the Sunday evening when Fleur had pointed down at Prosper Profond
+      strolling on the lawn, and said: &ldquo;Prowling cat!&rdquo; Had he not in
+      connection therewith, this very day, perused his Will and Marriage
+      Settlement? And now this anonymous ruffian, with nothing to gain,
+      apparently, save the venting of his spite against foreigners, had wrenched
+      it out of the obscurity in which he had hoped and wished it would remain.
+      To have such knowledge forced on him, at his time of life, about Fleur's
+      mother! He picked the letter up from the carpet, tore it across, and then,
+      when it hung together by just the fold at the back, stopped tearing, and
+      reread it. He was taking at that moment one of the decisive resolutions of
+      his life. He would not be forced into another scandal. No! However he
+      decided to deal with this matter&mdash;and it required the most
+      far-sighted and careful consideration he would do nothing that might
+      injure Fleur. That resolution taken, his mind answered the helm again, and
+      he made his ablutions. His hands trembled as he dried them. Scandal he
+      would not have, but something must be done to stop this sort of thing! He
+      went into his wife's room and stood looking around him. The idea of
+      searching for anything which would incriminate, and entitle him to hold a
+      menace over her, did not even come to him. There would be nothing&mdash;she
+      was much too practical. The idea of having her watched had been dismissed
+      before it came&mdash;too well he remembered his previous experience of
+      that. No! He had nothing but this torn-up letter from some anonymous
+      ruffian, whose impudent intrusion into his private life he so violently
+      resented. It was repugnant to him to make use of it, but he might have to.
+      What a mercy Fleur was not at home to-night! A tap on the door broke up
+      his painful cogitations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Michael Mont, sir, is in the drawing-room. Will you see him?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;yes. I'll come down.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anything that would take his mind off for a few minutes!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Michael Mont in flannels stood on the verandah smoking a cigarette. He
+      threw it away as Soames came up, and ran his hand through his hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames' feeling toward this young man was singular. He was no doubt
+      a rackety, irresponsible young fellow according to old standards, yet
+      somehow likeable, with his extraordinarily cheerful way of blurting out
+      his opinions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;have you had tea?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mont came in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought Fleur would have been back, sir; but I'm glad she
+      isn't. The fact is, I&mdash;I'm fearfully gone on her; so
+      fearfully gone that I thought you'd better know. It's
+      old-fashioned, of course, coming to fathers first, but I thought you'd
+      forgive that. I went to my own Dad, and he says if I settle down he'll
+      see me through. He rather cottons to the idea, in fact. I told him about
+      your Goya.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Soames, inexpressibly dry. &ldquo;He rather
+      cottons?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir; do you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames smiled faintly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; resumed Mont, twiddling his straw hat, while his
+      hair, ears, eyebrows, all seemed to stand up from excitement, &ldquo;when
+      you've been through the War you can't help being in a hurry.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To get married; and unmarried afterward,&rdquo; said Soames slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not from Fleur, sir. Imagine, if you were me!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames cleared his throat. That way of putting it was forcible enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur's too young,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! no, sir. We're awfully old nowadays. My Dad seems to me a
+      perfect babe; his thinking apparatus hasn't turned a hair. But he's
+      a Baronight, of course; that keeps him back.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Baronight,&rdquo; repeated Soames; &ldquo;what may that be?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bart, sir. I shall be a Bart some day. But I shall live it down,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away and live this down,&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young Mont said imploringly: &ldquo;Oh! no, sir. I simply must hang
+      around, or I shouldn't have a dog's chance. You'll let
+      Fleur do what she likes, I suppose, anyway. Madame passes me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; said Soames frigidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't really bar me, do you?&rdquo; and the young man
+      looked so doleful that Soames smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may think you're very old,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but you
+      strike me as extremely young. To rattle ahead of everything is not a proof
+      of maturity.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, sir; I give you our age. But to show you I mean business&mdash;I've
+      got a job.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Glad to hear it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Joined a publisher; my governor is putting up the stakes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames put his hand over his mouth&mdash;he had so very nearly said:
+      &ldquo;God help the publisher!&rdquo; His grey eyes scrutinised the
+      agitated young man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't dislike you, Mr. Mont, but Fleur is everything to me:
+      Everything&mdash;do you understand?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir, I know; but so she is to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's as may be. I'm glad you've told me,
+      however. And now I think there's nothing more to be said.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it rests with her, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will rest with her a long time, I hope.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You aren't cheering,&rdquo; said Mont suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;my experience of life has not made
+      me anxious to couple people in a hurry. Good-night, Mr. Mont. I shan't
+      tell Fleur what you've said.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; murmured Mont blankly; &ldquo;I really could knock my
+      brains out for want of her. She knows that perfectly well.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say.&rdquo; And Soames held out his hand. A distracted
+      squeeze, a heavy sigh, and soon after sounds from the young man's
+      motor-cycle called up visions of flying dust and broken bones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'The younger generation!' he thought heavily, and went out on
+      to the lawn. The gardeners had been mowing, and there was still the smell
+      of fresh-cut grass&mdash;the thundery air kept all scents close to earth.
+      The sky was of a purplish hue&mdash;the poplars black. Two or three boats
+      passed on the river, scuttling, as it were, for shelter before the storm.
+      'Three days' fine weather,' thought Soames, 'and
+      then a storm!' Where was Annette? With that chap, for all he knew&mdash;she
+      was a young woman! Impressed with the queer charity of that thought, he
+      entered the summerhouse and sat down. The fact was&mdash;and he admitted
+      it&mdash;Fleur was so much to him that his wife was very little&mdash;very
+      little; French&mdash;had never been much more than a mistress, and he was
+      getting indifferent to that side of things! It was odd how, with all this
+      ingrained care for moderation and secure investment, Soames ever put his
+      emotional eggs into one basket. First Irene&mdash;now Fleur. He was dimly
+      conscious of it, sitting there, conscious of its odd dangerousness. It had
+      brought him to wreck and scandal once, but now&mdash;now it should save
+      him! He cared so much for Fleur that he would have no further scandal. If
+      only he could get at that anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not
+      to meddle and stir up mud at the bottom of water which he wished should
+      remain stagnant!... A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain
+      spattered on the thatch above him. He remained indifferent, tracing a
+      pattern with his finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table.
+      Fleur's future! 'I want fair sailing for her,' he
+      thought. 'Nothing else matters at my time of life.' A lonely
+      business&mdash;life! What you had you never could keep to yourself! As you
+      warned one off, you let another in. One could make sure of nothing! He
+      reached up and pulled a red rambler rose from a cluster which blocked the
+      window. Flowers grew and dropped&mdash;Nature was a queer thing! The
+      thunder rumbled and crashed, travelling east along a river, the paling
+      flashes flicked his eyes; the poplar tops showed sharp and dense against
+      the sky, a heavy shower rustled and rattled and veiled in the little house
+      wherein he sat, indifferent, thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the storm was over, he left his retreat and went down the wet path to
+      the river bank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two swans had come, sheltering in among the reeds. He knew the birds well,
+      and stood watching the dignity in the curve of those white necks and
+      formidable snake-like heads. 'Not dignified&mdash;what I have to do!'
+      he thought. And yet it must be tackled, lest worse befell. Annette must be
+      back by now from wherever she had gone, for it was nearly dinner-time, and
+      as the moment for seeing her approached, the difficulty of knowing what to
+      say and how to say it had increased. A new and scaring thought occurred to
+      him. Suppose she wanted her liberty to marry this fellow! Well, if she
+      did, she couldn't have it. He had not married her for that. The
+      image of Prosper Profond dawdled before him reassuringly. Not a marrying
+      man! No, no! Anger replaced that momentary scare. 'He had better not
+      come my way,' he thought. The mongrel represented&mdash;-! But what
+      did Prosper Profond represent? Nothing that mattered surely. And yet
+      something real enough in the world&mdash;unmorality let off its chain,
+      disillusionment on the prowl! That expression Annette had caught from him:
+      &ldquo;Je m'en fiche!&rdquo; A fatalistic chap! A continental&mdash;a
+      cosmopolitan&mdash;a product of the age! If there were condemnation more
+      complete, Soames felt that he did not know it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into some
+      distance of their own. One of them uttered a little hiss, wagged its tail,
+      turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam away. The other followed.
+      Their white bodies, their stately necks, passed out of his sight, and he
+      went toward the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he thought as he
+      went up-stairs 'Handsome is as handsome does.' Handsome!
+      Except for remarks about the curtains in the drawing-room, and the storm,
+      there was practically no conversation during a meal distinguished by
+      exactitude of quantity and perfection of quality. Soames drank nothing. He
+      followed her into the drawing-room afterward, and found her smoking a
+      cigarette on the sofa between the two French windows. She was leaning
+      back, almost upright, in a low black frock, with her knees crossed and her
+      blue eyes half-closed; grey-blue smoke issued from her red, rather full
+      lips, a fillet bound her chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk
+      stockings, and shoes with very high heels showing off her instep. A fine
+      piece in any room! Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep
+      into the side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to shut the window; the damp's lifting in.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the cream-panelled
+      wall close by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was she thinking of? He had never understood a woman in his life&mdash;except
+      Fleur&mdash;and Fleur not always! His heart beat fast. But if he meant to
+      do it, now was the moment. Turning from the David Cox, he took out the
+      torn letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've had this.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames handed her the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's torn, but you can read it.&rdquo; And he turned back to
+      the David Cox&mdash;a sea-piece, of good tone&mdash;but without movement
+      enough. 'I wonder what that chap's doing at this moment?'
+      he thought. 'I'll astonish him yet.' Out of the corner
+      of his eye he saw Annette holding the letter rigidly; her eyes moved from
+      side to side under her darkened lashes and frowning darkened eyes. She
+      dropped the letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dirrty!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I quite agree,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;degrading. Is it true?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A tooth fastened on her red lower lip. &ldquo;And what if it were?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was brazen!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that all you have to say?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, speak out!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the good of talking?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames said icily: &ldquo;So you admit it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I admit nothing. You are a fool to ask. A man like you should not
+      ask. It is dangerous.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember,&rdquo; he said, halting in front of her, &ldquo;what
+      you were when I married you? Working at accounts in a restaurant.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you remember that I was not half your age?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to the
+      David Cox.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not going to bandy words. I require you to give up this&mdash;friendship.
+      I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&mdash;Fleur!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Soames stubbornly; &ldquo;Fleur. She is your child
+      as well as mine.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is kind to admit that!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to do what I say?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I refuse to tell you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I must make you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Soames,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You are helpless. Do not say
+      things that you will regret.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anger swelled the veins on his forehead. He opened his mouth to vent that
+      emotion, and could not. Annette went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There shall be no more such letters, I promise you. That is enough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames writhed. He had a sense of being treated like a child by this woman
+      who had deserved he did not know what.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had
+      better be quiet about each other. There are things one does not drag up
+      into the light for people to laugh at. You will be quiet, then; not for my
+      sake for your own. You are getting old; I am not, yet. You have made me
+      ver-ry practical&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked,
+      repeated dully:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I require you to give up this friendship.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if I do not?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;then I will cut you out of my Will.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somehow it did not seem to meet the case. Annette laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will live a long time, Soames.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;you are a bad woman,&rdquo; said Soames suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette shrugged her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not think so. Living with you has killed things in me, it is
+      true; but I am not a bad woman. I am sensible&mdash;that is all. And so
+      will you be when you have thought it over.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall see this man,&rdquo; said Soames sullenly, &ldquo;and warn
+      him off.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mon cher, you are funny. You do not want me, you have as much of me
+      as you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead. I admit nothing, but
+      I am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had better be quiet,
+      I tell you. I myself will make no scandal; none. Now, I am not saying any
+      more, whatever you do.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened it.
+      Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings. The thought of
+      that man was almost making him want her, and this was a revelation of
+      their relationship, startling to one little given to introspective
+      philosophy. Without saying another word he went out and up to the
+      picture-gallery. This came of marrying a Frenchwoman! And yet, without her
+      there would have been no Fleur! She had served her purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing. I
+      don't even know that there's anything in it.' The
+      instinct of self-preservation warned him to batten down his hatches, to
+      smother the fire with want of air. Unless one believed there was something
+      in a thing, there wasn't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night he went into her room. She received him in the most
+      matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them. And he
+      returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace. If one didn't
+      choose to see, one needn't. And he did not choose&mdash;in future he
+      did not choose. There was nothing to be gained by it&mdash;nothing!
+      Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed
+      photograph of Fleur. When he had looked at it a little he slipped it down,
+      and there was that other one&mdash;that old one of Irene. An owl hooted
+      while he stood in his window gazing at it. The owl hooted, the red
+      climbing roses seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of
+      lime-blossom. God! That had been a different thing! Passion&mdash;Memory!
+      Dust!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0116" id="link2H_4_0116">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.&mdash;JUNE TAKES A HAND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York, an
+      egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June Forsyte's
+      studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick. On the evening of July 6,
+      Boris Strumolowski&mdash;several of whose works were on show there because
+      they were as yet too advanced to be on show anywhere else&mdash;had begun
+      well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like silence which admirably
+      suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned countenance framed in bright
+      hair banged like a girl's. June had known him three weeks, and he
+      still seemed to her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of the
+      future; a sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an
+      unappreciative West. Until that evening he had conversationally confined
+      himself to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust he
+      had just shaken from off his feet&mdash;a country, in his opinion, so
+      barbarous in every way that he had sold practically nothing there, and
+      become an object of suspicion to the police; a country, as he said,
+      without a race of its own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity,
+      without principles, traditions, taste, without&mdash;in a word&mdash;a
+      soul. He had left it for his own good, and come to the only other country
+      where he could live well. June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely
+      moments, standing before his creations&mdash;frightening, but powerful and
+      symbolic once they had been explained! That he, haloed by bright hair like
+      an early Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion of
+      all else&mdash;the only sign of course by which real genius could be told&mdash;should
+      still be a &ldquo;lame duck&rdquo; agitated her warm heart almost to the
+      exclusion of Paul Post. And she had begun to take steps to clear her
+      Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces. She had at
+      once encountered trouble. Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch had stung. With
+      all the emphasis of a genius which she did not as yet deny them, they had
+      demanded another six weeks at least of her Gallery. The American stream,
+      still flowing in, would soon be flowing out. The American stream was their
+      right, their only hope, their salvation&mdash;since nobody in this &ldquo;beastly&rdquo;
+      country cared for Art. June had yielded to the demonstration. After all
+      Boris would not mind their having the full benefit of an American stream,
+      which he himself so violently despised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present, except
+      Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy Portugal, editor
+      of the Neo-Artist. She had put it to him with that sudden confidence which
+      continual contact with the neo-artistic world had never been able to dry
+      up in her warm and generous nature. He had not broken his Christ-like
+      silence, however, for more than two minutes before she began to move her
+      blue eyes from side to side, as a cat moves its tail. This&mdash;he said&mdash;was
+      characteristic of England, the most selfish country in the world; the
+      country which sucked the blood of other countries; destroyed the brains
+      and hearts of Irishmen, Hindus, Egyptians, Boers, and Burmese, all the
+      best races in the world; bullying, hypocritical England! This was what he
+      had expected, coming to, such a country, where the climate was all fog,
+      and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in
+      profiteering and the grossest materialism. Conscious that Hannah Hobdey
+      was murmuring, &ldquo;Hear, hear!&rdquo; and Jimmy Portugal sniggering,
+      June grew crimson, and suddenly rapped out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why did you ever come? We didn't ask you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The remark was so singularly at variance with all she had led him to
+      expect from her, that Strumolowski stretched out his hand and took a
+      cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;England never wants an idealist,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in June something primitively English was thoroughly upset; old Jolyon's
+      sense of justice had risen, as it were, from bed. &ldquo;You come and
+      sponge on us,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and then abuse us. If you think that's
+      playing the game, I don't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She now discovered that which others had discovered before her&mdash;the
+      thickness of hide beneath which the sensibility of genius is sometimes
+      veiled. Strumolowski's young and ingenuous face became the
+      incarnation of a sneer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sponge, one does not sponge, one takes what is owing&mdash;a tenth
+      part of what is owing. You will repent to say that, Miss Forsyte.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; said June, &ldquo;I shan't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! We know very well, we artists&mdash;you take us to get what you
+      can out of us. I want nothing from you&rdquo;&mdash;and he blew out a
+      cloud of June's smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Decision rose in an icy puff from the turmoil of insulted shame within
+      her. &ldquo;Very well, then, you can take your things away.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, almost in the same moment, she thought: 'Poor boy! He's
+      only got a garret, and probably not a taxi fare. In front of these people,
+      too; it's positively disgusting!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young Strumolowski shook his head violently; his hair, thick, smooth,
+      close as a golden plate, did not fall off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can live on nothing,&rdquo; he said shrilly; &ldquo;I have often
+      had to for the sake of my Art. It is you bourgeois who force us to spend
+      money.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words hit June like a pebble, in the ribs. After all she had done for
+      Art, all her identification with its troubles and lame ducks. She was
+      struggling for adequate words when the door was opened, and her Austrian
+      murmured:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A young lady, gnadiges Fraulein.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the little meal-room.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a glance at Boris Strumolowski, at Hannah Hobdey, at Jimmy Portugal,
+      June said nothing, and went out, devoid of equanimity. Entering the
+      &ldquo;little meal-room,&rdquo; she perceived the young lady to be Fleur&mdash;looking
+      very pretty, if pale. At this disenchanted moment a little lame duck of
+      her own breed was welcome to June, so homoeopathic by instinct.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl must have come, of course, because of Jon; or, if not, at least
+      to get something out of her. And June felt just then that to assist
+      somebody was the only bearable thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you've remembered to come,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. What a jolly little duck of a house! But please don't
+      let me bother you, if you've got people.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said June. &ldquo;I want to let them stew in
+      their own juice for a bit. Have you come about Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You said you thought we ought to be told. Well, I've found
+      out.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said June blankly. &ldquo;Not nice, is it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were standing one on each side of the little bare table at which June
+      took her meals. A vase on it was full of Iceland poppies; the girl raised
+      her hand and touched them with a gloved finger. To her new-fangled dress,
+      frilly about the hips and tight below the knees, June took a sudden liking&mdash;a
+      charming colour, flax-blue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'She makes a picture,' thought June. Her little room, with its
+      whitewashed walls, its floor and hearth of old pink brick, its black
+      paint, and latticed window athwart which the last of the sunlight was
+      shining, had never looked so charming, set off by this young figure, with
+      the creamy, slightly frowning face. She remembered with sudden vividness
+      how nice she herself had looked in those old days when her heart was set
+      on Philip Bosinney, that dead lover, who had broken from her to destroy
+      for ever Irene's allegiance to this girl's father. Did Fleur
+      know of that, too?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;what are you going to do?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was some seconds before Fleur answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want Jon to suffer. I must see him once more to put
+      an end to it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going to put an end to it!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What else is there to do?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl seemed to June, suddenly, intolerably spiritless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you're right,&rdquo; she muttered. &ldquo;I know my
+      father thinks so; but&mdash;I should never have done it myself. I can't
+      take things lying down.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How poised and watchful that girl looked; how unemotional her voice
+      sounded!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People will assume that I'm in love.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, aren't you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur shrugged her shoulders. 'I might have known it,' thought
+      June; 'she's Soames' daughter&mdash;fish! And yet&mdash;he!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want me to do then?&rdquo; she said with a sort of
+      disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Could I see Jon here to-morrow on his way down to Holly's? He'd
+      come if you sent him a line to-night. And perhaps afterward you'd
+      let them know quietly at Robin Hill that it's all over, and that
+      they needn't tell Jon about his mother.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; said June abruptly. &ldquo;I'll write now,
+      and you can post it. Half-past two tomorrow. I shan't be in, myself.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down at the tiny bureau which filled one corner. When she looked
+      round with the finished note Fleur was still touching the poppies with her
+      gloved finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June licked a stamp. &ldquo;Well, here it is. If you're not in love,
+      of course, there's no more to be said. Jon's lucky.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur took the note. &ldquo;Thanks awfully!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Cold-blooded little baggage!' thought June. Jon, son of her
+      father, to love, and not to be loved by the daughter of&mdash;Soames! It
+      was humiliating!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that all?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur nodded; her frills shook and trembled as she swayed toward the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye!... Little piece of fashion!&rdquo; muttered June, closing
+      the door. &ldquo;That family!&rdquo; And she marched back toward her
+      studio. Boris Strumolowski had regained his Christ-like silence and Jimmy
+      Portugal was damning everybody, except the group in whose behalf he ran
+      the Neo-Artist. Among the condemned were Eric Cobbley, and several other
+      &ldquo;lame-duck&rdquo; genii who at one time or another had held first
+      place in the repertoire of June's aid and adoration. She experienced
+      a sense of futility and disgust, and went to the window to let the
+      river-wind blow those squeaky words away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when at length Jimmy Portugal had finished, and gone with Hannah
+      Hobdey, she sat down and mothered young Strumolowski for half an hour,
+      promising him a month, at least, of the American stream; so that he went
+      away with his halo in perfect order. 'In spite of all,' June
+      thought, 'Boris is wonderful.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0117" id="link2H_4_0117">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.&mdash;THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To know that your hand is against every one's is&mdash;for some
+      natures&mdash;to experience a sense of moral release. Fleur felt no
+      remorse when she left June's house. Reading condemnatory resentment
+      in her little kinswoman's blue eyes-she was glad that she had fooled
+      her, despising June because that elderly idealist had not seen what she
+      was after.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      End it, forsooth! She would soon show them all that she was only just
+      beginning. And she smiled to herself on the top of the bus which carried
+      her back to Mayfair. But the smile died, squeezed out by spasms of
+      anticipation and anxiety. Would she be able to manage Jon? She had taken
+      the bit between her teeth, but could she make him take it too? She knew
+      the truth and the real danger of delay&mdash;he knew neither; therein lay
+      all the difference in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Suppose I tell him,' she thought; 'wouldn't it
+      really be safer?' This hideous luck had no right to spoil their
+      love; he must see that! They could not let it! People always accepted an
+      accomplished fact in time! From that piece of philosophy&mdash;profound
+      enough at her age&mdash;she passed to another consideration less
+      philosophic. If she persuaded Jon to a quick and secret marriage, and he
+      found out afterward that she had known the truth. What then? Jon hated
+      subterfuge. Again, then, would it not be better to tell him? But the
+      memory of his mother's face kept intruding on that impulse. Fleur
+      was afraid. His mother had power over him; more power perhaps than she
+      herself. Who could tell? It was too great a risk. Deep-sunk in these
+      instinctive calculations she was carried on past Green Street as far as
+      the Ritz Hotel. She got down there, and walked back on the Green Park
+      side. The storm had washed every tree; they still dripped. Heavy drops
+      fell on to her frills, and to avoid them she crossed over under the eyes
+      of the Iseeum Club. Chancing to look up she saw Monsieur Profond with a
+      tall stout man in the bay window. Turning into Green Street she heard her
+      name called, and saw &ldquo;that prowler&rdquo; coming up. He took off his
+      hat&mdash;a glossy &ldquo;bowler&rdquo; such as she particularly detested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good evenin'. Miss Forsyde. Isn't there a small thing I
+      can do for you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, pass by on the other side.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say! Why do you dislike me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do I?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It looks like it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, because you make me feel life isn't worth living.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monsieur Profond smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Miss Forsyde, don't worry. It'll be all
+      right. Nothing lasts.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Things do last,&rdquo; cried Fleur; &ldquo;with me anyhow&mdash;especially
+      likes and dislikes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that makes me a bit un'appy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have thought nothing could ever make you happy or unhappy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like to annoy other people. I'm goin' on
+      my yacht.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur looked at him, startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Small voyage to the South Seas or somewhere,&rdquo; said Monsieur
+      Profond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur suffered relief and a sense of insult. Clearly he meant to convey
+      that he was breaking with her mother. How dared he have anything to break,
+      and yet how dared he break it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night, Miss Forsyde! Remember me to Mrs. Dartie. I'm not
+      so bad really. Good-night!&rdquo; Fleur left him standing there with his
+      hat raised. Stealing a look round, she saw him stroll&mdash;immaculate and
+      heavy&mdash;back toward his Club.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'He can't even love with conviction,' she thought.
+      'What will Mother do?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her dreams that night were endless and uneasy; she rose heavy and
+      unrested, and went at once to the study of Whitaker's Almanac. A
+      Forsyte is instinctively aware that facts are the real crux of any
+      situation. She might conquer Jon's prejudice, but without exact
+      machinery to complete their desperate resolve, nothing would happen. From
+      the invaluable tome she learned that they must each be twenty-one; or some
+      one's consent would be necessary, which of course was unobtainable;
+      then she became lost in directions concerning licenses, certificates,
+      notices, districts, coming finally to the word &ldquo;perjury.&rdquo; But
+      that was nonsense! Who would really mind their giving wrong ages in order
+      to be married for love! She ate hardly any breakfast, and went back to
+      Whitaker. The more she studied the less sure she became; till, idly
+      turning the pages, she came to Scotland. People could be married there
+      without any of this nonsense. She had only to go and stay there twenty-one
+      days, then Jon could come, and in front of two people they could declare
+      themselves married. And what was more&mdash;they would be! It was far the
+      best way; and at once she ran over her schoolfellows. There was Mary Lambe
+      who lived in Edinburgh and was &ldquo;quite a sport!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a brother too. She could stay with Mary Lambe, who with her
+      brother would serve for witnesses. She well knew that some girls would
+      think all this unnecessary, and that all she and Jon need do was to go
+      away together for a weekend and then say to their people: &ldquo;We are
+      married by Nature, we must now be married by Law.&rdquo; But Fleur was
+      Forsyte enough to feel such a proceeding dubious, and to dread her father's
+      face when he heard of it. Besides, she did not believe that Jon would do
+      it; he had an opinion of her such as she could not bear to diminish. No!
+      Mary Lambe was preferable, and it was just the time of year to go to
+      Scotland. More at ease now she packed, avoided her aunt, and took a bus to
+      Chiswick. She was too early, and went on to Kew Gardens. She found no
+      peace among its flower-beds, labelled trees, and broad green spaces, and
+      having lunched off anchovy-paste sandwiches and coffee, returned to
+      Chiswick and rang June's bell. The Austrian admitted her to the
+      &ldquo;little meal-room.&rdquo; Now that she knew what she and Jon were up
+      against, her longing for him had increased tenfold, as if he were a toy
+      with sharp edges or dangerous paint such as they had tried to take from
+      her as a child. If she could not have her way, and get Jon for good and
+      all, she felt like dying of privation. By hook or crook she must and would
+      get him! A round dim mirror of very old glass hung over the pink brick
+      hearth. She stood looking at herself reflected in it, pale, and rather
+      dark under the eyes; little shudders kept passing through her nerves. Then
+      she heard the bell ring, and, stealing to the window, saw him standing on
+      the doorstep smoothing his hair and lips, as if he too were trying to
+      subdue the fluttering of his nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was sitting on one of the two rush-seated chairs, with her back to the
+      door, when he came in, and she said at once&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, Jon, I want to talk seriously.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon sat on the table by her side, and without looking at him she went on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you don't want to lose me, we must get married.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon gasped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why? Is there anything new?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, but I felt it at Robin Hill, and among my people.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo; stammered Jon, &ldquo;at Robin Hill&mdash;it was
+      all smooth&mdash;and they've said nothing to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they mean to stop us. Your mother's face was enough. And
+      my father's.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you seen him since?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur nodded. What mattered a few supplementary lies?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Jon eagerly, &ldquo;I can't see how they can
+      feel like that after all these years.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur looked up at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you don't love me enough.&rdquo; &ldquo;Not love you
+      enough! Why&mdash;!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then make sure of me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Without telling them?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not till after.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon was silent. How much older he looked than on that day, barely two
+      months ago, when she first saw him&mdash;quite two years older!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would hurt Mother awfully,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur drew her hand away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got to choose.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon slid off the table on to his knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why not tell them? They can't really stop us, Fleur!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They can! I tell you, they can.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We're utterly dependent&mdash;by putting money pressure, and
+      all sorts of other pressure. I'm not patient, Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's deceiving them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't really love me, or you wouldn't hesitate.
+      'He either fears his fate too much!'&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lifting his hands to her waist, Jon forced her to sit down again. She
+      hurried on:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've planned it all out. We've only to go to Scotland.
+      When we're married they'll soon come round. People always come
+      round to facts. Don't you see, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to hurt them so awfully!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he would rather hurt her than those people of his! &ldquo;All right,
+      then; let me go!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon got up and put his back against the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I expect you're right,&rdquo; he said slowly; &ldquo;but I
+      want to think it over.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could see that he was seething with feelings he wanted to express; but
+      she did not mean to help him. She hated herself at this moment and almost
+      hated him. Why had she to do all the work to secure their love? It wasn't
+      fair. And then she saw his eyes, adoring and distressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't look like that! I only don't want to lose you,
+      Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't lose me so long as you want me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes, I can.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon put his hands on her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur, do you know anything you haven't told me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the point-blank question she had dreaded. She looked straight at
+      him, and answered: &ldquo;No.&rdquo; She had burnt her boats; but what did
+      it matter, if she got him? He would forgive her. And throwing her arms
+      round his neck, she kissed him on the lips. She was winning! She felt it
+      in the beating of his heart against her, in the closing of his eyes.
+      &ldquo;I want to make sure! I want to make sure!&rdquo; she whispered.
+      &ldquo;Promise!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon did not answer. His face had the stillness of extreme trouble. At last
+      he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's like hitting them. I must think a little, Fleur. I
+      really must.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur slipped out of his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Very well!&rdquo; And suddenly she burst into tears of
+      disappointment, shame, and overstrain. Followed five minutes of acute
+      misery. Jon's remorse and tenderness knew no bounds; but he did not
+      promise. Despite her will to cry, &ldquo;Very well, then, if you don't
+      love me enough-goodbye!&rdquo; she dared not. From birth accustomed to her
+      own way, this check from one so young, so tender, so devoted, baffled and
+      surprised her. She wanted to push him away from her, to try what anger and
+      coldness would do, and again she dared not. The knowledge that she was
+      scheming to rush him blindfold into the irrevocable weakened everything&mdash;weakened
+      the sincerity of pique, and the sincerity of passion; even her kisses had
+      not the lure she wished for them. That stormy little meeting ended
+      inconclusively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you some tea, gnadiges Fraulein?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pushing Jon from her, she cried out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No-no, thank you! I'm just going.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And before he could prevent her she was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She went stealthily, mopping her gushed, stained cheeks, frightened,
+      angry, very miserable. She had stirred Jon up so fearfully, yet nothing
+      definite was promised or arranged! But the more uncertain and hazardous
+      the future, the more &ldquo;the will to have&rdquo; worked its tentacles
+      into the flesh of her heart&mdash;like some burrowing tick!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one was at Green Street. Winifred had gone with Imogen to see a play
+      which some said was allegorical, and others &ldquo;very exciting, don't
+      you know.&rdquo; It was because of what others said that Winifred and
+      Imogen had gone. Fleur went on to Paddington. Through the carriage the air
+      from the brick-kilns of West Drayton and the late hayfields fanned her
+      still gushed cheeks. Flowers had seemed to be had for the picking; now
+      they were all thorned and prickled. But the golden flower within the crown
+      of spikes seemed to her tenacious spirit all the fairer and more
+      desirable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0118" id="link2H_4_0118">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.&mdash;THE FAT IN THE FIRE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On reaching home Fleur found an atmosphere so peculiar that it penetrated
+      even the perplexed aura of her own private life. Her mother was
+      inaccessibly entrenched in a brown study; her father contemplating fate in
+      the vinery. Neither of them had a word to throw to a dog. 'Is it
+      because of me?' thought Fleur. 'Or because of Profond?'
+      To her mother she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter with Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mother answered with a shrug of her shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To her father:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the matter with Mother?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Matter? What should be the matter?&rdquo; and gave her a sharp
+      look.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the way,&rdquo; murmured Fleur, &ldquo;Monsieur Profond is going
+      a 'small' voyage on his yacht, to the South Seas.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames examined a branch on which no grapes were growing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This vine's a failure,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've had
+      young Mont here. He asked me something about you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! How do you like him, Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&mdash;he's a product&mdash;like all these young people.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What were you at his age, dear?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames smiled grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We went to work, and didn't play about&mdash;flying and
+      motoring, and making love.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Didn't you ever make love?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She avoided looking at him while she said that, but she saw him well
+      enough. His pale face had reddened, his eyebrows, where darkness was still
+      mingled with the grey, had come close together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no time or inclination to philander.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you had a grand passion.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames looked at her intently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;if you want to know&mdash;and much good it did me.&rdquo;
+      He moved away, along by the hot-water pipes. Fleur tiptoed silently after
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me about it, Father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames became very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What should you want to know about such things, at your age?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she alive?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And married?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's Jon Forsyte's mother, isn't it? And she was
+      your wife first.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was said in a flash of intuition. Surely his opposition came from his
+      anxiety that she should not know of that old wound to his pride. But she
+      was startled. To see some one so old and calm wince as if struck, to hear
+      so sharp a note of pain in his voice!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who told you that? If your aunt! I can't bear the affair
+      talked of.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, darling,&rdquo; said Fleur, softly, &ldquo;it's so long
+      ago.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Long ago or not, I....&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur stood stroking his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've tried to forget,&rdquo; he said suddenly; &ldquo;I don't
+      wish to be reminded.&rdquo; And then, as if venting some long and secret
+      irritation, he added: &ldquo;In these days people don't understand.
+      Grand passion, indeed! No one knows what it is.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said Fleur, almost in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames, who had turned his back on her, spun round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you talking of&mdash;a child like you!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I've inherited it, Father.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For her son, you see.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was pale as a sheet, and she knew that she was as bad. They stood
+      staring at each other in the steamy heat, redolent of the mushy scent of
+      earth, of potted geranium, and of vines coming along fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is crazy,&rdquo; said Soames at last, between dry lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Scarcely moving her own, she murmured:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be angry, Father. I can't help it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she could see he wasn't angry; only scared, deeply scared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought that foolishness,&rdquo; he stammered, &ldquo;was all
+      forgotten.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no! It's ten times what it was.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames kicked at the hot-water pipe. The hapless movement touched her, who
+      had no fear of her father&mdash;none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dearest!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;What must be, must, you know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must!&rdquo; repeated Soames. &ldquo;You don't know what you're
+      talking of. Has that boy been told?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blood rushed into her cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had turned from her again, and, with one shoulder a little raised,
+      stood staring fixedly at a joint in the pipes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's most distasteful to me,&rdquo; he said suddenly; &ldquo;nothing
+      could be more so. Son of that fellow! It's&mdash;it's&mdash;perverse!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had noted, almost unconsciously, that he did not say &ldquo;son of
+      that woman,&rdquo; and again her intuition began working.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did the ghost of that grand passion linger in some corner of his heart?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She slipped her hand under his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon's father is quite ill and old; I saw him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I went there with Jon; I saw them both.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, and what did they say to you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing. They were very polite.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They would be.&rdquo; He resumed his contemplation of the
+      pipe-joint, and then said suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must think this over&mdash;I'll speak to you again
+      to-night.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew this was final for the moment, and stole away, leaving him still
+      looking at the pipe-joint. She wandered into the fruit-garden, among the
+      raspberry and currant bushes, without impetus to pick and eat. Two months
+      ago&mdash;she was light-hearted! Even two days ago&mdash;light-hearted,
+      before Prosper Profond told her. Now she felt tangled in a web-of
+      passions, vested rights, oppressions and revolts, the ties of love and
+      hate. At this dark moment of discouragement there seemed, even to her
+      hold-fast nature, no way out. How deal with it&mdash;how sway and bend
+      things to her will, and get her heart's desire? And, suddenly, round
+      the corner of the high box hedge, she came plump on her mother, walking
+      swiftly, with an open letter in her hand. Her bosom was heaving, her eyes
+      dilated, her cheeks flushed. Instantly Fleur thought: 'The yacht!
+      Poor Mother!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette gave her a wide startled look, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;J'ai la migraine.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm awfully sorry, Mother.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes! you and your father&mdash;sorry!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Mother&mdash;I am. I know what it feels like.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette's startled eyes grew wide, till the whites showed above
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor innocent!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mother&mdash;so self-possessed, and commonsensical&mdash;to look and
+      speak like this! It was all frightening! Her father, her mother, herself!
+      And only two months back they had seemed to have everything they wanted in
+      this world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette crumpled the letter in her hand. Fleur knew that she must ignore
+      the sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't I do anything for your head, Mother?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette shook that head and walked on, swaying her hips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'It's cruel,' thought Fleur, 'and I was glad! That
+      man! What do men come prowling for, disturbing everything! I suppose he's
+      tired of her. What business has he to be tired of my mother? What
+      business!' And at that thought, so natural and so peculiar, she
+      uttered a little choked laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She ought, of course, to be delighted, but what was there to be delighted
+      at? Her father didn't really care! Her mother did, perhaps? She
+      entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree. A breeze sighed in
+      the higher boughs; the sky seen through their green was very blue and very
+      white in cloud&mdash;those heavy white clouds almost always present in
+      river landscape. Bees, sheltering out of the wind, hummed softly, and over
+      the lush grass fell the thick shade from those fruit-trees planted by her
+      father five-and-twenty, years ago. Birds were almost silent, the cuckoos
+      had ceased to sing, but wood-pigeons were cooing. The breath and drone and
+      cooing of high summer were not for long a sedative to her excited nerves.
+      Crouched over her knees she began to scheme. Her father must be made to
+      back her up. Why should he mind so long as she was happy? She had not
+      lived for nearly nineteen years without knowing that her future was all he
+      really cared about. She had, then, only to convince him that her future
+      could not be happy without Jon. He thought it a mad fancy. How foolish the
+      old were, thinking they could tell what the young felt! Had not he
+      confessed that he&mdash;when young&mdash;had loved with a grand passion?
+      He ought to understand! 'He piles up his money for me,' she
+      thought; 'but what's the use, if I'm not going to be
+      happy?' Money, and all it bought, did not bring happiness. Love only
+      brought that. The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard, which gave it such a
+      moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour. 'They
+      oughtn't to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if they
+      didn't mean me to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.'
+      Nothing real stood in the way, like poverty, or disease&mdash;sentiment
+      only, a ghost from the unhappy past! Jon was right. They wouldn't
+      let you live, these old people! They made mistakes, committed crimes, and
+      wanted their children to go on paying! The breeze died away; midges began
+      to bite. She got up, plucked a piece of honeysuckle, and went in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hot that night. Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale low
+      frocks. The dinner flowers were pale. Fleur was struck with the pale look
+      of everything; her father's face, her mother's shoulders; the
+      pale panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-shade, even
+      the soup was pale. There was not one spot of colour in the room, not even
+      wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it. What was not pale was black&mdash;her
+      father's clothes, the butler's clothes, her retriever
+      stretched out exhausted in the window, the curtains black with a cream
+      pattern. A moth came in, and that was pale. And silent was that
+      half-mourning dinner in the heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her father called her back as she was following her mother out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down beside him at the table, and, unpinning the pale honeysuckle,
+      put it to her nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been thinking,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, dear?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's extremely painful for me to talk, but there's no
+      help for it. I don't know if you understand how much you are to me I've
+      never spoken of it, I didn't think it necessary; but&mdash;but you're
+      everything. Your mother&mdash;&rdquo; he paused, staring at his
+      finger-bowl of Venetian glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've only you to look to. I've never had&mdash;never
+      wanted anything else, since you were born.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; Fleur murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames moistened his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may think this a matter I can smooth over and arrange for you.
+      You're mistaken. I'm helpless.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite apart from my own feelings,&rdquo; went on Soames with more
+      resolution, &ldquo;those two are not amenable to anything I can say. They&mdash;they
+      hate me, as people always hate those whom they have injured.&rdquo;
+      &ldquo;But he&mdash;Jon&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's their flesh and blood, her only child. Probably he means
+      to her what you mean to me. It's a deadlock.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; cried Fleur, &ldquo;no, Father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames leaned back, the image of pale patience, as if resolved on the
+      betrayal of no emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You're putting the feelings of
+      two months&mdash;two months&mdash;against the feelings of thirty-five
+      years! What chance do you think you have? Two months&mdash;your very first
+      love affair, a matter of half a dozen meetings, a few walks and talks, a
+      few kisses&mdash;against, against what you can't imagine, what no
+      one could who hasn't been through it. Come, be reasonable, Fleur! It's
+      midsummer madness!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur tore the honeysuckle into little, slow bits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The madness is in letting the past spoil it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do we care about the past? It's our lives, not yours.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames raised his hand to his forehead, where suddenly she saw moisture
+      shining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose child are you?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Whose child is he? The
+      present is linked with the past, the future with both. There's no
+      getting away from that.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had never heard philosophy pass those lips before. Impressed even in
+      her agitation, she leaned her elbows on the table, her chin on her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Father, consider it practically. We want each other. There's
+      ever so much money, and nothing whatever in the way but sentiment. Let's
+      bury the past, Father.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer was a sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Besides,&rdquo; said Fleur gently, &ldquo;you can't prevent
+      us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't suppose,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;that if left to
+      myself I should try to prevent you; I must put up with things, I know, to
+      keep your affection. But it's not I who control this matter. That's
+      what I want you to realise before it's too late. If you go on
+      thinking you can get your way and encourage this feeling, the blow will be
+      much heavier when you find you can't.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; cried Fleur, &ldquo;help me, Father; you can help me,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames made a startled movement of negation. &ldquo;I?&rdquo; he said
+      bitterly. &ldquo;Help? I am the impediment&mdash;the just cause and
+      impediment&mdash;isn't that the jargon? You have my blood in your
+      veins.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, the fat's in the fire. If you persist in your
+      wilfulness you'll have yourself to blame. Come! Don't be
+      foolish, my child&mdash;my only child!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur laid her forehead against his shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All was in such turmoil within her. But no good to show it! No good at
+      all! She broke away from him, and went out into the twilight, distraught,
+      but unconvinced. All was indeterminate and vague within her, like the
+      shapes and shadows in the garden, except&mdash;her will to have. A poplar
+      pierced up into the dark-blue sky and touched a white star there. The dew
+      wetted her shoes, and chilled her bare shoulders. She went down to the
+      river bank, and stood gazing at a moonstreak on the darkening water.
+      Suddenly she smelled tobacco smoke, and a white figure emerged as if
+      created by the moon. It was young Mont in flannels, standing in his boat.
+      She heard the tiny hiss of his cigarette extinguished in the water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur,&rdquo; came his voice, &ldquo;don't be hard on a poor
+      devil! I've been waiting hours.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For what?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in my boat!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not I.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not a water-nymph.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't you any romance in you? Don't be modern, Fleur!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He appeared on the path within a yard of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur, I love you. Fleur!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur uttered a short laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come again,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;when I haven't got my
+      wish.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is your wish?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask another.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur,&rdquo; said Mont, and his voice sounded strange, &ldquo;don't
+      mock me! Even vivisected dogs are worth decent treatment before they're
+      cut up for good.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur shook her head; but her lips were trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you shouldn't make me jump. Give me a cigarette.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mont gave her one, lighted it, and another for himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to talk rot,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but please
+      imagine all the rot that all the lovers that ever were have talked, and
+      all my special rot thrown in.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, I have imagined it. Good-night!&rdquo; They stood for a
+      moment facing each other in the shadow of an acacia-tree with very moonlit
+      blossoms, and the smoke from their cigarettes mingled in the air between
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Also ran: 'Michael Mont'.&rdquo; he said. Fleur turned
+      abruptly toward the house. On the lawn she stopped to look back. Michael
+      Mont was whirling his arms above him; she could see them dashing at his
+      head; then waving at the moonlit blossoms of the acacia. His voice just
+      reached her. &ldquo;Jolly-jolly!&rdquo; Fleur shook herself. She couldn't
+      help him, she had too much trouble of her own! On the verandah she stopped
+      very suddenly again. Her mother was sitting in the drawing-room at her
+      writing bureau, quite alone. There was nothing remarkable in the
+      expression of her face except its utter immobility. But she looked
+      desolate! Fleur went upstairs. At the door of her room she paused. She
+      could hear her father walking up and down, up and down the
+      picture-gallery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Yes,' she thought, jolly! Oh, Jon!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0119" id="link2H_4_0119">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.&mdash;DECISION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Fleur left him Jon stared at the Austrian. She was a thin woman with
+      a dark face and the concerned expression of one who has watched every
+      little good that life once had slip from her, one by one. &ldquo;No tea?&rdquo;
+      she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Susceptible to the disappointment in her voice, Jon murmured:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, really; thanks.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A lil cup&mdash;it ready. A lil cup and cigarette.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur was gone! Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him! And with a
+      heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;thank you!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She brought in a little pot of tea with two little cups, and a silver box
+      of cigarettes on a little tray.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sugar? Miss Forsyte has much sugar&mdash;she buy my sugar, my
+      friend's sugar also. Miss Forsyte is a veree kind lady. I am happy
+      to serve her. You her brother?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Jon, beginning to puff the second cigarette of his
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very young brother,&rdquo; said the Austrian, with a little anxious
+      smile, which reminded him of the wag of a dog's tail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I give you some?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And won't you sit
+      down, please?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Austrian shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your father a very nice old man&mdash;the most nice old man I ever
+      see. Miss Forsyte tell me all about him. Is he better?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her words fell on Jon like a reproach. &ldquo;Oh Yes, I think he's
+      all right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like to see him again,&rdquo; said the Austrian, putting a hand
+      on her heart; &ldquo;he have veree kind heart.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Jon. And again her words seemed to him a reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He never give no trouble to no one, and smile so gentle.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, doesn't he?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He look at Miss Forsyte so funny sometimes. I tell him all my
+      story; he so sympatisch. Your mother&mdash;she nice and well?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, very.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He have her photograph on his dressing-table. Veree beautiful&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon gulped down his tea. This woman, with her concerned face and her
+      reminding words, was like the first and second murderers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I must go now. May&mdash;may I
+      leave this with you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He put a ten-shilling note on the tray with a doubting hand and gained the
+      door. He heard the Austrian gasp, and hurried out. He had just time to
+      catch his train, and all the way to Victoria looked at every face that
+      passed, as lovers will, hoping against hope. On reaching Worthing he put
+      his luggage into the local train, and set out across the Downs for
+      Wansdon, trying to walk off his aching irresolution. So long as he went
+      full bat, he could enjoy the beauty of those green slopes, stopping now
+      and again to sprawl on the grass, admire the perfection of a wild rose or
+      listen to a lark's song. But the war of motives within him was but
+      postponed&mdash;the longing for Fleur, and the hatred of deception. He
+      came to the old chalk-pit above Wansdon with his mind no more made up than
+      when he started. To see both sides of a question vigorously was at once
+      Jon's strength and weakness. He tramped in, just as the first
+      dinner-bell rang. His things had already been brought up. He had a hurried
+      bath and came down to find Holly alone&mdash;Val had gone to Town and
+      would not be back till the last train.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since Val's advice to him to ask his sister what was the matter
+      between the two families, so much had happened&mdash;Fleur's
+      disclosure in the Green Park, her visit to Robin Hill, to-day's
+      meeting&mdash;that there seemed nothing to ask. He talked of Spain, his
+      sunstroke, Val's horses, their father's health. Holly startled
+      him by saying that she thought their father not at all well. She had been
+      twice to Robin Hill for the week-end. He had seemed fearfully languid,
+      sometimes even in pain, but had always refused to talk about himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's awfully dear and unselfish&mdash;don't you think,
+      Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Feeling far from dear and unselfish himself, Jon answered: &ldquo;Rather!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think, he's been a simply perfect father, so long as I can
+      remember.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; answered Jon, very subdued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's never interfered, and he's always seemed to
+      understand. I shall never forget his letting me go to South Africa in the
+      Boer War when I was in love with Val.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That was before he married Mother, wasn't it?&rdquo; said Jon
+      suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! nothing. Only, wasn't she engaged to Fleur's father
+      first?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holly put down the spoon she was using, and raised her eyes. Her stare was
+      circumspect. What did the boy know? Enough to make it better to tell him?
+      She could not decide. He looked strained and worried, altogether older,
+      but that might be the sunstroke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was something,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Of course we were out
+      there, and got no news of anything.&rdquo; She could not take the risk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not her secret. Besides, she was in the dark about his feelings
+      now. Before Spain she had made sure he was in love; but boys were boys;
+      that was seven weeks ago, and all Spain between.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw that he knew she was putting him off, and added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you heard anything of Fleur?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His face told her, then, more than the most elaborate explanations. So he
+      had not forgotten!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said very quietly: &ldquo;Fleur is awfully attractive, Jon, but you
+      know&mdash;Val and I don't really like her very much.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We think she's got rather a 'having' nature.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Having'. I don't know what you mean. She&mdash;she&mdash;&rdquo;
+      he pushed his dessert plate away, got up, and went to the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holly, too, got up, and put her arm round his waist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be angry, Jon dear. We can't all see people in
+      the same light, can we? You know, I believe each of us only has about one
+      or two people who can see the best that's in us, and bring it out.
+      For you I think it's your mother. I once saw her looking at a letter
+      of yours; it was wonderful to see her face. I think she's the most
+      beautiful woman I ever saw&mdash;Age doesn't seem to touch her.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon's face softened; then again became tense. Everybody&mdash;everybody
+      was against him and Fleur! It all strengthened the appeal of her words:
+      &ldquo;Make sure of me&mdash;marry me, Jon!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, where he had passed that wonderful week with her&mdash;the tug of
+      her enchantment, the ache in his heart increased with every minute that
+      she was not there to make the room, the garden, the very air magical.
+      Would he ever be able to live down here, not seeing her? And he closed up
+      utterly, going early to bed. It would not make him healthy, wealthy, and
+      wise, but it closeted him with memory of Fleur in her fancy frock. He
+      heard Val's arrival&mdash;the Ford discharging cargo, then the
+      stillness of the summer night stole back&mdash;with only the bleating of
+      very distant sheep, and a night-Jar's harsh purring. He leaned far
+      out. Cold moon&mdash;warm air&mdash;the Downs like silver! Small wings, a
+      stream bubbling, the rambler roses! God&mdash;how empty all of it without
+      her! In the Bible it was written: Thou shalt leave father and mother and
+      cleave to&mdash;Fleur!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let him have pluck, and go and tell them! They couldn't stop him
+      marrying her&mdash;they wouldn't want to stop him when they knew how
+      he felt. Yes! He would go! Bold and open&mdash;Fleur was wrong!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night-jar ceased, the sheep were silent; the only sound in the
+      darkness was the bubbling of the stream. And Jon in his bed slept, freed
+      from the worst of life's evils&mdash;indecision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0120" id="link2H_4_0120">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.&mdash;TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the day of the cancelled meeting at the National Gallery began the
+      second anniversary of the resurrection of England's pride and glory&mdash;or,
+      more shortly, the top hat. &ldquo;Lord's&rdquo;&mdash;that festival
+      which the War had driven from the field&mdash;raised its light and dark
+      blue flags for the second time, displaying almost every feature of a
+      glorious past. Here, in the luncheon interval, were all species of female
+      and one species of male hat, protecting the multiple types of face
+      associated with &ldquo;the classes.&rdquo; The observing Forsyte might
+      discern in the free or unconsidered seats a certain number of the
+      squash-hatted, but they hardly ventured on the grass; the old school&mdash;or
+      schools&mdash;could still rejoice that the proletariat was not yet paying
+      the necessary half-crown. Here was still a close borough, the only one
+      left on a large scale&mdash;for the papers were about to estimate the
+      attendance at ten thousand. And the ten thousand, all animated by one
+      hope, were asking each other one question: &ldquo;Where are you lunching?&rdquo;
+      Something wonderfully uplifting and reassuring in that query and the sight
+      of so many people like themselves voicing it! What reserve power in the
+      British realm&mdash;enough pigeons, lobsters, lamb, salmon mayonnaise,
+      strawberries, and bottles of champagne to feed the lot! No miracle in
+      prospect&mdash;no case of seven loaves and a few fishes&mdash;faith rested
+      on surer foundations. Six thousand top hats, four thousand parasols would
+      be doffed and furled, ten thousand mouths all speaking the same English
+      would be filled. There was life in the old dog yet! Tradition! And again
+      Tradition! How strong and how elastic! Wars might rage, taxation prey,
+      Trades Unions take toll, and Europe perish of starvation; but the ten
+      thousand would be fed; and, within their ring fence, stroll upon green
+      turf, wear their top hats, and meet&mdash;themselves. The heart was sound,
+      the pulse still regular. E-ton! E-ton! Har-r-o-o-o-w!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the many Forsytes, present on a hunting-ground theirs, by personal
+      prescriptive right, or proxy, was Soames with his wife and daughter. He
+      had not been at either school, he took no interest in cricket, but he
+      wanted Fleur to show her frock, and he wanted to wear his top hat parade
+      it again in peace and plenty among his peers. He walked sedately with
+      Fleur between him and Annette. No women equalled them, so far as he could
+      see. They could walk, and hold themselves up; there was substance in their
+      good looks; the modern woman had no build, no chest, no anything! He
+      remembered suddenly with what intoxication of pride he had walked round
+      with Irene in the first years of his first marriage. And how they used to
+      lunch on the drag which his mother would make his father have, because it
+      was so &ldquo;chic&rdquo;&mdash;all drags and carriages in those days, not
+      these lumbering great Stands! And how consistently Montague Dartie had
+      drunk too much. He supposed that people drank too much still, but there
+      was not the scope for it there used to be. He remembered George Forsyte&mdash;whose
+      brothers Roger and Eustace had been at Harrow and Eton&mdash;towering up
+      on the top of the drag waving a light-blue flag with one hand and a
+      dark-blue flag with the other, and shouting &ldquo;Etroow-Harrton!&rdquo;
+      Just when everybody was silent, like the buffoon he had always been; and
+      Eustace got up to the nines below, too dandified to wear any colour or
+      take any notice. H'm! Old days, and Irene in grey silk shot with
+      palest green. He looked, sideways, at Fleur's face. Rather
+      colourless-no light, no eagerness! That love affair was preying on her&mdash;a
+      bad business! He looked beyond, at his wife's face, rather more
+      touched up than usual, a little disdainful&mdash;not that she had any
+      business to disdain, so far as he could see. She was taking Profond's
+      defection with curious quietude; or was his &ldquo;small&rdquo; voyage
+      just a blind? If so, he should refuse to see it! Having promenaded round
+      the pitch and in front of the pavilion, they sought Winifred's table
+      in the Bedouin Club tent. This Club&mdash;a new &ldquo;cock and hen&rdquo;&mdash;had
+      been founded in the interests of travel, and of a gentleman with an old
+      Scottish name, whose father had somewhat strangely been called Levi.
+      Winifred had joined, not because she had travelled, but because instinct
+      told her that a Club with such a name and such a founder was bound to go
+      far; if one didn't join at once one might never have the chance. Its
+      tent, with a text from the Koran on an orange ground, and a small green
+      camel embroidered over the entrance, was the most striking on the ground.
+      Outside it they found Jack Cardigan in a dark blue tie (he had once played
+      for Harrow), batting with a Malacca cane to show how that fellow ought to
+      have hit that ball. He piloted them in. Assembled in Winifred's
+      corner were Imogen, Benedict with his young wife, Val Dartie without
+      Holly, Maud and her husband, and, after Soames and his two were seated,
+      one empty place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm expecting Prosper,&rdquo; said Winifred, &ldquo;but he's
+      so busy with his yacht.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames stole a glance. No movement in his wife's face! Whether that
+      fellow were coming or not, she evidently knew all about it. It did not
+      escape him that Fleur, too, looked at her mother. If Annette didn't
+      respect his feelings, she might think of Fleur's! The conversation,
+      very desultory, was syncopated by Jack Cardigan talking about &ldquo;mid-off.&rdquo;
+      He cited all the &ldquo;great mid-offs&rdquo; from the beginning of time,
+      as if they had been a definite racial entity in the composition of the
+      British people. Soames had finished his lobster, and was beginning on
+      pigeon-pie, when he heard the words, &ldquo;I'm a small bit late,
+      Mrs. Dartie,&rdquo; and saw that there was no longer any empty place. That
+      fellow was sitting between Annette and Imogen. Soames ate steadily on,
+      with an occasional word to Maud and Winifred. Conversation buzzed around
+      him. He heard the voice of Profond say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you're mistaken, Mrs. Forsyde; I'll&mdash;I'll
+      bet Miss Forsyde agrees with me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In what?&rdquo; came Fleur's clear voice across the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was sayin', young gurls are much the same as they always
+      were&mdash;there's very small difference.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know so much about them?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That sharp reply caught the ears of all, and Soames moved uneasily on his
+      thin green chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't know, I think they want their own small way,
+      and I think they always did.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, but&mdash;Prosper,&rdquo; Winifred interjected comfortably,
+      &ldquo;the girls in the streets&mdash;the girls who've been in
+      munitions, the little flappers in the shops; their manners now really
+      quite hit you in the eye.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the word &ldquo;hit&rdquo; Jack Cardigan stopped his disquisition; and
+      in the silence Monsieur Profond said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was inside before, now it's outside; that's all.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But their morals!&rdquo; cried Imogen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just as moral as they ever were, Mrs. Cardigan, but they've
+      got more opportunity.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The saying, so cryptically cynical, received a little laugh from Imogen, a
+      slight opening of Jack Cardigan's mouth, and a creak from Soames'
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred said: &ldquo;That's too bad, Prosper.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you say, Mrs. Forsyde; don't you think human nature's
+      always the same?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames subdued a sudden longing to get up and kick the fellow. He heard
+      his wife reply:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Human nature is not the same in England as anywhere else.&rdquo;
+      That was her confounded mockery!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I don't know much about this small country&rdquo;&mdash;'No,
+      thank God!' thought Soames&mdash;&ldquo;but I should say the pot was
+      boilin' under the lid everywhere. We all want pleasure, and we
+      always did.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Damn the fellow! His cynicism was&mdash;was outrageous!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When lunch was over they broke up into couples for the digestive
+      promenade. Too proud to notice, Soames knew perfectly that Annette and
+      that fellow had gone prowling round together. Fleur was with Val; she had
+      chosen him, no doubt, because he knew that boy. He himself had Winifred
+      for partner. They walked in the bright, circling stream, a little flushed
+      and sated, for some minutes, till Winifred sighed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish we were back forty years, old boy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the eyes of her spirit an interminable procession of her own
+      &ldquo;Lord's&rdquo; frocks was passing, paid for with the money of
+      her father, to save a recurrent crisis. &ldquo;It's been very
+      amusing, after all. Sometimes I even wish Monty was back. What do you
+      think of people nowadays, Soames?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precious little style. The thing began to go to pieces with
+      bicycles and motor-cars; the War has finished it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder what's coming?&rdquo; said Winifred in a voice
+      dreamy from pigeon-pie. &ldquo;I'm not at all sure we shan't
+      go back to crinolines and pegtops. Look at that dress!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's money, but no faith in things. We don't lay by
+      for the future. These youngsters&mdash;it's all a short life and a
+      merry one with them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a hat!&rdquo; said Winifred. &ldquo;I don't
+      know&mdash;when you come to think of the people killed and all that in the
+      War, it's rather wonderful, I think. There's no other country&mdash;Prosper
+      says the rest are all bankrupt, except America; and of course her men
+      always took their style in dress from us.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is that chap,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;really going to the South
+      Seas?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! one never knows where Prosper's going!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a sign of the times,&rdquo; muttered Soames, &ldquo;if
+      you like.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred's hand gripped his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't turn your head,&rdquo; she said in a low voice, &ldquo;but
+      look to your right in the front row of the Stand.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames looked as best he could under that limitation. A man in a grey top
+      hat, grey-bearded, with thin brown, folded cheeks, and a certain elegance
+      of posture, sat there with a woman in a lawn-coloured frock, whose dark
+      eyes were fixed on himself. Soames looked quickly at his feet. How funnily
+      feet moved, one after the other like that! Winifred's voice said in
+      his ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jolyon looks very ill; but he always had style. She doesn't
+      change&mdash;except her hair.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you tell Fleur about that business?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't; she picked it up. I always knew she would.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it's a mess. She's set her heart upon their boy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The little wretch,&rdquo; murmured Winifred. &ldquo;She tried to
+      take me in about that. What shall you do, Soames?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be guided by events.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They moved on, silent, in the almost solid crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; said Winifred suddenly; &ldquo;it almost seems like
+      Fate. Only that's so old-fashioned. Look! there are George and
+      Eustace!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      George Forsyte's lofty bulk had halted before them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hallo, Soames!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Just met Profond and your
+      wife. You'll catch 'em if you put on pace. Did you ever go to
+      see old Timothy?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames nodded, and the streams forced them apart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I always liked old George,&rdquo; said Winifred. &ldquo;He's
+      so droll.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never did,&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;Where's your seat? I
+      shall go to mine. Fleur may be back there.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having seen Winifred to her seat, he regained his own, conscious of small,
+      white, distant figures running, the click of the bat, the cheers and
+      counter-cheers. No Fleur, and no Annette! You could expect nothing of
+      women nowadays! They had the vote. They were &ldquo;emancipated,&rdquo;
+      and much good it was doing them! So Winifred would go back, would she, and
+      put up with Dartie all over again? To have the past once more&mdash;to be
+      sitting here as he had sat in '83 and '84, before he was
+      certain that his marriage with Irene had gone all wrong, before her
+      antagonism had become so glaring that with the best will in the world he
+      could not overlook it. The sight of her with that fellow had brought all
+      memory back. Even now he could not understand why she had been so
+      impracticable. She could love other men; she had it in her! To himself,
+      the one person she ought to have loved, she had chosen to refuse her
+      heart. It seemed to him, fantastically, as he looked back, that all this
+      modern relaxation of marriage&mdash;though its forms and laws were the
+      same as when he married her&mdash;that all this modern looseness had come
+      out of her revolt; it seemed to him, fantastically, that she had started
+      it, till all decent ownership of anything had gone, or was on the point of
+      going. All came from her! And now&mdash;a pretty state of things! Homes!
+      How could you have them without mutual ownership? Not that he had ever had
+      a real home! But had that been his fault? He had done his best. And his
+      rewards were&mdash;those two sitting in that Stand, and this affair of
+      Fleur's!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And overcome by loneliness he thought: 'Shan't wait any
+      longer! They must find their own way back to the hotel&mdash;if they mean
+      to come!' Hailing a cab outside the ground, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drive me to the Bayswater Road.&rdquo; His old aunts had never
+      failed him. To them he had meant an ever-welcome visitor. Though they were
+      gone, there, still, was Timothy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Smither was standing in the open doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Soames! I was just taking the air. Cook will be so pleased.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is Mr. Timothy?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not himself at all these last few days, sir; he's been
+      talking a great deal. Only this morning he was saying: 'My brother
+      James, he's getting old.' His mind wanders, Mr. Soames, and
+      then he will talk of them. He troubles about their investments. The other
+      day he said: 'There's my brother Jolyon won't look at
+      Consols'&mdash;he seemed quite down about it. Come in, Mr. Soames,
+      come in! It's such a pleasant change!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;just for a few minutes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; murmured Smither in the hall, where the air had the
+      singular freshness of the outside day, &ldquo;we haven't been very
+      satisfied with him, not all this week. He's always been one to leave
+      a titbit to the end; but ever since Monday he's been eating it
+      first. If you notice a dog, Mr. Soames, at its dinner, it eats the meat
+      first. We've always thought it such a good sign of Mr. Timothy at
+      his age to leave it to the last, but now he seems to have lost all his
+      self-control; and, of course, it makes him leave the rest. The doctor
+      doesn't make anything of it, but&rdquo;&mdash;Smither shook her head&mdash;&ldquo;he
+      seems to think he's got to eat it first, in case he shouldn't
+      get to it. That and his talking makes us anxious.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he said anything important?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shouldn't like to say that, Mr. Soames; but he's
+      turned against his Will. He gets quite pettish&mdash;and after having had
+      it out every morning for years, it does seem funny. He said the other day:
+      'They want my money.' It gave me such a turn, because, as I
+      said to him, nobody wants his money, I'm sure. And it does seem a
+      pity he should be thinking about money at his time of life. I took my
+      courage in my 'ands. 'You know, Mr. Timothy,' I said,
+      'my dear mistress'&mdash;that's Miss Forsyte, Mr.
+      Soames, Miss Ann that trained me&mdash;'she never thought about
+      money,' I said, 'it was all character with her.' He
+      looked at me, I can't tell you how funny, and he said quite dry:
+      'Nobody wants my character.' Think of his saying a thing like
+      that! But sometimes he'll say something as sharp and sensible as
+      anything.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames, who had been staring at an old print by the hat-rack, thinking,
+      'That's got value!' murmured: &ldquo;I'll go up
+      and see him, Smither.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cook's with him,&rdquo; answered Smither above her corsets;
+      &ldquo;she will be pleased to see you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He mounted slowly, with the thought: 'Shan't care to live to
+      be that age.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the second floor, he paused, and tapped. The door was opened, and he
+      saw the round homely face of a woman about sixty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Soames!&rdquo; she said: &ldquo;Why! Mr. Soames!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames nodded. &ldquo;All right, Cook!&rdquo; and entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Timothy was propped up in bed, with his hands joined before his chest, and
+      his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where a fly was standing upside down.
+      Soames stood at the foot of the bed, facing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Timothy,&rdquo; he said, raising his voice. &ldquo;Uncle
+      Timothy!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Timothy's eyes left the fly, and levelled themselves on his visitor.
+      Soames could see his pale tongue passing over his darkish lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Timothy,&rdquo; he said again, &ldquo;is there anything I can
+      do for you? Is there anything you'd like to say?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; said Timothy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've come to look you up and see that everything's all
+      right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Timothy nodded. He seemed trying to get used to the apparition before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you got everything you want?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Timothy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can I get you anything?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Timothy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm Soames, you know; your nephew, Soames Forsyte. Your
+      brother James' son.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Timothy nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be delighted to do anything I can for you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Timothy beckoned. Soames went close to him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&mdash;&rdquo; said Timothy in a voice which seemed to have
+      outlived tone, &ldquo;you tell them all from me&mdash;you tell them all&mdash;&rdquo;
+      and his finger tapped on Soames' arm, &ldquo;to hold on&mdash;hold
+      on&mdash;Consols are goin' up,&rdquo; and he nodded thrice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;I will.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Timothy, and, fixing his eyes again on the
+      ceiling, he added: &ldquo;That fly!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strangely moved, Soames looked at the Cook's pleasant fattish face,
+      all little puckers from staring at fires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That'll do him a world of good, sir,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A mutter came from Timothy, but he was clearly speaking to himself, and
+      Soames went out with the cook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I could make you a pink cream, Mr. Soames, like in old days;
+      you did so relish them. Good-bye, sir; it has been a pleasure.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take care of him, Cook, he is old.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, shaking her crumpled hand, he went down-stairs. Smither was still
+      taking the air in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think of him, Mr. Soames?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm!&rdquo; Soames murmured: &ldquo;He's lost touch.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Smither, &ldquo;I was afraid you'd think
+      that coming fresh out of the world to see him like.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smither,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;we're all indebted to
+      you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, Mr. Soames, don't say that! It's a pleasure&mdash;he's
+      such a wonderful man.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, good-bye!&rdquo; said Soames, and got into his taxi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Going up!' he thought; 'going up!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reaching the hotel at Knightsbridge he went to their sitting-room, and
+      rang for tea. Neither of them were in. And again that sense of loneliness
+      came over him. These hotels. What monstrous great places they were now! He
+      could remember when there was nothing bigger than Long's or Brown's,
+      Morley's or the Tavistock, and the heads that were shaken over the
+      Langham and the Grand. Hotels and Clubs&mdash;Clubs and Hotels; no end to
+      them now! And Soames, who had just been watching at Lord's a miracle
+      of tradition and continuity, fell into reverie over the changes in that
+      London where he had been born five-and-sixty years before. Whether Consols
+      were going up or not, London had become a terrific property. No such
+      property in the world, unless it were New York! There was a lot of
+      hysteria in the papers nowadays; but any one who, like himself, could
+      remember London sixty years ago, and see it now, realised the fecundity
+      and elasticity of wealth. They had only to keep their heads, and go at it
+      steadily. Why! he remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the floor
+      of your cab. And old Timothy&mdash;what could he not have told them, if he
+      had kept his memory! Things were unsettled, people in a funk or in a
+      hurry, but here were London and the Thames, and out there the British
+      Empire, and the ends of the earth. &ldquo;Consols are goin' up!&rdquo;
+      He should n't be a bit surprised. It was the breed that counted. And
+      all that was bull-dogged in Soames stared for a moment out of his grey
+      eyes, till diverted by the print of a Victorian picture on the walls. The
+      hotel had bought three dozen of that little lot! The old hunting or
+      &ldquo;Rake's Progress&rdquo; prints in the old inns were worth
+      looking at&mdash;but this sentimental stuff&mdash;well, Victorianism had
+      gone! &ldquo;Tell them to hold on!&rdquo; old Timothy had said. But to
+      what were they to hold on in this modern welter of the &ldquo;democratic
+      principle&rdquo;? Why, even privacy was threatened! And at the thought
+      that privacy might perish, Soames pushed back his teacup and went to the
+      window. Fancy owning no more of Nature than the crowd out there owned of
+      the flowers and trees and waters of Hyde Park! No, no! Private possession
+      underlay everything worth having. The world had slipped its sanity a bit,
+      as dogs now and again at full moon slipped theirs and went off for a night's
+      rabbiting; but the world, like the dog, knew where its bread was buttered
+      and its bed warm, and would come back sure enough to the only home worth
+      having&mdash;to private ownership. The world was in its second childhood
+      for the moment, like old Timothy&mdash;eating its titbit first!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard a sound behind him, and saw that his wife and daughter had come
+      in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So you're back!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur did not answer; she stood for a moment looking at him and her
+      mother, then passed into her bedroom. Annette poured herself out a cup of
+      tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to Paris, to my mother, Soames.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! To your mother?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For how long?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when are you going?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On Monday.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was she really going to her mother? Odd, how indifferent he felt! Odd, how
+      clearly she had perceived the indifference he would feel so long as there
+      was no scandal. And suddenly between her and himself he saw distinctly the
+      face he had seen that afternoon&mdash;Irene's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you want money?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you; I have enough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. Let us know when you are coming back.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette put down the cake she was fingering, and, looking up through
+      darkened lashes, said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I give Maman any message?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My regards.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Annette stretched herself, her hands on her waist, and said in French:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What luck that you have never loved me, Soames!&rdquo; Then rising,
+      she too left the room. Soames was glad she had spoken it in French&mdash;it
+      seemed to require no dealing with. Again that other face&mdash;pale,
+      dark-eyed, beautiful still! And there stirred far down within him the
+      ghost of warmth, as from sparks lingering beneath a mound of flaky ash.
+      And Fleur infatuated with her boy! Queer chance! Yet, was there such a
+      thing as chance? A man went down a street, a brick fell on his head. Ah!
+      that was chance, no doubt. But this! &ldquo;Inherited,&rdquo; his girl had
+      said. She&mdash;she was &ldquo;holding on&rdquo;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PARTc3" id="link2H_PARTc3">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PART III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0122" id="link2H_4_0122">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.&mdash;OLD JOLYON WALKS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Twofold impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast &ldquo;Let's
+      go up to Lord's!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wanted&rdquo;&mdash;something to abate the anxiety in which those
+      two had lived during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down.
+      &ldquo;Wanted&rdquo;&mdash;too, that which might assuage the pangs of
+      memory in one who knew he might lose them any day!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had become an Eton boy, for old Jolyon's
+      whim had been that he should be canonised at the greatest possible
+      expense. Year after year he had gone to Lord's from Stanhope Gate
+      with a father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed without
+      polish in the game of cricket. Old Jolyon would speak quite openly of
+      swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and young Jolyon with
+      the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest his sire should be
+      overheard. Only in this supreme matter of cricket he had been nervous, for
+      his father&mdash;in Crimean whiskers then&mdash;had ever impressed him as
+      the beau ideal. Though never canonised himself, Old Jolyon's natural
+      fastidiousness and balance had saved him from the errors of the vulgar.
+      How delicious, after bowling in a top hat and a sweltering heat, to go
+      home with his father in a hansom cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the
+      &ldquo;Disunion&rdquo; Club, to dine off white bait, cutlets, and a tart,
+      and go&mdash;two &ldquo;swells,&rdquo; old and young, in lavender kid
+      gloves&mdash;to the opera or play. And on Sunday, when the match was over,
+      and his top hat duly broken, down with his father in a special hansom to
+      the &ldquo;Crown and Sceptre,&rdquo; and the terrace above the river&mdash;the
+      golden sixties when the world was simple, dandies glamorous, Democracy not
+      born, and the books of Whyte Melville coming thick and fast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-buttonholed with
+      corn-flowers&mdash;by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been
+      canonised at a trifle less expense&mdash;again Jolyon had experienced the
+      heat and counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the
+      strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making
+      the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up.
+      Those two days each year he and his son had been alone together in the
+      world, one on each side&mdash;and Democracy just born!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of light-blue
+      ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and train and taxi,
+      had reached Lord's Ground. There, beside her in a lawn-coloured
+      frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game, and felt the old
+      thrill stir within him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Soames passed, the day was spoiled. Irene's face was distorted
+      by compression of the lips. No good to go on sitting here with Soames or
+      perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals. And he
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, dear, if you've had enough&mdash;let's go!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he
+      waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study. He
+      opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear her
+      music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair, closed
+      his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like that passage
+      of the Cesar Franck Sonata&mdash;so had been his life with her, a divine
+      third movement. And now this business of Jon's&mdash;this bad
+      business! Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it were
+      in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his
+      father in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went,
+      and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting, he
+      saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed, glasses balanced between
+      thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep eyes looking
+      up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his own, seeming to
+      speak. &ldquo;Are you facing it, Jo? It's for you to decide. She's
+      only a woman!&rdquo; Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how
+      all the Victorian Age came up with it! And his answer &ldquo;No, I've
+      funked it&mdash;funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I've got a
+      heart; I've funked it.&rdquo; But the old eyes, so much older, so
+      much younger than his own, kept at it; &ldquo;It's your wife, your
+      son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!&rdquo; Was it a message from walking
+      spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living on within him? And again
+      came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old saturated leather. Well! he
+      would tackle it, write to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and
+      white! And suddenly he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of
+      suffocation, as if his heart were swollen. He got up and went out into the
+      air. The stars were very bright. He passed along the terrace round the
+      corner of the house, till, through the window of the music-room, he could
+      see Irene at the piano, with lamp-light falling on her powdery hair;
+      withdrawn into herself she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before
+      her, her hands idle. Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over
+      her breast. 'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all
+      Jon! I'm dying out of her&mdash;it's natural!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task. He wrote with
+      difficulty and many erasures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MY DEAREST BOY,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for
+      elders to give themselves away to their young. Especially when&mdash;like
+      your mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but
+      young&mdash;their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must
+      confess. I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly&mdash;people
+      in real life very seldom are, I believe&mdash;but most persons would say
+      we had, and at all events our conduct, righteous or not, has found us out.
+      The truth is, my dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make
+      known to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future.
+      Many, very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she was only
+      twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an
+      unhappy marriage&mdash;no, not with me, Jon. Without money of her own, and
+      with only a stepmother&mdash;closely related to Jezebel&mdash;she was very
+      unhappy in her home life. It was Fleur's father that she married, my
+      cousin Soames Forsyte. He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him
+      justice was deeply in love with her. Within a week she knew the fearful
+      mistake she had made. It was not his fault; it was her error of judgment&mdash;her
+      misfortune.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject
+      carried him away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon, I want to explain to you if I can&mdash;and it's very
+      hard&mdash;how it is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily
+      come about. You will of course say: 'If she didn't really love
+      him how could she ever have married him?' You would be right if it
+      were not for one or two rather terrible considerations. From this initial
+      mistake of hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come,
+      and so I must make it clear to you if I can. You see, Jon, in those days
+      and even to this day&mdash;indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of
+      enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise&mdash;most girls are married
+      ignorant of the sexual side of life. Even if they know what it means they
+      have not experienced it. That's the crux. It is this actual lack of
+      experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes all the
+      difference and all the trouble. In a vast number of marriages-and your
+      mother's was one&mdash;girls are not and cannot be certain whether
+      they love the man they marry or not; they do not know until after that act
+      of union which makes the reality of marriage. Now, in many, perhaps in
+      most doubtful cases, this act cements and strengthens the attachment, but
+      in other cases, and your mother's was one, it is a revelation of
+      mistake, a destruction of such attraction as there was. There is nothing
+      more tragic in a woman's life than such a revelation, growing daily,
+      nightly clearer. Coarse-grained and unthinking people are apt to laugh at
+      such a mistake, and say, 'What a fuss about nothing!' Narrow
+      and self-righteous people, only capable of judging the lives of others by
+      their own, are apt to condemn those who make this tragic error, to condemn
+      them for life to the dungeons they have made for themselves. You know the
+      expression: 'She has made her bed, she must lie on it!' It is
+      a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or lady in the best
+      sense of those words; and I can use no stronger condemnation. I have not
+      been what is called a moral man, but I wish to use no words to you, my
+      dear, which will make you think lightly of ties or contracts into which
+      you enter. Heaven forbid! But with the experience of a life behind me I do
+      say that those who condemn the victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn
+      them and hold out no hands to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would
+      be if they had the understanding to know what they are doing. But they
+      haven't! Let them go! They are as much anathema to me as I, no
+      doubt, am to them. I have had to say all this, because I am going to put
+      you into a position to judge your mother, and you are very young, without
+      experience of what life is. To go on with the story. After three years of
+      effort to subdue her shrinking&mdash;I was going to say her loathing and
+      it's not too strong a word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing
+      under such circumstances&mdash;three years of what to a sensitive,
+      beauty-loving nature like your mother's, Jon, was torment, she met a
+      young man who fell in love with her. He was the architect of this very
+      house that we live in now, he was building it for her and Fleur's
+      father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in place of the one she
+      inhabited with him in London. Perhaps that fact played some part in what
+      came of it. But in any case she, too, fell in love with him. I know it's
+      not necessary to explain to you that one does not precisely choose with
+      whom one will fall in love. It comes. Very well! It came. I can imagine&mdash;though
+      she never said much to me about it&mdash;the struggle that then took place
+      in her, because, Jon, she was brought up strictly and was not light in her
+      ideas&mdash;not at all. However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it
+      came to pass that they loved in deed as well as in thought. Then came a
+      fearful tragedy. I must tell you of it because if I don't you will
+      never understand the real situation that you have now to face. The man
+      whom she had married&mdash;Soames Forsyte, the father of Fleur one night,
+      at the height of her passion for this young man, forcibly reasserted his
+      rights over her. The next day she met her lover and told him of it.
+      Whether he committed suicide or whether he was accidentally run over in
+      his distraction, we never knew; but so it was. Think of your mother as she
+      was that evening when she heard of his death. I happened to see her. Your
+      grandfather sent me to help her if I could. I only just saw her, before
+      the door was shut against me by her husband. But I have never forgotten
+      her face, I can see it now. I was not in love with her then, not for
+      twelve years after, but I have never forgotten. My dear boy&mdash;it is
+      not easy to write like this. But you see, I must. Your mother is wrapped
+      up in you, utterly, devotedly. I don't wish to write harshly of
+      Soames Forsyte. I don't think harshly of him. I have long been sorry
+      for him; perhaps I was sorry even then. As the world judges she was in
+      error, he within his rights. He loved her&mdash;in his way. She was his
+      property. That is the view he holds of life&mdash;of human feelings and
+      hearts&mdash;property. It's not his fault&mdash;so was he born. To
+      me it is a view that has always been abhorrent&mdash;so was I born!
+      Knowing you as I do, I feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you.
+      Let me go on with the story. Your mother fled from his house that night;
+      for twelve years she lived quietly alone without companionship of any
+      sort, until in 1899 her husband&mdash;you see, he was still her husband,
+      for he did not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right to
+      divorce him&mdash;became conscious, it seems, of the want of children, and
+      commenced a long attempt to induce her to go back to him and give him a
+      child. I was her trustee then, under your Grandfather's Will, and I
+      watched this going on. While watching, I became attached to her, devotedly
+      attached. His pressure increased, till one day she came to me here and
+      practically put herself under my protection. Her husband, who was kept
+      informed of all her movements, attempted to force us apart by bringing a
+      divorce suit, or possibly he really meant it, I don't know; but
+      anyway our names were publicly joined. That decided us, and we became
+      united in fact. She was divorced, married me, and you were born. We have
+      lived in perfect happiness, at least I have, and I believe your mother
+      also. Soames, soon after the divorce, married Fleur's mother, and
+      she was born. That is the story, Jon. I have told it you, because by the
+      affection which we see you have formed for this man's daughter you
+      are blindly moving toward what must utterly destroy your mother's
+      happiness, if not your own. I don't wish to speak of myself, because
+      at my age there's no use supposing I shall cumber the ground much
+      longer, besides, what I should suffer would be mainly on her account, and
+      on yours. But what I want you to realise is that feelings of horror and
+      aversion such as those can never be buried or forgotten. They are alive in
+      her to-day. Only yesterday at Lord's we happened to see Soames
+      Forsyte. Her face, if you had seen it, would have convinced you. The idea
+      that you should marry his daughter is a nightmare to her, Jon. I have
+      nothing to say against Fleur save that she is his daughter. But your
+      children, if you married her, would be the grandchildren of Soames, as
+      much as of your mother, of a man who once owned your mother as a man might
+      own a slave. Think what that would mean. By such a marriage you enter the
+      camp which held your mother prisoner and wherein she ate her heart out.
+      You are just on the threshold of life, you have only known this girl two
+      months, and however deeply you think you love her, I appeal to you to
+      break it off at once. Don't give your mother this rankling pain and
+      humiliation during the rest of her life. Young though she will always seem
+      to me, she is fifty-seven. Except for us two she has no one in the world.
+      She will soon have only you. Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away.
+      Don't put this cloud and barrier between you. Don't break her
+      heart! Bless you, my dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this
+      letter must bring you&mdash;we tried to spare it you, but Spain&mdash;it
+      seems&mdash;-was no good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ever your devoted father,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;JOLYON FORSYTE.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having finished his confession, Jolyon sat with a thin cheek on his hand,
+      re-reading. There were things in it which hurt him so much, when he
+      thought of Jon reading them, that he nearly tore the letter up. To speak
+      of such things at all to a boy&mdash;his own boy&mdash;to speak of them in
+      relation to his own wife and the boy's own mother, seemed dreadful
+      to the reticence of his Forsyte soul. And yet without speaking of them how
+      make Jon understand the reality, the deep cleavage, the ineffaceable scar?
+      Without them, how justify this stiffing of the boy's love? He might
+      just as well not write at all!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He folded the confession, and put it in his pocket. It was&mdash;thank
+      Heaven!&mdash;Saturday; he had till Sunday evening to think it over; for
+      even if posted now it could not reach Jon till Monday. He felt a curious
+      relief at this delay, and at the fact that, whether sent or not, it was
+      written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the rose garden, which had taken the place of the old fernery, he could
+      see Irene snipping and pruning, with a little basket on her arm. She was
+      never idle, it seemed to him, and he envied her now that he himself was
+      idle nearly all his time. He went down to her. She held up a stained glove
+      and smiled. A piece of lace tied under her chin concealed her hair, and
+      her oval face with its still dark brows looked very young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The green-fly are awful this year, and yet it's cold. You
+      look tired, Jolyon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon took the confession from his pocket. &ldquo;I've been writing
+      this. I think you ought to see it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Jon?&rdquo; Her whole face had changed, in that instant,
+      becoming almost haggard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; the murder's out.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave it to her, and walked away among the roses. Presently, seeing that
+      she had finished reading and was standing quite still with the sheets of
+      the letter against her skirt, he came back to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's wonderfully put. I don't see how it could be put
+      better. Thank you, dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there anything you would like left out?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; he must know all, if he's to understand.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I thought, but&mdash;I hate it!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had the feeling that he hated it more than she&mdash;to him sex was so
+      much easier to mention between man and woman than between man and man; and
+      she had always been more natural and frank, not deeply secretive like his
+      Forsyte self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if he will understand, even now, Jolyon? He's so
+      young; and he shrinks from the physical.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He gets that shrinking from my father, he was as fastidious as a
+      girl in all such matters. Would it be better to rewrite the whole thing,
+      and just say you hated Soames?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hate's only a word. It conveys nothing. No, better as it is.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well. It shall go to-morrow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her face to his, and in sight of the big house's many
+      creepered windows, he kissed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0123" id="link2H_4_0123">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.&mdash;CONFESSION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Late that same afternoon, Jolyon had a nap in the old armchair. Face down
+      on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and just before he
+      fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall we ever really
+      like the French? Will they ever really like us!' He himself had
+      always liked the French, feeling at home with their wit, their taste,
+      their cooking. Irene and he had paid many visits to France before the War,
+      when Jon had been at his private school. His romance with her had begun in
+      Paris&mdash;his last and most enduring romance. But the French&mdash;no
+      Englishman could like them who could not see them in some sort with the
+      detached aesthetic eye! And with that melancholy conclusion he had nodded
+      off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he woke he saw Jon standing between him and the window. The boy had
+      evidently come in from the garden and was waiting for him to wake. Jolyon
+      smiled, still half asleep. How nice the chap looked&mdash;sensitive,
+      affectionate, straight! Then his heart gave a nasty jump; and a quaking
+      sensation overcame him. Jon! That confession! He controlled himself with
+      an effort. &ldquo;Why, Jon, where did you spring from?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon bent over and kissed his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only then he noticed the look on the boy's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came home to tell you something, Dad.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With all his might Jolyon tried to get the better of the jumping, gurgling
+      sensations within his chest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sit down, old man. Have you seen your mother?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; The boy's flushed look gave place to pallor; he
+      sat down on the arm of the old chair, as, in old days, Jolyon himself used
+      to sit beside his own father, installed in its recesses. Right up to the
+      time of the rupture in their relations he had been wont to perch there&mdash;had
+      he now reached such a moment with his own son? All his life he had hated
+      scenes like poison, avoided rows, gone on his own way quietly and let
+      others go on theirs. But now&mdash;it seemed&mdash;at the very end of
+      things, he had a scene before him more painful than any he had avoided. He
+      drew a visor down over his emotion, and waited for his son to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Father,&rdquo; said Jon slowly, &ldquo;Fleur and I are engaged.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Exactly!' thought Jolyon, breathing with difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know that you and Mother don't like the idea. Fleur says
+      that Mother was engaged to her father before you married her. Of course I
+      don't know what happened, but it must be ages ago. I'm devoted
+      to her, Dad, and she says she is to me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon uttered a queer sound, half laugh, half groan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are nineteen, Jon, and I am seventy-two. How are we to
+      understand each other in a matter like this, eh?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You love Mother, Dad; you must know what we feel. It isn't
+      fair to us to let old things spoil our happiness, is it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brought face to face with his confession, Jolyon resolved to do without it
+      if by any means he could. He laid his hand on the boy's arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look, Jon! I might put you off with talk about your both being too
+      young and not knowing your own minds, and all that, but you wouldn't
+      listen, besides, it doesn't meet the case&mdash;Youth,
+      unfortunately, cures itself. You talk lightly about 'old things like
+      that,' knowing nothing&mdash;as you say truly&mdash;of what
+      happened. Now, have I ever given you reason to doubt my love for you, or
+      my word?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a less anxious moment he might have been amused by the conflict his
+      words aroused&mdash;the boy's eager clasp, to reassure him on these
+      points, the dread on his face of what that reassurance would bring forth;
+      but he could only feel grateful for the squeeze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, you can believe what I tell you. If you don't give
+      up this love affair, you will make Mother wretched to the end of her days.
+      Believe me, my dear, the past, whatever it was, can't be buried&mdash;it
+      can't indeed.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon got off the arm of the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'The girl'&mdash;thought Jolyon&mdash;'there she goes&mdash;starting
+      up before him&mdash;life itself&mdash;eager, pretty, loving!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't, Father; how can I&mdash;just because you say that?
+      Of course, I can't!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon, if you knew the story you would give this up without
+      hesitation; you would have to! Can't you believe me?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you tell what I should think? Father, I love her better
+      than anything in the world.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon's face twitched, and he said with painful slowness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better than your mother, Jon?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the boy's face, and his clenched fists Jolyon realised the
+      stress and struggle he was going through.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he burst out, &ldquo;I don't know!
+      But to give Fleur up for nothing&mdash;for something I don't
+      understand, for something that I don't believe can really matter
+      half so much, will make me&mdash;make me....&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make you feel us unjust, put a barrier&mdash;yes. But that's
+      better than going on with this.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't. Fleur loves me, and I love her. You want me to trust
+      you; why don't you trust me, Father? We wouldn't want to know
+      anything&mdash;we wouldn't let it make any difference. It'll
+      only make us both love you and Mother all the more.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon put his hand into his breast pocket, but brought it out again
+      empty, and sat, clucking his tongue against his teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think what your mother's been to you, Jon! She has nothing
+      but you; I shan't last much longer.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? It isn't fair to&mdash;Why not?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Jolyon, rather coldly, &ldquo;because the doctors
+      tell me I shan't; that's all.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Dad!&rdquo; cried Jon, and burst into tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This downbreak of his son, whom he had not seen cry since he was ten,
+      moved Jolyon terribly. He recognised to the full how fearfully soft the
+      boy's heart was, how much he would suffer in this business, and in
+      life generally. And he reached out his hand helplessly&mdash;not wishing,
+      indeed not daring to get up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear man,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;don't&mdash;or you'll
+      make me!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon smothered down his paroxysm, and stood with face averted, very still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'What now?' thought Jolyon. 'What can I say to move him?'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By the way, don't speak of that to Mother,&rdquo; he said;
+      &ldquo;she has enough to frighten her with this affair of yours. I know
+      how you feel. But, Jon, you know her and me well enough to be sure we
+      wouldn't wish to spoil your happiness lightly. Why, my dear boy, we
+      don't care for anything but your happiness&mdash;at least, with me
+      it's just yours and Mother's and with her just yours. It's
+      all the future for you both that's at stake.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon turned. His face was deadly pale; his eyes, deep in his head, seemed
+      to burn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it? What is it? Don't keep me like this!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon, who knew that he was beaten, thrust his hand again into his breast
+      pocket, and sat for a full minute, breathing with difficulty, his eyes
+      closed. The thought passed through his mind: 'I've had a good
+      long innings&mdash;some pretty bitter moments&mdash;this is the worst!'
+      Then he brought his hand out with the letter, and said with a sort of
+      fatigue: &ldquo;Well, Jon, if you hadn't come to-day, I was going to
+      send you this. I wanted to spare you&mdash;I wanted to spare your mother
+      and myself, but I see it's no good. Read it, and I think I'll
+      go into the garden.&rdquo; He reached forward to get up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, &ldquo;No, I'll go&rdquo;;
+      and was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jolyon sank back in his chair. A blue-bottle chose that moment to come
+      buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely, better than
+      nothing.... Where had the boy gone to read his letter? The wretched letter&mdash;the
+      wretched story! A cruel business&mdash;cruel to her&mdash;to Soames&mdash;to
+      those two children&mdash;to himself!... His heart thumped and pained him.
+      Life&mdash;its loves&mdash;its work&mdash;its beauty&mdash;its aching, and&mdash;its
+      end! A good time; a fine time in spite of all; until&mdash;you regretted
+      that you had ever been born. Life&mdash;it wore you down, yet did not make
+      you want to die&mdash;that was the cunning evil! Mistake to have a heart!
+      Again the blue-bottle came buzzing&mdash;bringing in all the heat and hum
+      and scent of summer&mdash;yes, even the scent&mdash;as of ripe fruits,
+      dried grasses, sappy shrubs, and the vanilla breath of cows. And out there
+      somewhere in the fragrance Jon would be reading that letter, turning and
+      twisting its pages in his trouble, his bewilderment and trouble&mdash;breaking
+      his heart about it! The thought made Jolyon acutely miserable. Jon was
+      such a tender-hearted chap, affectionate to his bones, and conscientious,
+      too&mdash;it was so unfair, so damned unfair! He remembered Irene saying
+      to him once: &ldquo;Never was any one born more loving and lovable than
+      Jon.&rdquo; Poor little Jon! His world gone up the spout, all of a summer
+      afternoon! Youth took things so hard! And stirred, tormented by that
+      vision of Youth taking things hard, Jolyon got out of his chair, and went
+      to the window. The boy was nowhere visible. And he passed out. If one
+      could take any help to him now&mdash;one must!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden&mdash;no Jon!
+      Nor where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to swell and colour.
+      He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral, into the meadow. Where had
+      the boy got to? Had he rushed down to the coppice&mdash;his old
+      hunting-ground? Jolyon crossed the rows of hay. They would cock it on
+      Monday and be carrying the day after, if rain held off. Often they had
+      crossed this field together&mdash;hand in hand, when Jon was a little
+      chap. Dash it! The golden age was over by the time one was ten! He came to
+      the pond, where flies and gnats were dancing over a bright reedy surface;
+      and on into the coppice. It was cool there, fragrant of larches. Still no
+      Jon! He called. No answer! On the log seat he sat down, nervous, anxious,
+      forgetting his own physical sensations. He had been wrong to let the boy
+      get away with that letter; he ought to have kept him under his eye from
+      the start! Greatly troubled, he got up to retrace his steps. At the
+      farm-buildings he called again, and looked into the dark cow-house. There
+      in the cool, and the scent of vanilla and ammonia, away from flies, the
+      three Alderneys were chewing the quiet cud; just milked, waiting for
+      evening, to be turned out again into the lower field. One turned a lazy
+      head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon could see the slobber on its grey lower lip.
+      He saw everything with passionate clearness, in the agitation of his
+      nerves&mdash;all that in his time he had adored and tried to paint&mdash;wonder
+      of light and shade and colour. No wonder the legend put Christ into a
+      manger&mdash;what more devotional than the eyes and moon-white horns of a
+      chewing cow in the warm dusk! He called again. No answer! And he hurried
+      away out of the coppice, past the pond, up the hill. Oddly ironical&mdash;now
+      he came to think of it&mdash;if Jon had taken the gruel of his discovery
+      down in the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those old days had
+      made the plunge of acknowledging their love. Where he himself, on the log
+      seat the Sunday morning he came back from Paris, had realised to the full
+      that Irene had become the world to him. That would have been the place for
+      Irony to tear the veil from before the eyes of Irene's boy! But he
+      was not here! Where had he got to? One must find the poor chap!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all the beauty
+      of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening shadows, of the blue,
+      and the white clouds, the scent of the hay, and the cooing of the pigeons;
+      and the flower shapes standing tall. He came to the rosery, and the beauty
+      of the roses in that sudden sunlight seemed to him unearthly. &ldquo;Rose,
+      you Spaniard!&rdquo; Wonderful three words! There she had stood by that
+      bush of dark red roses; had stood to read and decide that Jon must know it
+      all! He knew all now! Had she chosen wrong? He bent and sniffed a rose,
+      its petals brushed his nose and trembling lips; nothing so soft as a
+      rose-leaf's velvet, except her neck&mdash;Irene! On across the lawn
+      he went, up the slope, to the oak-tree. Its top alone was glistening, for
+      the sudden sun was away over the house; the lower shade was thick,
+      blessedly cool&mdash;he was greatly overheated. He paused a minute with
+      his hand on the rope of the swing&mdash;Jolly, Holly&mdash;Jon! The old
+      swing! And suddenly, he felt horribly&mdash;deadly ill. 'I've
+      over done it!' he thought: 'by Jove! I've overdone it&mdash;after
+      all!' He staggered up toward the terrace, dragged himself up the
+      steps, and fell against the wall of the house. He leaned there gasping,
+      his face buried in the honey-suckle that he and she had taken such trouble
+      with that it might sweeten the air which drifted in. Its fragrance mingled
+      with awful pain. 'My love!' he thought; 'the boy!'
+      And with a great effort he tottered in through the long window, and sank
+      into old Jolyon's chair. The book was there, a pencil in it; he
+      caught it up, scribbled a word on the open page.... His hand dropped....
+      So it was like this&mdash;was it?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a great wrench; and darkness....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0124" id="link2H_4_0124">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.&mdash;IRENE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along the terrace
+      and round the corner of the house, in fear and confusion. Leaning against
+      the creepered wall he tore open the letter. It was long&mdash;very long!
+      This added to his fear, and he began reading. When he came to the words:
+      &ldquo;It was Fleur's father that she married,&rdquo; everything
+      seemed to spin before him. He was close to a window, and entering by it,
+      he passed, through music-room and hall, up to his bedroom. Dipping his
+      face in cold water, he sat on his bed, and went on reading, dropping each
+      finished page on the bed beside him. His father's writing was easy
+      to read&mdash;he knew it so well, though he had never had a letter from
+      him one quarter so long. He read with a dull feeling&mdash;imagination
+      only half at work. He best grasped, on that first reading, the pain his
+      father must have had in writing such a letter. He let the last sheet fall,
+      and in a sort of mental, moral helplessness began to read the first again.
+      It all seemed to him disgusting&mdash;dead and disgusting. Then, suddenly,
+      a hot wave of horrified emotion tingled through him. He buried his face in
+      his hands. His mother! Fleur's father! He took up the letter again,
+      and read on mechanically. And again came the feeling that it was all dead
+      and disgusting; his own love so different! This letter said his mother&mdash;and
+      her father! An awful letter!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their property? Faces
+      seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him&mdash;red,
+      stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent faces;
+      hundreds, thousands of them! How could he know what men who had such faces
+      thought and did? He held his head in his hands and groaned. His mother! He
+      caught up the letter and read on again: &ldquo;horror and aversion-alive
+      in her to-day.... your children.... grandchildren.... of a man who once
+      owned your mother as a man might own a slave....&rdquo; He got up from his
+      bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his love and Fleur's,
+      was true, or his father could never have written it. 'Why didn't
+      they tell me the first thing,' he thought, 'the day I first
+      saw Fleur? They knew I'd seen her. They were afraid, and&mdash;now&mdash;I've&mdash;got
+      it!' Overcome by misery too acute for thought or reason, he crept
+      into a dusky corner of the room and sat down on the floor. He sat there,
+      like some unhappy little animal. There was comfort in dusk, and the floor&mdash;as
+      if he were back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all
+      over it. He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped round
+      his knees, for how long he did not know. He was wrenched from his blank
+      wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from his mother's
+      room. The blinds were down over the windows of his room, shut up in his
+      absence, and from where he sat he could only hear a rustle, her footsteps
+      crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her standing before his
+      dressing-table. She had something in her hand. He hardly breathed, hoping
+      she would not see him, and go away. He saw her touch things on the table
+      as if they had some virtue in them, then face the window-grey from head to
+      foot like a ghost. The least turn of her head, and she must see him! Her
+      lips moved: &ldquo;Oh! Jon!&rdquo; She was speaking to herself; the tone
+      of her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her hand a little
+      photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at it&mdash;very small.
+      He knew it&mdash;one of himself as a tiny boy, which she always kept in
+      her bag. His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had heard it, she
+      turned her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave, and the movement of her
+      hands pressing the photograph against her breast, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it's me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him, her
+      hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the sheets of the letter
+      which had slipped to the floor. She saw them, and her hands grasped the
+      edge of the bed. She sat very upright, her dark eyes fixed on him. At last
+      she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Jon, you know, I see.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've seen Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long silence, till she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! my darling!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right.&rdquo; The emotions in him were so, violent
+      and so mixed that he dared not move&mdash;resentment, despair, and yet a
+      strange yearning for the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another long silence, then she got up. She stood a moment, very
+      still, made a little movement with her hand, and said: &ldquo;My darling
+      boy, my most darling boy, don't think of me&mdash;think of yourself,&rdquo;
+      and, passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon turned&mdash;curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog&mdash;into
+      the corner made by the two walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him. It came
+      from the terrace below. He got up, scared. Again came the cry: &ldquo;Jon!&rdquo;
+      His mother was calling! He ran out and down the stairs, through the empty
+      dining-room into the study. She was kneeling before the old armchair, and
+      his father was lying back quite white, his head on his breast, one of his
+      hands resting on an open book, with a pencil clutched in it&mdash;more
+      strangely still than anything he had ever seen. She looked round wildly,
+      and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! Jon&mdash;he's dead&mdash;he's dead!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where he
+      had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead. Icy cold! How could&mdash;how
+      could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago&mdash;! His mother's arms
+      were round the knees; pressing her breast against them. &ldquo;Why&mdash;why
+      wasn't I with him?&rdquo; he heard her whisper. Then he saw the
+      tottering word &ldquo;Irene&rdquo; pencilled on the open page, and broke
+      down himself. It was his first sight of human death, and its unutterable
+      stillness blotted from him all other emotion; all else, then, was but
+      preliminary to this! All love and life, and joy, anxiety, and sorrow, all
+      movement, light and beauty, but a beginning to this terrible white
+      stillness. It made a dreadful mark on him; all seemed suddenly little,
+      futile, short. He mastered himself at last, got up, and raised her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother! don't cry&mdash;Mother!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother was
+      lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a white
+      sheet. He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had never looked
+      angry&mdash;always whimsical, and kind. &ldquo;To be kind and keep your
+      end up&mdash;there's nothing else in it,&rdquo; he had once heard
+      his father say. How wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy! He
+      understood now that his father had known for a long time past that this
+      would come suddenly&mdash;known, and not said a word. He gazed with an
+      awed and passionate reverence. The loneliness of it&mdash;just to spare
+      his mother and himself! His own trouble seemed small while he was looking
+      at that face. The word scribbled on the page! The farewell word! Now his
+      mother had no one but himself! He went up close to the dead face&mdash;not
+      changed at all, and yet completely changed. He had heard his father say
+      once that he did not believe in consciousness surviving death, or that if
+      it did it might be just survival till the natural age limit of the body
+      had been reached&mdash;the natural term of its inherent vitality; so that
+      if the body were broken by accident, excess, violent disease,
+      consciousness might still persist till, in the course of Nature
+      uninterfered with, it would naturally have faded out. It had struck him
+      because he had never heard any one else suggest it. When the heart failed
+      like this&mdash;surely it was not quite natural! Perhaps his father's
+      consciousness was in the room with him. Above the bed hung a picture of
+      his father's father. Perhaps his consciousness, too, was still
+      alive; and his brother's&mdash;his half-brother, who had died in the
+      Transvaal. Were they all gathered round this bed? Jon kissed the forehead,
+      and stole back to his own room. The door between it and his mother's
+      was ajar; she had evidently been in&mdash;everything was ready for him,
+      even some biscuits and hot milk, and the letter no longer on the floor. He
+      ate and drank, watching the last light fade. He did not try to see into
+      the future&mdash;just stared at the dark branches of the oak-tree, level
+      with his window, and felt as if life had stopped. Once in the night,
+      turning in his heavy sleep, he was conscious of something white and still,
+      beside his bed, and started up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother's voice said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's only I, Jon dear!&rdquo; Her hand pressed his forehead
+      gently back; her white figure disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone! He fell heavily asleep again, and dreamed he saw his mother's
+      name crawling on his bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0125" id="link2H_4_0125">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.&mdash;SOAMES COGITATES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The announcement in The Times of his cousin Jolyon's death affected
+      Soames quite simply. So that chap was gone! There had never been a time in
+      their two lives when love had not been lost between them. That
+      quick-blooded sentiment hatred had run its course long since in Soames'
+      heart, and he had refused to allow any recrudescence, but he considered
+      this early decease a piece of poetic justice. For twenty years the fellow
+      had enjoyed the reversion of his wife and house, and&mdash;he was dead!
+      The obituary notice, which appeared a little later, paid Jolyon&mdash;he
+      thought&mdash;too much attention. It spoke of that &ldquo;diligent and
+      agreeable painter whose work we have come to look on as typical of the
+      best late-Victorian water-colour art.&rdquo; Soames, who had almost
+      mechanically preferred Mole, Morpin, and Caswell Baye, and had always
+      sniffed quite audibly when he came to one of his cousin's on the
+      line, turned The Times with a crackle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to go up to Town that morning on Forsyte affairs, and was fully
+      conscious of Gradman's glance sidelong over his spectacles. The old
+      clerk had about him an aura of regretful congratulation. He smelled, as it
+      were, of old days. One could almost hear him thinking: &ldquo;Mr. Jolyon,
+      ye-es&mdash;just my age, and gone&mdash;dear, dear! I dare say she feels
+      it. She was a nice-lookin' woman. Flesh is flesh! They've
+      given 'im a notice in the papers. Fancy!&rdquo; His atmosphere in
+      fact caused Soames to handle certain leases and conversions with
+      exceptional swiftness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About that settlement on Miss Fleur, Mr. Soames?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought better of that,&rdquo; answered Soames shortly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! I'm glad of that. I thought you were a little hasty. The
+      times do change.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How this death would affect Fleur had begun to trouble Soames. He was not
+      certain that she knew of it&mdash;she seldom looked at the paper, never at
+      the births, marriages, and deaths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He pressed matters on, and made his way to Green Street for lunch.
+      Winifred was almost doleful. Jack Cardigan had broken a splashboard, so
+      far as one could make out, and would not be &ldquo;fit&rdquo; for some
+      time. She could not get used to the idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did Profond ever get off?&rdquo; he said suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He got off,&rdquo; replied Winifred, &ldquo;but where&mdash;I don't
+      know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, there it was&mdash;impossible to tell anything! Not that he wanted to
+      know. Letters from Annette were coming from Dieppe, where she and her
+      mother were staying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You saw that fellow's death, I suppose?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Winifred. &ldquo;I'm sorry for&mdash;for his
+      children. He was very amiable.&rdquo; Soames uttered a rather queer sound.
+      A suspicion of the old deep truth&mdash;that men were judged in this world
+      rather by what they were than by what they did&mdash;crept and knocked
+      resentfully at the back doors of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know there was a superstition to that effect,&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One must do him justice now he's dead.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to have done him justice before,&rdquo; said Soames;
+      &ldquo;but I never had the chance. Have you got a 'Baronetage'
+      here?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; in that bottom row.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames took out a fat red book, and ran over the leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mont-Sir Lawrence, 9th Bt., cr. 1620, e. s. of Geoffrey, 8th Bt.,
+      and Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt., of Muskham Hall, Shrops:
+      marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq., of Condaford Grange, co.
+      Oxon; 1 son, heir Michael Conway, b. 1895, 2 daurs. Residence: Lippinghall
+      Manor, Folwell, Bucks. Clubs: Snooks'. Coffee House: Aeroplane. See
+      Bidicott.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;H'm!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Did you ever know a publisher?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Uncle Timothy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alive, I mean.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monty knew one at his Club. He brought him here to dinner once.
+      Monty was always thinking of writing a book, you know, about how to make
+      money on the turf. He tried to interest that man.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He put him on to a horse&mdash;for the Two Thousand. We didn't
+      see him again. He was rather smart, if I remember.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did it win?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; it ran last, I think. You know Monty really was quite clever in
+      his way.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was he?&rdquo; said Soames. &ldquo;Can you see any connection
+      between a sucking baronet and publishing?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People do all sorts of things nowadays,&rdquo; replied Winifred.
+      &ldquo;The great stunt seems not to be idle&mdash;so different from our
+      time. To do nothing was the thing then. But I suppose it'll come
+      again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This young Mont that I'm speaking of is very sweet on Fleur.
+      If it would put an end to that other affair I might encourage it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he got style?&rdquo; asked Winifred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's no beauty; pleasant enough, with some scattered brains.
+      There's a good deal of land, I believe. He seems genuinely attached.
+      But I don't know.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; murmured Winifred; &ldquo;it's&mdash;very
+      difficult. I always found it best to do nothing. It is such a bore about
+      Jack; now we shan't get away till after Bank Holiday. Well, the
+      people are always amusing, I shall go into the Park and watch them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were you,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;I should have a country
+      cottage, and be out of the way of holidays and strikes when you want.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The country bores me,&rdquo; answered Winifred, &ldquo;and I found
+      the railway strike quite exciting.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred had always been noted for sang-froid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames took his leave. All the way down to Reading he debated whether he
+      should tell Fleur of that boy's father's death. It did not
+      alter the situation except that he would be independent now, and only have
+      his mother's opposition to encounter. He would come into a lot of
+      money, no doubt, and perhaps the house&mdash;the house built for Irene and
+      himself&mdash;the house whose architect had wrought his domestic ruin. His
+      daughter&mdash;mistress of that house! That would be poetic justice!
+      Soames uttered a little mirthless laugh. He had designed that house to
+      re-establish his failing union, meant it for the seat of his descendants,
+      if he could have induced Irene to give him one! Her son and Fleur! Their
+      children would be, in some sort, offspring of the union between himself
+      and her!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theatricality in that thought was repulsive to his sober sense. And
+      yet&mdash;it would be the easiest and wealthiest way out of the impasse,
+      now that Jolyon was gone. The juncture of two Forsyte fortunes had a kind
+      of conservative charm. And she&mdash;Irene-would be linked to him once
+      more. Nonsense! Absurd! He put the notion from his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On arriving home he heard the click of billiard-balls, and through the
+      window saw young Mont sprawling over the table. Fleur, with her cue
+      akimbo, was watching with a smile. How pretty she looked! No wonder that
+      young fellow was out of his mind about her. A title&mdash;land! There was
+      little enough in land, these days; perhaps less in a title. The old
+      Forsytes had always had a kind of contempt for titles, rather remote and
+      artificial things&mdash;not worth the money they cost, and having to do
+      with the Court. They had all had that feeling in differing measure&mdash;Soames
+      remembered. Swithin, indeed, in his most expansive days had once attended
+      a Levee. He had come away saying he shouldn't go again&mdash;&ldquo;all
+      that small fry.&rdquo; It was suspected that he had looked too big in
+      knee-breeches. Soames remembered how his own mother had wished to be
+      presented because of the fashionable nature of the performance, and how
+      his father had put his foot down with unwonted decision. What did she want
+      with that peacocking&mdash;wasting time and money; there was nothing in
+      it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the chief power
+      in the State, a feeling that their own world was good enough and a little
+      better than any other because it was their world, had kept the old
+      Forsytes singularly free of &ldquo;flummery,&rdquo; as Nicholas had been
+      wont to call it when he had the gout. Soames' generation, more
+      self-conscious and ironical, had been saved by a sense of Swithin in
+      knee-breeches. While the third and the fourth generation, as it seemed to
+      him, laughed at everything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a
+      title and estate&mdash;a thing one couldn't help. He entered
+      quietly, as Mont missed his shot. He noted the young man's eyes,
+      fixed on Fleur bending over in her turn; and the adoration in them almost
+      touched him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand, and shook
+      her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall never do it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Nothing venture.'&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right.&rdquo; The cue struck, the ball rolled. &ldquo;There!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bad luck! Never mind!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then they saw him, and Soames said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll mark for you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and tired,
+      furtively studying those two young faces. When the game was over Mont came
+      up to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've started in, sir. Rum game, business, isn't it? I
+      suppose you saw a lot of human nature as a solicitor.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the
+      wrong tack in offering less than they can afford to give; they ought to
+      offer more, and work backward.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames raised his eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose the more is accepted?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That doesn't matter a little bit,&rdquo; said Mont; &ldquo;it's
+      much more paying to abate a price than to increase it. For instance, say
+      we offer an author good terms&mdash;he naturally takes them. Then we go
+      into it, find we can't publish at a decent profit and tell him so.
+      He's got confidence in us because we've been generous to him,
+      and he comes down like a lamb, and bears us no malice. But if we offer him
+      poor terms at the start, he doesn't take them, so we have to advance
+      them to get him, and he thinks us damned screws into the bargain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Try buying pictures on that system,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;an
+      offer accepted is a contract&mdash;haven't you learned that?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I wish I had. Then there's another
+      thing. Always let a man off a bargain if he wants to be let off.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As advertisement?&rdquo; said Soames dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course it is; but I meant on principle.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does your firm work on those lines?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet,&rdquo; said Mont, &ldquo;but it'll come.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they will go.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, really, sir. I'm making any number of observations, and
+      they all confirm my theory. Human nature is consistently underrated in
+      business, people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure and profit
+      by that. Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and open, but that's
+      easy if you feel it. The more human and generous you are the better chance
+      you've got in business.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you a partner?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not for six months, yet.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mont laughed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll see,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There's going to be
+      a big change. The possessive principle has got its shutters up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The house is to let! Good-bye, sir; I'm off now.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the squeeze it
+      received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as he passed
+      out. Then she came from the window, trailing her finger along the mahogany
+      edge of the billiard-table. Watching her, Soames knew that she was going
+      to ask him something. Her finger felt round the last pocket, and she
+      looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven't seen, then?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;His father
+      died just a week ago to-day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to apprehend
+      what this would mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Jon! Why didn't you tell me, Father?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never know!&rdquo; said Soames slowly; &ldquo;you don't
+      confide in me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would, if you'd help me, dear.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps I shall.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur clasped her hands. &ldquo;Oh! darling&mdash;when one wants a thing
+      fearfully, one doesn't think of other people. Don't be angry
+      with me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm cogitating,&rdquo; he said. What on earth had made him
+      use a word like that! &ldquo;Has young Mont been bothering you again?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur smiled. &ldquo;Oh! Michael! He's always bothering; but he's
+      such a good sort&mdash;I don't mind him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;I'm tired; I shall go and
+      have a nap before dinner.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there, and closed
+      his eyes. A terrible responsibility this girl of his&mdash;whose mother
+      was&mdash;ah! what was she? A terrible responsibility! Help her&mdash;how
+      could he help her? He could not alter the fact that he was her father. Or
+      that Irene&mdash;! What was it young Mont had said&mdash;some nonsense
+      about the possessive instinct&mdash;shutters up&mdash;To let? Silly!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and roses,
+      closed on his senses, drowsing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0126" id="link2H_4_0126">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.&mdash;THE FIXED IDEA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The fixed idea,&rdquo; which has outrun more constables than any
+      other form of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when
+      it takes the avid guise of love. To hedges and ditches, and doors, to
+      humans without ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the contents
+      sucking their fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from this fast
+      malady&mdash;the fixed idea of love pays no attention. It runs with eyes
+      turned inward to its own light, oblivious of all other stars. Those with
+      the fixed ideas that human happiness depends on their art, on vivisecting
+      dogs, on hating foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers, on
+      making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours from being
+      divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox
+      and superiority to everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania&mdash;all
+      are unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession
+      of some her or him. And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued
+      the scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and
+      whose business is pleasure, she was&mdash;as Winifred would have said in
+      the latest fashion of speech&mdash;&ldquo;honest to God&rdquo; indifferent
+      to it all. She wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies
+      above the river or the Green Park when she went to Town. She even kept Jon's
+      letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which in days when
+      corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and chests so out of fashion,
+      there could, perhaps, have been no greater proof of the fixity of her
+      idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received
+      his answer three days later on her return from a river picnic. It was his
+      first letter since their meeting at June's. She opened it with
+      misgiving, and read it with dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past. I won't
+      tell it you&mdash;I think you knew when we met at June's. She says
+      you did. If you did, Fleur, you ought to have told me. I expect you only
+      heard your father's side of it. I have heard my mother's. It's
+      dreadful. Now that she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt
+      her more. Of course, I long for you all day, but I don't believe now
+      that we shall ever come together&mdash;there's something too strong
+      pulling us apart.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So! Her deception had found her out. But Jon&mdash;she felt&mdash;had
+      forgiven that. It was what he said of his mother which caused the
+      guttering in her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her first impulse was to reply&mdash;her second, not to reply. These
+      impulses were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while
+      desperation grew within her. She was not her father's child for
+      nothing. The tenacity which had at once made and undone Soames was her
+      backbone, too, frilled and embroidered by French grace and quickness.
+      Instinctively she conjugated the verb &ldquo;to have&rdquo; always with
+      the pronoun &ldquo;I.&rdquo; She concealed, however, all signs of her
+      growing desperation, and pursued such river pleasures as the winds and
+      rain of a disagreeable July permitted, as if she had no care in the world;
+      nor did any &ldquo;sucking baronet&rdquo; ever neglect the business of a
+      publisher more consistently than her attendant spirit, Michael Mont.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Soames she was a puzzle. He was almost deceived by this careless
+      gaiety. Almost&mdash;because he did not fail to mark her eyes often fixed
+      on nothing, and the film of light shining from her bedroom window late at
+      night. What was she thinking and brooding over into small hours when she
+      ought to have been asleep? But he dared not ask what was in her mind; and,
+      since that one little talk in the billiard-room, she said nothing to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred invited
+      them to lunch and to go afterward to &ldquo;a most amusing little play,
+      'The Beggar's Opera'&rdquo; and would they bring a man
+      to make four? Soames, whose attitude toward theatres was to go to nothing,
+      accepted, because Fleur's attitude was to go to everything. They
+      motored up, taking Michael Mont, who, being in his seventh heaven, was
+      found by Winifred &ldquo;very amusing.&rdquo; &ldquo;The Beggar's
+      Opera&rdquo; puzzled Soames. The people were very unpleasant, the whole
+      thing very cynical. Winifred was &ldquo;intrigued&rdquo;&mdash;by the
+      dresses. The music, too, did not displease her. At the Opera, the night
+      before, she had arrived too early for the Russian Ballet, and found the
+      stage occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or apoplectic from terror
+      lest by some dreadful inadvertence they might drop into a tune. Michael
+      Mont was enraptured with the whole thing. And all three wondered what
+      Fleur was thinking of it. But Fleur was not thinking of it. Her fixed idea
+      stood on the stage and sang with Polly Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced
+      with Jenny Diver, postured with Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and cuddled
+      with Macheath. Her lips might smile, her hands applaud, but the comic old
+      masterpiece made no more impression on her than if it had been pathetic,
+      like a modern &ldquo;Revue.&rdquo; When they embarked in the car to
+      return, she ached because Jon was not sitting next her instead of Michael
+      Mont. When, at some jolt, the young man's arm touched hers as if by
+      accident, she only thought: 'If that were Jon's arm!'
+      When his cheerful voice, tempered by her proximity, murmured above the
+      sound of the car's progress, she smiled and answered, thinking:
+      'If that were Jon's voice!' and when once he said,
+      &ldquo;Fleur, you look a perfect angel in that dress!&rdquo; she answered,
+      &ldquo;Oh, do you like it?&rdquo; thinking, 'If only Jon could see
+      it!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During this drive she took a resolution. She would go to Robin Hill and
+      see him&mdash;alone; she would take the car, without word beforehand to
+      him or to her father. It was nine days since his letter, and she could
+      wait no longer. On Monday she would go! The decision made her well
+      disposed toward young Mont. With something to look forward to she could
+      afford to tolerate and respond. He might stay to dinner; propose to her as
+      usual; dance with her, press her hand, sigh&mdash;do what he liked. He was
+      only a nuisance when he interfered with her fixed idea. She was even sorry
+      for him so far as it was possible to be sorry for anybody but herself just
+      now. At dinner he seemed to talk more wildly than usual about what he
+      called &ldquo;the death of the close borough&rdquo;&mdash;she paid little
+      attention, but her father seemed paying a good deal, with the smile on his
+      face which meant opposition, if not anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The younger generation doesn't think as you do, sir; does it,
+      Fleur?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur shrugged her shoulders&mdash;the younger generation was just Jon,
+      and she did not know what he was thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Young people will think as I do when they're my age, Mr.
+      Mont. Human nature doesn't change.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the times.
+      The pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that's going out.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed! To mind one's own business is not a form of thought,
+      Mr. Mont, it's an instinct.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, when Jon was the business!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what is one's business, sir? That's the point.
+      Everybody's business is going to be one's business. Isn't
+      it, Fleur?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur only smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If not,&rdquo; added young Mont, &ldquo;there'll be blood.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;People have talked like that from time immemorial&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying
+      out?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should say increasing among those who have none.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, look at me! I'm heir to an entailed estate. I don't
+      want the thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not married, and you don't know what you're
+      talking about.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you really mean that marriage&mdash;?&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Society is built on marriage,&rdquo; came from between her father's
+      close lips; &ldquo;marriage and its consequences. Do you want to do away
+      with it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Young Mont made a distracted gesture. Silence brooded over the dinner
+      table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest&mdash;a pheasant
+      proper&mdash;under the electric light in an alabaster globe. And outside,
+      the river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and sweet scents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0127" id="link2H_4_0127">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.&mdash;DESPERATE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty to the
+      only Jolyon Forsyte left. The necessary forms and ceremonies&mdash;the
+      reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of the legacies&mdash;were
+      enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet of age. Jolyon was
+      cremated. By his special wish no one attended that ceremony, or wore black
+      for him. The succession of his property, controlled to some extent by old
+      Jolyon's Will, left his widow in possession of Robin Hill, with two
+      thousand five hundred pounds a year for life. Apart from this the two
+      Wills worked together in some complicated way to insure that each of
+      Jolyon's three children should have an equal share in their
+      grandfather's and father's property in the future as in the
+      present, save only that Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of
+      his capital when he was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have
+      the spirit of theirs, in order that their children might have the body
+      after them. If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he
+      outlived them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was
+      considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of
+      income tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he
+      died. All this was nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother. It was
+      June who did everything needful for one who had left his affairs in
+      perfect order. When she had gone, and those two were alone again in the
+      great house, alone with death drawing them together, and love driving them
+      apart, Jon passed very painful days secretly disgusted and disappointed
+      with himself. His mother would look at him with such a patient sadness
+      which yet had in it an instinctive pride, as if she were reserving her
+      defence. If she smiled he was angry that his answering smile should be so
+      grudging and unnatural. He did not judge or condemn her; that was all too
+      remote&mdash;indeed, the idea of doing so had never come to him. No! he
+      was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have what he wanted
+      because of her. There was one alleviation&mdash;much to do in connection
+      with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted to
+      June, though she had offered to undertake it. Both Jon and his mother had
+      felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings and unfinished
+      matter, away with her, the work would encounter such icy blasts from Paul
+      Post and other frequenters of her studio, that it would soon be frozen out
+      even of her warm heart. On its old-fashioned plane and of its kind the
+      work was good, and they could not bear the thought of its subjection to
+      ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the least testimony they
+      could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation for this they spent
+      many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for
+      his father. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre
+      talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches.
+      There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth
+      and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very
+      high&mdash;but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious, and
+      complete. And, remembering his father's utter absence of &ldquo;side&rdquo;
+      or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always spoken
+      of his own efforts, ever calling himself &ldquo;an amateur,&rdquo; Jon
+      could not help feeling that he had never really known his father. To take
+      himself seriously, yet never that he did so, seemed to have been his
+      ruling principle. There was something in this which appealed to the boy,
+      and made him heartily endorse his mother's comment: &ldquo;He had
+      true refinement; he couldn't help thinking of others, whatever he
+      did. And when he took a resolution which went counter, he did it with the
+      minimum of defiance&mdash;not like the Age, is it? Twice in his life he
+      had to go against everything; and yet it never made him bitter.&rdquo; Jon
+      saw tears running down her face, which she at once turned away from him.
+      She was so quiet about her loss that sometimes he had thought she didn't
+      feel it much. Now, as he looked at her, he felt how far he fell short of
+      the reserve power and dignity in both his father and his mother. And,
+      stealing up to her, he put his arm round her waist. She kissed him
+      swiftly, but with a sort of passion, and went out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once been Holly's
+      schoolroom, devoted to her silkworms, dried lavender, music, and other
+      forms of instruction. Now, at the end of July, despite its northern and
+      eastern aspects, a warm and slumberous air came in between the long-faded
+      lilac linen curtains. To redeem a little the departed glory, as of a field
+      that is golden and gone, clinging to a room which its master has left,
+      Irene had placed on the paint-stained table a bowl of red roses. This, and
+      Jolyon's favourite cat, who still clung to the deserted habitat,
+      were the pleasant spots in that dishevelled, sad workroom. Jon, at the
+      north window, sniffing air mysteriously scented with warm strawberries,
+      heard a car drive up. The lawyers again about some nonsense! Why did that
+      scent so make one ache? And where did it come from&mdash;there were no
+      strawberry beds on this side of the house. Instinctively he took a
+      crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, and wrote down some broken words.
+      A warmth began spreading in his chest; he rubbed the palms of his hands
+      together. Presently he had jotted this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I could make a little song A little song to soothe my heart! I'd
+      make it all of little things The plash of water, rub of wings, The
+      puffing-off of dandies crown, The hiss of raindrop spilling down, The purr
+      of cat, the trill of bird, And ev'ry whispering I've heard
+      From willy wind in leaves and grass, And all the distant drones that pass.
+      A song as tender and as light As flower, or butterfly in flight; And when
+      I saw it opening, I'd let it fly and sing!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was still muttering it over to himself at the window, when he heard his
+      name called, and, turning round, saw Fleur. At that amazing apparition, he
+      made at first no movement and no sound, while her clear vivid glance
+      ravished his heart. Then he went forward to the table, saying, &ldquo;How
+      nice of you to come!&rdquo; and saw her flinch as if he had thrown
+      something at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I asked for you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and they showed me up
+      here. But I can go away again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon clutched the paint-stained table. Her face and figure in its frilly
+      frock photographed itself with such startling vividness upon his eyes,
+      that if she had sunk through the floor he must still have seen her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know I told you a lie, Jon. But I told it out of love.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, oh! yes! That's nothing!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't answer your letter. What was the use&mdash;there
+      wasn't anything to answer. I wanted to see you instead.&rdquo; She
+      held out both her hands, and Jon grasped them across the table. He tried
+      to say something, but all his attention was given to trying not to hurt
+      her hands. His own felt so hard and hers so soft. She said almost
+      defiantly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That old story&mdash;was it so very dreadful?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; In his voice, too, there was a note of defiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She dragged her hands away. &ldquo;I didn't think in these days boys
+      were tied to their mothers' apron-strings.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon's chin went up as if he had been struck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I didn't mean it, Jon. What a horrible thing to say!&rdquo;
+      Swiftly she came close to him. &ldquo;Jon, dear; I didn't mean it.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had put her two hands on his shoulder, and her forehead down on them;
+      the brim of her hat touched his neck, and he felt it quivering. But, in a
+      sort of paralysis, he made no response. She let go of his shoulder and
+      drew away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I'll go, if you don't want me. But I never
+      thought you'd have given me up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I haven't,&rdquo; cried Jon, coming suddenly to life. &ldquo;I
+      can't. I'll try again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes gleamed, she swayed toward him. &ldquo;Jon&mdash;I love you! Don't
+      give me up! If you do, I don't know what&mdash;I feel so desperate.
+      What does it matter&mdash;all that past-compared with this?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She clung to him. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. But while he
+      kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down on the floor of
+      his bedroom&mdash;his father's white dead face&mdash;his mother
+      kneeling before it. Fleur's whispered, &ldquo;Make her! Promise! Oh!
+      Jon, try!&rdquo; seemed childish in his ear. He felt curiously old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I promise!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;Only, you don't
+      understand.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She wants to spoil our lives, just because&mdash;&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, of what?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer. Her arms
+      tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even while he
+      yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the letter. Fleur did not
+      know, she did not understand&mdash;she misjudged his mother; she came from
+      the enemy's camp! So lovely, and he loved her so&mdash;yet, even in
+      her embrace, he could not help the memory of Holly's words: &ldquo;I
+      think she has a 'having' nature,&rdquo; and his mother's
+      &ldquo;My darling boy, don't think of me&mdash;think of yourself!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on his eyes,
+      her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon leaned in the
+      window, listening to the car bearing her away. Still the scent as of warm
+      strawberries, still the little summer sounds that should make his song;
+      still all the promise of youth and happiness in sighing, floating,
+      fluttering July&mdash;and his heart torn; yearning strong in him; hope
+      high in him yet with its eyes cast down, as if ashamed. The miserable task
+      before him! If Fleur was desperate, so was he&mdash;watching the poplars
+      swaying, the white clouds passing, the sunlight on the grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till his
+      mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling that she knew what
+      he was waiting to say. She kissed him and went up-stairs, and still he
+      lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that unreality of
+      colouring which steals along and stains a summer night. And he would have
+      given anything to be back again in the past&mdash;barely three months
+      back; or away forward, years, in the future. The present with this dark
+      cruelty of a decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible. He
+      realised now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had at
+      first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ producing
+      a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt there were two
+      camps, his mother's and his&mdash;Fleur's and her father's.
+      It might be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and enmity, but dead
+      things were poisonous till time had cleaned them away. Even his love felt
+      tainted, less illusioned, more of the earth, and with a treacherous
+      lurking doubt lest Fleur, like her father, might want to own; not
+      articulate, just a stealing haunt, horribly unworthy, which crept in and
+      about the ardour of his memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the
+      vividness and grace of that charmed face and figure&mdash;a doubt, not
+      real enough to convince him of its presence, just real enough to deflower
+      a perfect faith. And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was essential.
+      He still had Youth's eagerness to give with both hands, to take with
+      neither&mdash;to give lovingly to one who had his own impulsive
+      generosity. Surely she had! He got up from the window-seat and roamed in
+      the big grey ghostly room, whose walls were hung with silvered canvas.
+      This house his father said in that death-bed letter&mdash;had been built
+      for his mother to live in&mdash;with Fleur's father! He put out his
+      hand in the half-dark, as if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead. He
+      clenched, trying to feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to
+      squeeze them, and reassure him that he&mdash;he was on his father's
+      side. Tears, prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot. He went
+      back to the window. It was warmer, not so eerie, more comforting outside,
+      where the moon hung golden, three days off full; the freedom of the night
+      was comforting. If only Fleur and he had met on some desert island without
+      a past&mdash;and Nature for their house! Jon had still his high regard for
+      desert islands, where breadfruit grew, and the water was blue above the
+      coral. The night was deep, was free&mdash;there was enticement in it; a
+      lure, a promise, a refuge from entanglement, and love! Milksop tied to his
+      mother's...! His cheeks burned. He shut the window, drew curtains
+      over it, switched off the lighted sconce, and went up-stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother, still in
+      her evening gown, was standing at the window. She turned and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit down, Jon; let's talk.&rdquo; She sat down on the
+      window-seat, Jon on his bed. She had her profile turned to him, and the
+      beauty and grace of her figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose,
+      the neck, the strange and as it were remote refinement of her, moved him.
+      His mother never belonged to her surroundings. She came into them from
+      somewhere&mdash;as it were! What was she going to say to him, who had in
+      his heart such things to say to her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know Fleur came to-day. I'm not surprised.&rdquo; It was as
+      though she had added: &ldquo;She is her father's daughter!&rdquo;
+      And Jon's heart hardened. Irene went on quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have Father's letter. I picked it up that night and kept
+      it. Would you like it back, dear?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you. It didn't
+      quite do justice to my criminality.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother!&rdquo; burst from Jon's lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's
+      father without love I did a dreadful thing. An unhappy marriage, Jon, can
+      play such havoc with other lives besides one's own. You are
+      fearfully young, my darling, and fearfully loving. Do you think you can
+      possibly be happy with this girl?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; oh! yes&mdash;if you could be.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love. If
+      yours were another case like mine, Jon&mdash;where the deepest things are
+      stifled; the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why should it, Mother? You think she must be like her father, but
+      she's not. I've seen him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something wavered;
+      there was such irony and experience in that smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again! He said with
+      vehemence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She isn't&mdash;she isn't. It's only because I
+      can't bear to make you unhappy, Mother, now that Father&mdash;&rdquo;
+      He thrust his fists against his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene got up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told you that night, dear, not to mind me. I meant it. Think of
+      yourself and your own happiness! I can stand what's left&mdash;I've
+      brought it on myself.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the word &ldquo;Mother!&rdquo; burst from Jon's lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came over to him and put her hands over his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you feel your head, darling?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon shook it. What he felt was in his chest&mdash;a sort of tearing
+      asunder of the tissue there, by the two loves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do. You won't
+      lose anything.&rdquo; She smoothed his hair gently, and walked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay, stifling his
+      breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0128" id="link2H_4_0128">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.&mdash;EMBASSY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been out in
+      the car since two. Three hours! Where had she gone? Up to London without a
+      word to him? He had never become quite reconciled with cars. He had
+      embraced them in principle&mdash;like the born empiricist, or Forsyte,
+      that he was&mdash;adopting each symptom of progress as it came along with:
+      &ldquo;Well, we couldn't do without them now.&rdquo; But in fact he
+      found them tearing, great, smelly things. Obliged by Annette to have one&mdash;a
+      Rollhard with pearl-grey cushions, electric light, little mirrors, trays
+      for the ashes of cigarettes, flower vases&mdash;all smelling of petrol and
+      stephanotis&mdash;he regarded it much as he used to regard his
+      brother-in-law, Montague Dartie. The thing typified all that was fast,
+      insecure, and subcutaneously oily in modern life. As modern life became
+      faster, looser, younger, Soames was becoming older, slower, tighter, more
+      and more in thought and language like his father James before him. He was
+      almost aware of it himself. Pace and progress pleased him less and less;
+      there was an ostentation, too, about a car which he considered provocative
+      in the prevailing mood of Labour. On one occasion that fellow Sims had
+      driven over the only vested interest of a working man. Soames had not
+      forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many people would have
+      stopped to put up with it. He had been sorry for the dog, and quite
+      prepared to take its part against the car, if that ruffian hadn't
+      been so outrageous. With four hours fast becoming five, and still no
+      Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had experienced in person and by
+      proxy balled within him, and sinking sensations troubled the pit of his
+      stomach. At seven he telephoned to Winifred by trunk call. No! Fleur had
+      not been to Green Street. Then where was she? Visions of his beloved
+      daughter rolled up in her pretty frills, all blood and dust-stained, in
+      some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him. He went to her room and
+      spied among her things. She had taken nothing&mdash;no dressing-case, no
+      Jewellery. And this, a relief in one sense, increased his fears of an
+      accident. Terrible to be helpless when his loved one was missing,
+      especially when he couldn't bear fuss or publicity of any kind! What
+      should he do if she were not back by nightfall?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a quarter to eight he heard the car. A great weight lifted from off his
+      heart; he hurried down. She was getting out&mdash;pale and tired-looking,
+      but nothing wrong. He met her in the hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've frightened me. Where have you been?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Robin Hill. I'm sorry, dear. I had to go; I'll tell
+      you afterward.&rdquo; And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames waited in the drawing-room. To Robin Hill! What did that portend?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner&mdash;consecrated to the
+      susceptibilities of the butler. The agony of nerves Soames had been
+      through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his power to condemn
+      what she had done, or resist what she was going to do; he waited in a
+      relaxed stupor for her revelation. Life was a queer business. There he was
+      at sixty-five and no more in command of things than if he had not spent
+      forty years in building up security-always something one couldn't
+      get on terms with! In the pocket of his dinner-jacket was a letter from
+      Annette. She was coming back in a fortnight. He knew nothing of what she
+      had been doing out there. And he was glad that he did not. Her absence had
+      been a relief. Out of sight was out of mind! And now she was coming back.
+      Another worry! And the Bolderby Old Crome was gone&mdash;Dumetrius had got
+      it&mdash;all because that anonymous letter had put it out of his thoughts.
+      He furtively remarked the strained look on his daughter's face, as
+      if she too were gazing at a picture that she couldn't buy. He almost
+      wished the War back. Worries didn't seem, then, quite so worrying.
+      From the caress in her voice, the look on her face, he became certain that
+      she wanted something from him, uncertain whether it would be wise of him
+      to give it her. He pushed his savoury away uneaten, and even joined her in
+      a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner she set the electric piano-player going. And he augured the
+      worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his knee, and put her
+      hand on his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Darling, be nice to me. I had to see Jon&mdash;he wrote to me. He's
+      going to try what he can do with his mother. But I've been thinking.
+      It's really in your hands, Father. If you'd persuade her that
+      it doesn't mean renewing the past in any way! That I shall stay
+      yours, and Jon will stay hers; that you need never see him or her, and she
+      need never see you or me! Only you could persuade her, dear, because only
+      you could promise. One can't promise for other people. Surely it
+      wouldn't be too awkward for you to see her just this once now that
+      Jon's father is dead?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too awkward?&rdquo; Soames repeated. &ldquo;The whole thing's
+      preposterous.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know,&rdquo; said Fleur, without looking up, &ldquo;you wouldn't
+      mind seeing her, really.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames was silent. Her words had expressed a truth too deep for him to
+      admit. She slipped her fingers between his own&mdash;hot, slim, eager,
+      they clung there. This child of his would corkscrew her way into a brick
+      wall!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What am I to do if you won't, Father?&rdquo; she said very
+      softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll do anything for your happiness,&rdquo; said Soanies;
+      &ldquo;but this isn't for your happiness.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! it is; it is!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It'll only stir things up,&rdquo; he said grimly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they are stirred up. The thing is to quiet them. To make her
+      feel that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with yours or
+      hers. You can do it, Father, I know you can.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know a great deal, then,&rdquo; was Soames' glum answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you will, Jon and I will wait a year&mdash;two years if you
+      like.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me,&rdquo; murmured Soames, &ldquo;that you care
+      nothing about what I feel.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do, darling. But you wouldn't like me to be awfully
+      miserable.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How she wheedled to get her ends! And trying with all his might to think
+      she really cared for him&mdash;he was not sure&mdash;not sure. All she
+      cared for was this boy! Why should he help her to get this boy, who was
+      killing her affection for himself? Why should he? By the laws of the
+      Forsytes it was foolish! There was nothing to be had out of it&mdash;nothing!
+      To give her to that boy! To pass her into the enemy's camp, under
+      the influence of the woman who had injured him so deeply! Slowly&mdash;inevitably&mdash;he
+      would lose this flower of his life! And suddenly he was conscious that his
+      hand was wet. His heart gave a little painful jump. He couldn't bear
+      her to cry. He put his other hand quickly over hers, and a tear dropped on
+      that, too. He couldn't go on like this! &ldquo;Well, well,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;I'll think it over, and do what I can. Come, come!&rdquo;
+      If she must have it for her happiness&mdash;she must; he couldn't
+      refuse to help her. And lest she should begin to thank him he got out of
+      his chair and went up to the piano-player&mdash;making that noise! It ran
+      down, as he reached it, with a faint buzz. That musical box of his nursery
+      days: &ldquo;The Harmonious Blacksmith,&rdquo; &ldquo;Glorious Port&rdquo;&mdash;the
+      thing had always made him miserable when his mother set it going on Sunday
+      afternoons. Here it was again&mdash;the same thing, only larger, more
+      expensive, and now it played &ldquo;The Wild, Wild Women,&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;The Policeman's Holiday,&rdquo; and he was no longer in black
+      velvet with a sky blue collar. 'Profond's right,' he
+      thought, 'there's nothing in it! We're all progressing
+      to the grave!' And with that surprising mental comment he walked
+      out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not see Fleur again that night. But, at breakfast, her eyes
+      followed him about with an appeal he could not escape&mdash;not that he
+      intended to try. No! He had made up his mind to the nerve-racking
+      business. He would go to Robin Hill&mdash;to that house of memories.
+      Pleasant memory&mdash;the last! Of going down to keep that boy's
+      father and Irene apart by threatening divorce. He had often thought,
+      since, that it had clinched their union. And, now, he was going to clinch
+      the union of that boy with his girl. 'I don't know what I've
+      done,' he thought, 'to have such things thrust on me!'
+      He went up by train and down by train, and from the station walked by the
+      long rising lane, still very much as he remembered it over thirty years
+      ago. Funny&mdash;so near London! Some one evidently was holding on to the
+      land there. This speculation soothed him, moving between the high hedges
+      slowly, so as not to get overheated, though the day was chill enough.
+      After all was said and done there was something real about land, it didn't
+      shift. Land, and good pictures! The values might fluctuate a bit, but on
+      the whole they were always going up&mdash;worth holding on to, in a world
+      where there was such a lot of unreality, cheap building, changing
+      fashions, such a &ldquo;Here to-day and gone to-morrow&rdquo; spirit. The
+      French were right, perhaps, with their peasant proprietorship, though he
+      had no opinion of the French. One's bit of land! Something solid in
+      it! He had heard peasant proprietors described as a pig-headed lot; had
+      heard young Mont call his father a pigheaded Morning Poster&mdash;disrespectful
+      young devil. Well, there were worse things than being pig-headed or
+      reading the Morning Post. There was Profond and his tribe, and all these
+      Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed politicians and 'wild, wild women'.
+      A lot of worse things! And suddenly Soames became conscious of feeling
+      weak, and hot, and shaky. Sheer nerves at the meeting before him! As Aunt
+      Juley might have said&mdash;quoting &ldquo;Superior Dosset&rdquo;&mdash;his
+      nerves were &ldquo;in a proper fautigue.&rdquo; He could see the house now
+      among its trees, the house he had watched being built, intending it for
+      himself and this woman, who, by such strange fate, had lived in it with
+      another after all! He began to think of Dumetrius, Local Loans, and other
+      forms of investment. He could not afford to meet her with his nerves all
+      shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgment for her on earth as it was
+      in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified, meeting lawless beauty,
+      incarnate. His dignity demanded impassivity during this embassy designed
+      to link their offspring, who, if she had behaved herself, would have been
+      brother and sister. That wretched tune, &ldquo;The Wild, Wild Women,&rdquo;
+      kept running in his head, perversely, for tunes did not run there as a
+      rule. Passing the poplars in front of the house, he thought: 'How
+      they've grown; I had them planted!' A maid answered his ring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you say&mdash;Mr. Forsyte, on a very special matter.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If she realised who he was, quite probably she would not see him. 'By
+      George!' he thought, hardening as the tug came. 'It's a
+      topsy-turvy affair!'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The maid came back. &ldquo;Would the gentleman state his business, please?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Say it concerns Mr. Jon,&rdquo; said Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And once more he was alone in that hall with the pool of grey-white marble
+      designed by her first lover. Ah! she had been a bad lot&mdash;had loved
+      two men, and not himself! He must remember that when he came face to face
+      with her once more. And suddenly he saw her in the opening chink between
+      the long heavy purple curtains, swaying, as if in hesitation; the old
+      perfect poise and line, the old startled dark-eyed gravity, the old calm
+      defensive voice: &ldquo;Will you come in, please?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed through that opening. As in the picture-gallery and the
+      confectioner's shop, she seemed to him still beautiful. And this was
+      the first time&mdash;the very first&mdash;since he married her
+      seven-and-thirty years ago, that he was speaking to her without the legal
+      right to call her his. She was not wearing black&mdash;one of that fellow's
+      radical notions, he supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I apologise for coming,&rdquo; he said glumly; &ldquo;but this
+      business must be settled one way or the other.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Won't you sit down?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, thank you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anger at his false position, impatience of ceremony between them, mastered
+      him, and words came tumbling out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an infernal mischance; I've done my best to
+      discourage it. I consider my daughter crazy, but I've got into the
+      habit of indulging her; that's why I'm here. I suppose you're
+      fond of your son.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Devotedly.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It rests with him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a sense of being met and baffled. Always&mdash;always she had
+      baffled him, even in those old first married days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a mad notion,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you had only&mdash;! Well&mdash;they might have been&mdash;&rdquo;
+      he did not finish that sentence &ldquo;brother and sister and all this
+      saved,&rdquo; but he saw her shudder as if he had, and stung by the sight
+      he crossed over to the window. Out there the trees had not grown&mdash;they
+      couldn't, they were old!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as I'm concerned,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you may make
+      your mind easy. I desire to see neither you nor your son if this marriage
+      comes about. Young people in these days are&mdash;are unaccountable. But I
+      can't bear to see my daughter unhappy. What am I to say to her when
+      I go back?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please say to her as I said to you, that it rests with Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't oppose it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With all my heart; not with my lips.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames stood, biting his finger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember an evening&mdash;&rdquo; he said suddenly; and was
+      silent. What was there&mdash;what was there in this woman that would not
+      fit into the four corners of his hate or condemnation? &ldquo;Where is he&mdash;your
+      son?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Up in his father's studio, I think.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you'd have him down.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He watched her ring the bell, he watched the maid come in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please tell Mr. Jon that I want him.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it rests with him,&rdquo; said Soames hurriedly, when the maid
+      was gone, &ldquo;I suppose I may take it for granted that this unnatural
+      marriage will take place; in that case there'll be formalities. Whom
+      do I deal with&mdash;Herring's?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't propose to live with them?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What happens to this house?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be as Jon wishes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This house,&rdquo; said Soames suddenly: &ldquo;I had hopes when I
+      began it. If they live in it&mdash;their children! They say there's
+      such a thing as Nemesis. Do you believe in it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! You do!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had come back from the window, and was standing close to her, who, in
+      the curve of her grand piano, was, as it were, embayed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not likely to see you again,&rdquo; he said slowly.
+      &ldquo;Will you shake hands&rdquo;&mdash;his lip quivered, the words came
+      out jerkily&mdash;&ldquo;and let the past die.&rdquo; He held out his
+      hand. Her pale face grew paler, her eyes so dark, rested immovably on his,
+      her hands remained clasped in front of her. He heard a sound and turned.
+      That boy was standing in the opening of the curtains. Very queer he
+      looked, hardly recognisable as the young fellow he had seen in the Gallery
+      off Cork Street&mdash;very queer; much older, no youth in the face at all&mdash;haggard,
+      rigid, his hair ruffled, his eyes deep in his head. Soames made an effort,
+      and said with a lift of his lip, not quite a smile nor quite a sneer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, young man! I'm here for my daughter; it rests with you,
+      it seems&mdash;this matter. Your mother leaves it in your hands.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy continued staring at his mother's face, and made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For my daughter's sake I've brought myself to come,&rdquo;
+      said Soames. &ldquo;What am I to say to her when I go back?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still looking at his mother, the boy said, quietly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell Fleur that it's no good, please; I must do as my father
+      wished before he died.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right, Mother.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a kind of stupefaction Soames looked from one to the other; then,
+      taking up hat and umbrella which he had put down on a chair, he walked
+      toward the curtains. The boy stood aside for him to go by. He passed
+      through and heard the grate of the rings as the curtains were drawn behind
+      him. The sound liberated something in his chest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'So that's that!' he thought, and passed out of the
+      front door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0129" id="link2H_4_0129">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.&mdash;THE DARK TUNE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As Soames walked away from the house at Robin Hill the sun broke through
+      the grey of that chill afternoon, in smoky radiance. So absorbed in
+      landscape painting that he seldom looked seriously for effects of Nature
+      out of doors&mdash;he was struck by that moody effulgence&mdash;it mourned
+      with a triumph suited to his own feeling. Victory in defeat. His embassy
+      had come to naught. But he was rid of those people, had regained his
+      daughter at the expense of&mdash;her happiness. What would Fleur say to
+      him? Would she believe he had done his best? And under that sunlight
+      faring on the elms, hazels, hollies of the lane and those unexploited
+      fields, Soames felt dread. She would be terribly upset! He must appeal to
+      her pride. That boy had given her up, declared part and lot with the woman
+      who so long ago had given her father up! Soames clenched his hands. Given
+      him up, and why? What had been wrong with him? And once more he felt the
+      malaise of one who contemplates himself as seen by another&mdash;like a
+      dog who chances on his refection in a mirror and is intrigued and anxious
+      at the unseizable thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not in a hurry to get home, he dined in town at the Connoisseurs. While
+      eating a pear it suddenly occurred to him that, if he had not gone down to
+      Robin Hill, the boy might not have so decided. He remembered the
+      expression on his face while his mother was refusing the hand he had held
+      out. A strange, an awkward thought! Had Fleur cooked her own goose by
+      trying to make too sure?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached home at half-past nine. While the car was passing in at one
+      drive gate he heard the grinding sputter of a motor-cycle passing out by
+      the other. Young Mont, no doubt, so Fleur had not been lonely. But he went
+      in with a sinking heart. In the cream-panelled drawing-room she was
+      sitting with her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands,
+      in front of a white camellia plant which filled the fireplace. That glance
+      at her before she saw him renewed his dread. What was she seeing among
+      those white camellias?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames shook his head. His tongue failed him. This was murderous work! He
+      saw her eyes dilate, her lips quivering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What? What? Quick, Father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; said Soames, &ldquo;I&mdash;I did my best, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+      And again he shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur ran to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; muttered Soames; &ldquo;he. I was to tell you that it
+      was no use; he must do what his father wished before he died.&rdquo; He
+      caught her by the waist. &ldquo;Come, child, don't let them hurt
+      you. They're not worth your little finger.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur tore herself from his grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't you&mdash;couldn't have tried. You&mdash;you
+      betrayed me, Father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bitterly wounded, Soames gazed at her passionate figure writhing there in
+      front of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You didn't try&mdash;you didn't&mdash;I was a fool! I
+      won't believe he could&mdash;he ever could! Only yesterday he&mdash;!
+      Oh! why did I ask you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Soames, quietly, &ldquo;why did you? I swallowed
+      my feelings; I did my best for you, against my judgment&mdash;and this is
+      my reward. Good-night!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With every nerve in his body twitching he went toward the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur darted after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He gives me up? You mean that? Father!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames turned and forced himself to answer:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; cried Fleur. &ldquo;What did you&mdash;what could you
+      have done in those old days?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The breathless sense of really monstrous injustice cut the power of speech
+      in Soames' throat. What had he done! What had they done to him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with quite unconscious dignity he put his hand on his breast, and
+      looked at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a shame!&rdquo; cried Fleur passionately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames went out. He mounted, slow and icy, to his picture gallery, and
+      paced among his treasures. Outrageous! Oh! Outrageous! She was spoiled!
+      Ah! and who had spoiled her? He stood still before the Goya copy.
+      Accustomed to her own way in everything. Flower of his life! And now that
+      she couldn't have it! He turned to the window for some air. Daylight
+      was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the poplars! What sound was that?
+      Why! That piano thing! A dark tune, with a thrum and a throb! She had set
+      it going&mdash;what comfort could she get from that? His eyes caught
+      movement down there beyond the lawn, under the trellis of rambler roses
+      and young acacia-trees, where the moonlight fell. There she was, roaming
+      up and down. His heart gave a little sickening jump. What would she do
+      under this blow? How could he tell? What did he know of her&mdash;he had
+      only loved her all his life&mdash;looked on her as the apple of his eye!
+      He knew nothing&mdash;had no notion. There she was&mdash;and that dark
+      tune&mdash;and the river gleaming in the moonlight!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      'I must go out,' he thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hastened down to the drawing-room, lighted just as he had left it, with
+      the piano thrumming out that waltz, or fox-trot, or whatever they called
+      it in these days, and passed through on to the verandah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where could he watch, without her seeing him? And he stole down through
+      the fruit garden to the boat-house. He was between her and the river now,
+      and his heart felt lighter. She was his daughter, and Annette's&mdash;she
+      wouldn't do anything foolish; but there it was&mdash;he didn't
+      know! From the boat house window he could see the last acacia and the spin
+      of her skirt when she turned in her restless march. That tune had run down
+      at last&mdash;thank goodness! He crossed the floor and looked through the
+      farther window at the water slow-flowing past the lilies. It made little
+      bubbles against them, bright where a moon-streak fell. He remembered
+      suddenly that early morning when he had slept on the house-boat after his
+      father died, and she had just been born&mdash;nearly nineteen years ago!
+      Even now he recalled the unaccustomed world when he woke up, the strange
+      feeling it had given him. That day the second passion of his life began&mdash;for
+      this girl of his, roaming under the acacias. What a comfort she had been
+      to him! And all the soreness and sense of outrage left him. If he could
+      make her happy again, he didn't care! An owl flew, queeking,
+      queeking; a bat flitted by; the moonlight brightened and broadened on the
+      water. How long was she going to roam about like this! He went back to the
+      window, and suddenly saw her coming down to the bank. She stood quite
+      close, on the landing-stage. And Soames watched, clenching his hands.
+      Should he speak to her? His excitement was intense. The stillness of her
+      figure, its youth, its absorption in despair, in longing, in&mdash;itself.
+      He would always remember it, moonlit like that; and the faint sweet reek
+      of the river and the shivering of the willow leaves. She had everything in
+      the world that he could give her, except the one thing that she could not
+      have because of him! The perversity of things hurt him at that moment, as
+      might a fish-bone in his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, with an infinite relief, he saw her turn back toward the house. What
+      could he give her to make amends? Pearls, travel, horses, other young men&mdash;anything
+      she wanted&mdash;that he might lose the memory of her young figure lonely
+      by the water! There! She had set that tune going again! Why&mdash;it was a
+      mania! Dark, thrumming, faint, travelling from the house. It was as though
+      she had said: &ldquo;If I can't have something to keep me going, I
+      shall die of this!&rdquo; Soames dimly understood. Well, if it helped her,
+      let her keep it thrumming on all night! And, mousing back through the
+      fruit garden, he regained the verandah. Though he meant to go in and speak
+      to her now, he still hesitated, not knowing what to say, trying hard to
+      recall how it felt to be thwarted in love. He ought to know, ought to
+      remember&mdash;and he could not! Gone&mdash;all real recollection; except
+      that it had hurt him horribly. In this blankness he stood passing his
+      handkerchief over hands and lips, which were very dry. By craning his head
+      he could just see Fleur, standing with her back to that piano still
+      grinding out its tune, her arms tight crossed on her breast, a lighted
+      cigarette between her lips, whose smoke half veiled her face. The
+      expression on it was strange to Soames, the eyes shone and stared, and
+      every feature was alive with a sort of wretched scorn and anger. Once or
+      twice he had seen Annette look like that&mdash;the face was too vivid, too
+      naked, not his daughter's at that moment. And he dared not go in,
+      realising the futility of any attempt at consolation. He sat down in the
+      shadow of the ingle-nook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him! Nemesis! That old unhappy
+      marriage! And in God's name-why? How was he to know, when he wanted
+      Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that she would never love
+      him? The tune died and was renewed, and died again, and still Soames sat
+      in the shadow, waiting for he knew not what. The fag of Fleur's
+      cigarette, flung through the window, fell on the grass; he watched it
+      glowing, burning itself out. The moon had freed herself above the poplars,
+      and poured her unreality on the garden. Comfortless light, mysterious,
+      withdrawn&mdash;like the beauty of that woman who had never loved him&mdash;dappling
+      the nemesias and the stocks with a vesture not of earth. Flowers! And his
+      flower so unhappy! Ah! Why could one not put happiness into Local Loans,
+      gild its edges, insure it against going down?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window. All was
+      silent and dark in there. Had she gone up? He rose, and, tiptoeing, peered
+      in. It seemed so! He entered. The verandah kept the moonlight out; and at
+      first he could see nothing but the outlines of furniture blacker than the
+      darkness. He groped toward the farther window to shut it. His foot struck
+      a chair, and he heard a gasp. There she was, curled and crushed into the
+      corner of the sofa! His hand hovered. Did she want his consolation? He
+      stood, gazing at that ball of crushed frills and hair and graceful youth,
+      trying to burrow its way out of sorrow. How leave her there? At last he
+      touched her hair, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, darling, better go to bed. I'll make it up to you,
+      somehow.&rdquo; How fatuous! But what could he have said?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0130" id="link2H_4_0130">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.&mdash;UNDER THE OAK-TREE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood without
+      speaking, till he said suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to have seen him out.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went upstairs to
+      his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had once
+      been married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever since she
+      left him the night before. It had put the finishing touch of reality. To
+      marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face; to betray his dead
+      father! It was no good! Jon had the least resentful of natures. He bore
+      his parents no grudge in this hour of his distress. For one so young there
+      was a rather strange power in him of seeing things in some sort of
+      proportion. It was worse for Fleur, worse for his mother even, than it was
+      for him. Harder than to give up was to be given up, or to be the cause of
+      some one you loved giving up for you. He must not, would not behave
+      grudgingly! While he stood watching the tardy sunlight, he had again that
+      sudden vision of the world which had come to him the night before. Sea on
+      sea, country on country, millions on millions of people, all with their
+      own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering&mdash;all with things
+      they had to give up, and separate struggles for existence. Even though he
+      might be willing to give up all else for the one thing he couldn't
+      have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered much in so vast a
+      world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad. He pictured the people who
+      had nothing&mdash;the millions who had given up life in the War, the
+      millions whom the War had left with life and little else; the hungry
+      children he had read of, the shattered men; people in prison, every kind
+      of unfortunate. And&mdash;they did not help him much. If one had to miss a
+      meal, what comfort in the knowledge that many others had to miss it too?
+      There was more distraction in the thought of getting away out into this
+      vast world of which he knew nothing yet. He could not go on staying here,
+      walled in and sheltered, with everything so slick and comfortable, and
+      nothing to do but brood and think what might have been. He could not go
+      back to Wansdon, and the memories of Fleur. If he saw her again he could
+      not trust himself; and if he stayed here or went back there, he would
+      surely see her. While they were within reach of each other that must
+      happen. To go far away and quickly was the only thing to do. But, however
+      much he loved his mother, he did not want to go away with her. Then
+      feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind desperately to propose that
+      they should go to Italy. For two hours in that melancholy room he tried to
+      master himself, then dressed solemnly for dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mother had done the same. They ate little, at some length, and talked
+      of his father's catalogue. The show was arranged for October, and
+      beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a little, talked
+      a little, till they were standing silent at last beneath the oak-tree.
+      Ruled by the thought: 'If I show anything, I show all,' Jon
+      put his arm through hers and said quite casually:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother, let's go to Italy.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Irene pressed his arm, and said as casually:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be very nice; but I've been thinking you ought to
+      see and do more than you would if I were with you.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But then you'd be alone.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was once alone for more than twelve years. Besides, I should like
+      to be here for the opening of Father's show.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon's grip tightened round her arm; he was not deceived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You couldn't stay here all by yourself; it's too big.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not here, perhaps. In London, and I might go to Paris, after the
+      show opens. You ought to have a year at least, Jon, and see the world.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I'd like to see the world and rough it. But I don't
+      want to leave you all alone.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear, I owe you that at least. If it's for your good, it'll
+      be for mine. Why not start tomorrow? You've got your passport.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; if I'm going it had better be at once. Only&mdash;Mother&mdash;if&mdash;if
+      I wanted to stay out somewhere&mdash;America or anywhere, would you mind
+      coming presently?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wherever and whenever you send for me. But don't send until
+      you really want me.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jon drew a deep breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel England's choky.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood a few minutes longer under the oak-tree&mdash;looking out to
+      where the grand stand at Epsom was veiled in evening. The branches kept
+      the moonlight from them, so that it only fell everywhere else&mdash;over
+      the fields and far away, and on the windows of the creepered house behind,
+      which soon would be to let.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0131" id="link2H_4_0131">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.&mdash;FLEUR'S WEDDING
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The October paragraphs describing the wedding of Fleur Forsyte to Michael
+      Mont hardly conveyed the symbolic significance of this event. In the union
+      of the great-granddaughter of &ldquo;Superior Dosset&rdquo; with the heir
+      of a ninth baronet was the outward and visible sign of that merger of
+      class in class which buttresses the political stability of a realm. The
+      time had come when the Forsytes might resign their natural resentment
+      against a &ldquo;flummery&rdquo; not theirs by birth, and accept it as the
+      still more natural due of their possessive instincts. Besides, they had to
+      mount to make room for all those so much more newly rich. In that quiet
+      but tasteful ceremony in Hanover Square, and afterward among the furniture
+      in Green Street, it had been impossible for those not in the know to
+      distinguish the Forsyte troop from the Mont contingent&mdash;so far away
+      was &ldquo;Superior Dosset&rdquo; now. Was there, in the crease of his
+      trousers, the expression of his moustache, his accent, or the shine on his
+      top-hat, a pin to choose between Soames and the ninth baronet himself? Was
+      not Fleur as self-possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the
+      likeliest Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present? If anything, the
+      Forsytes had it in dress and looks and manners. They had become &ldquo;upper
+      class&rdquo; and now their name would be formally recorded in the Stud
+      Book, their money joined to land. Whether this was a little late in the
+      day, and those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money,
+      destined for the melting-pot&mdash;was still a question so moot that it
+      was not mooted. After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up.
+      Timothy, the last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater
+      Road&mdash;so Francie had reported. It was whispered, too, that this young
+      Mont was a sort of socialist&mdash;strangely wise of him, and in the
+      nature of insurance, considering the days they lived in. There was no
+      uneasiness on that score. The landed classes produced that sort of amiable
+      foolishness at times, turned to safe uses and confined to theory. As
+      George remarked to his sister Francie: &ldquo;They'll soon be having
+      puppies&mdash;that'll give him pause.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The church with white flowers and something blue in the middle of the East
+      window looked extremely chaste, as though endeavouring to counteract the
+      somewhat lurid phraseology of a Service calculated to keep the thoughts of
+      all on puppies. Forsytes, Haymans, Tweetymans, sat in the left aisle;
+      Monts, Charwells; Muskhams in the right; while a sprinkling of Fleur's
+      fellow-sufferers at school, and of Mont's fellow-sufferers in, the
+      War, gaped indiscriminately from either side, and three maiden ladies, who
+      had dropped in on their way from Skyward's brought up the rear,
+      together with two Mont retainers and Fleur's old nurse. In the
+      unsettled state of the country as full a house as could be expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Val Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed his
+      hand more than once during the performance. To her, who knew the plot of
+      this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh painful. 'I
+      wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought&mdash;Jon, out in
+      British Columbia. She had received a letter from him only that morning
+      which had made her smile and say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jon's in British Columbia, Val, because he wants to be in
+      California. He thinks it's too nice there.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Val, &ldquo;so he's beginning to see a joke
+      again.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's bought some land and sent for his mother.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What on earth will she do out there?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All she cares about is Jon. Do you still think it a happy release?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Val's shrewd eyes narrowed to grey pin-points between their dark
+      lashes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fleur wouldn't have suited him a bit. She's not bred
+      right.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor little Fleur!&rdquo; sighed Holly. Ah! it was strange&mdash;this
+      marriage. The young man, Mont, had caught her on the rebound, of course,
+      in the reckless mood of one whose ship has just gone down. Such a plunge
+      could not but be&mdash;as Val put it&mdash;an outside chance. There was
+      little to be told from the back view of her young cousin's veil, and
+      Holly's eyes reviewed the general aspect of this Christian wedding.
+      She, who had made a love-match which had been successful, had a horror of
+      unhappy marriages. This might not be one in the end&mdash;but it was
+      clearly a toss-up; and to consecrate a toss-up in this fashion with
+      manufactured unction before a crowd of fashionable free-thinkers&mdash;for
+      who thought otherwise than freely, or not at all, when they were &ldquo;dolled&rdquo;
+      up&mdash;seemed to her as near a sin as one could find in an age which had
+      abolished them. Her eyes wandered from the prelate in his robes (a
+      Charwell-the Forsytes had not as yet produced a prelate) to Val, beside
+      her, thinking&mdash;she was certain&mdash;of the Mayfly filly at fifteen
+      to one for the Cambridgeshire. They passed on and caught the profile of
+      the ninth baronet, in counterfeitment of the kneeling process. She could
+      just see the neat ruck above his knees where he had pulled his trousers
+      up, and thought: 'Val's forgotten to pull up his!' Her
+      eyes passed to the pew in front of her, where Winifred's substantial
+      form was gowned with passion, and on again to Soames and Annette kneeling
+      side by side. A little smile came on her lips&mdash;Prosper Profond, back
+      from the South Seas of the Channel, would be kneeling too, about six rows
+      behind. Yes! This was a funny &ldquo;small&rdquo; business, however it
+      turned out; still it was in a proper church and would be in the proper
+      papers to-morrow morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had begun a hymn; she could hear the ninth baronet across the aisle,
+      singing of the hosts of Midian. Her little finger touched Val's
+      thumb&mdash;they were holding the same hymn-book&mdash;and a tiny thrill
+      passed through her, preserved&mdash;from twenty years ago. He stooped and
+      whispered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I say, d'you remember the rat?&rdquo; The rat at their
+      wedding in Cape Colony, which had cleaned its whiskers behind the table at
+      the Registrar's! And between her little and third forgers she
+      squeezed his thumb hard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hymn was over, the prelate had begun to deliver his discourse. He told
+      them of the dangerous times they lived in, and the awful conduct of the
+      House of Lords in connection with divorce. They were all soldiers&mdash;he
+      said&mdash;in the trenches under the poisonous gas of the Prince of
+      Darkness, and must be manful. The purpose of marriage was children, not
+      mere sinful happiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An imp danced in Holly's eyes&mdash;Val's eyelashes were
+      meeting. Whatever happened; he must not snore. Her finger and thumb closed
+      on his thigh till he stirred uneasily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discourse was over, the danger past. They were signing in the vestry;
+      and general relaxation had set in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A voice behind her said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will she stay the course?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's that?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old George Forsyte!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holly demurely scrutinized one of whom she had often heard. Fresh from
+      South Africa, and ignorant of her kith and kin, she never saw one without
+      an almost childish curiosity. He was very big, and very dapper; his eyes
+      gave her a funny feeling of having no particular clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're off!&rdquo; she heard him say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They came, stepping from the chancel. Holly looked first in young Mont's
+      face. His lips and ears were twitching, his eyes, shifting from his feet
+      to the hand within his arm, stared suddenly before them as if to face a
+      firing party. He gave Holly the feeling that he was spiritually
+      intoxicated. But Fleur! Ah! That was different. The girl was perfectly
+      composed, prettier than ever, in her white robes and veil over her banged
+      dark chestnut hair; her eyelids hovered demure over her dark hazel eyes.
+      Outwardly, she seemed all there. But inwardly, where was she? As those two
+      passed, Fleur raised her eyelids&mdash;the restless glint of those clear
+      whites remained on Holly's vision as might the flutter of caged bird's
+      wings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Green Street Winifred stood to receive, just a little less composed
+      than usual. Soames' request for the use of her house had come on her
+      at a deeply psychological moment. Under the influence of a remark of
+      Prosper Profond, she had begun to exchange her Empire for Expressionistic
+      furniture. There were the most amusing arrangements, with violet, green,
+      and orange blobs and scriggles, to be had at Mealard's. Another
+      month and the change would have been complete. Just now, the very &ldquo;intriguing&rdquo;
+      recruits she had enlisted, did not march too well with the old guard. It
+      was as if her regiment were half in khaki, half in scarlet and bearskins.
+      But her strong and comfortable character made the best of it in a
+      drawing-room which typified, perhaps, more perfectly than she imagined,
+      the semi-bolshevized imperialism of her country. After all, this was a day
+      of merger, and you couldn't have too much of it! Her eyes travelled
+      indulgently among her guests. Soames had gripped the back of a buhl chair;
+      young Mont was behind that &ldquo;awfully amusing&rdquo; screen, which no
+      one as yet had been able to explain to her. The ninth baronet had shied
+      violently at a round scarlet table, inlaid under glass with blue
+      Australian butteries' wings, and was clinging to her Louis-Quinze
+      cabinet; Francie Forsyte had seized the new mantel-board, finely carved
+      with little purple grotesques on an ebony ground; George, over by the old
+      spinet, was holding a little sky-blue book as if about to enter bets;
+      Prosper Profond was twiddling the knob of the open door, black with
+      peacock-blue panels; and Annette's hands, close by, were grasping
+      her own waist; two Muskhams clung to the balcony among the plants, as if
+      feeling ill; Lady Mont, thin and brave-looking, had taken up her
+      long-handled glasses and was gazing at the central light shade, of ivory
+      and orange dashed with deep magenta, as if the heavens had opened.
+      Everybody, in fact, seemed holding on to something. Only Fleur, still in
+      her bridal dress, was detached from all support, flinging her words and
+      glances to left and right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The room was full of the bubble and the squeak of conversation. Nobody
+      could hear anything that anybody said; which seemed of little consequence,
+      since no one waited for anything so slow as an answer. Modern conversation
+      seemed to Winifred so different from the days of her prime, when a drawl
+      was all the vogue. Still it was &ldquo;amusing,&rdquo; which, of course,
+      was all that mattered. Even the Forsytes were talking with extreme
+      rapidity&mdash;Fleur and Christopher, and Imogen, and young Nicholas's
+      youngest, Patrick. Soames, of course, was silent; but George, by the
+      spinet, kept up a running commentary, and Francie, by her mantel-shelf.
+      Winifred drew nearer to the ninth baronet. He seemed to promise a certain
+      repose; his nose was fine and drooped a little, his grey moustaches too;
+      and she said, drawling through her smile:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's rather nice, isn't it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His reply shot out of his smile like a snipped bread pellet
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'you remember, in Frazer, the tribe that buries the bride up
+      to the waist?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke as fast as anybody! He had dark lively little eyes, too, all
+      crinkled round like a Catholic priest's. Winifred felt suddenly he
+      might say things she would regret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're always so amusing&mdash;weddings,&rdquo; she
+      murmured, and moved on to Soames. He was curiously still, and Winifred saw
+      at once what was dictating his immobility. To his right was George
+      Forsyte, to his left Annette and Prosper Profond. He could not move
+      without either seeing those two together, or the reflection of them in
+      George Forsyte's japing eyes. He was quite right not to be taking
+      notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say Timothy's sinking;&rdquo; he said glumly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where will you put him, Soames?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Highgate.&rdquo; He counted on his fingers. &ldquo;It'll make
+      twelve of them there, including wives. How do you think Fleur looks?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remarkably well.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames nodded. He had never seen her look prettier, yet he could not rid
+      himself of the impression that this business was unnatural&mdash;remembering
+      still that crushed figure burrowing into the corner of the sofa. From that
+      night to this day he had received from her no confidences. He knew from
+      his chauffeur that she had made one more attempt on Robin Hill and drawn
+      blank&mdash;an empty house, no one at home. He knew that she had received
+      a letter, but not what was in it, except that it had made her hide herself
+      and cry. He had remarked that she looked at him sometimes when she thought
+      he wasn't noticing, as if she were wondering still what he had done&mdash;forsooth&mdash;to
+      make those people hate him so. Well, there it was! Annette had come back,
+      and things had worn on through the summer&mdash;very miserable, till
+      suddenly Fleur had said she was going to marry young Mont. She had shown
+      him a little more affection when she told him that. And he had yielded&mdash;what
+      was the good of opposing it? God knew that he had never wished to thwart
+      her in anything! And the young man seemed quite delirious about her. No
+      doubt she was in a reckless mood, and she was young, absurdly young. But
+      if he opposed her, he didn't know what she would do; for all he
+      could tell she might want to take up a profession, become a doctor or
+      solicitor, some nonsense. She had no aptitude for painting, writing,
+      music, in his view the legitimate occupations of unmarried women, if they
+      must do something in these days. On the whole, she was safer married, for
+      he could see too well how feverish and restless she was at home. Annette,
+      too, had been in favour of it&mdash;Annette, from behind the veil of his
+      refusal to know what she was about, if she was about anything. Annette had
+      said: &ldquo;Let her marry this young man. He is a nice boy&mdash;not so
+      highty-flighty as he seems.&rdquo; Where she got her expressions, he didn't
+      know&mdash;but her opinion soothed his doubts. His wife, whatever her
+      conduct, had clear eyes and an almost depressing amount of common sense.
+      He had settled fifty thousand on Fleur, taking care that there was no
+      cross settlement in case it didn't turn out well. Could it turn out
+      well? She had not got over that other boy&mdash;he knew. They were to go
+      to Spain for the honeymoon. He would be even lonelier when she was gone.
+      But later, perhaps, she would forget, and turn to him again! Winifred's
+      voice broke on his reverie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why! Of all wonders-June!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, in a djibbah&mdash;what things she wore!&mdash;with her hair
+      straying from under a fillet, Soames saw his cousin, and Fleur going
+      forward to greet her. The two passed from their view out on to the
+      stairway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really,&rdquo; said Winifred, &ldquo;she does the most impossible
+      things! Fancy her coming!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What made you ask her?&rdquo; muttered Soames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I thought she wouldn't accept, of course.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Winifred had forgotten that behind conduct lies the main trend of
+      character; or, in other words, omitted to remember that Fleur was now a
+      &ldquo;lame duck.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On receiving her invitation, June had first thought, 'I wouldn't
+      go near them for the world!' and then, one morning, had awakened
+      from a dream of Fleur waving to her from a boat with a wild unhappy
+      gesture. And she had changed her mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Fleur came forward and said to her, &ldquo;Do come up while I'm
+      changing my dress,&rdquo; she had followed up the stairs. The girl led the
+      way into Imogen's old bedroom, set ready for her toilet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June sat down on the bed, thin and upright, like a little spirit in the
+      sear and yellow. Fleur locked the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl stood before her divested of her wedding dress. What a pretty
+      thing she was!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you think me a fool,&rdquo; she said, with quivering
+      lips, &ldquo;when it was to have been Jon. But what does it matter?
+      Michael wants me, and I don't care. It'll get me away from
+      home.&rdquo; Diving her hand into the frills on her breast, she brought
+      out a letter. &ldquo;Jon wrote me this.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June read: &ldquo;Lake Okanagen, British Columbia. I'm not coming
+      back to England. Bless you always. Jon.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's made safe, you see,&rdquo; said Fleur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June handed back the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's not fair to Irene,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;she always
+      told Jon he could do as he wished.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur smiled bitterly. &ldquo;Tell me, didn't she spoil your life
+      too?&rdquo; June looked up. &ldquo;Nobody can spoil a life, my dear. That's
+      nonsense. Things happen, but we bob up.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sort of terror she saw the girl sink on her knees and bury her face
+      in the djibbah. A strangled sob mounted to June's ears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all right&mdash;all right,&rdquo; she murmured, &ldquo;Don't!
+      There, there!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the point of the girl's chin was pressed ever closer into her
+      thigh, and the sound was dreadful of her sobbing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, well! It had to come. She would feel better afterward! June stroked
+      the short hair of that shapely head; and all the scattered mother-sense in
+      her focussed itself and passed through the tips of her fingers into the
+      girl's brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't sit down under it, my dear,&rdquo; she said at last.
+      &ldquo;We can't control life, but we can fight it. Make the best of
+      things. I've had to. I held on, like you; and I cried, as you're
+      crying now. And look at me!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fleur raised her head; a sob merged suddenly into a little choked laugh.
+      In truth it was a thin and rather wild and wasted spirit she was looking
+      at, but it had brave eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I'm sorry. I shall forget
+      him, I suppose, if I fly fast and far enough.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, scrambling to her feet, she went over to the wash-stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June watched her removing with cold water the traces of emotion. Save for
+      a little becoming pinkness there was nothing left when she stood before
+      the mirror. June got off the bed and took a pin-cushion in her hand. To
+      put two pins into the wrong places was all the vent she found for
+      sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me a kiss,&rdquo; she said when Fleur was ready, and dug her
+      chin into the girl's warm cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want a whiff,&rdquo; said Fleur; &ldquo;don't wait.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June left her, sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her lips and
+      her eyes half closed, and went down-stairs. In the doorway of the
+      drawing-room stood Soames as if unquiet at his daughter's tardiness.
+      June tossed her head and passed down on to the half-landing. Her cousin
+      Francie was standing there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; said June, pointing with her chin at Soames. &ldquo;That
+      man's fatal!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you mean,&rdquo; said Francie, &ldquo;fatal?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June did not answer her. &ldquo;I shan't wait to see them off,&rdquo;
+      she said. &ldquo;Good-bye!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye!&rdquo; said Francie, and her eyes, of a Celtic grey,
+      goggled. That old feud! Really, it was quite romantic!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames, moving to the well of the staircase, saw June go, and drew a
+      breath of satisfaction. Why didn't Fleur come? They would miss their
+      train. That train would bear her away from him, yet he could not help
+      fidgeting at the thought that they would lose it. And then she did come,
+      running down in her tan-coloured frock and black velvet cap, and passed
+      him into the drawing-room. He saw her kiss her mother, her aunt, Val's
+      wife, Imogen, and then come forth, quick and pretty as ever. How would she
+      treat him at this last moment of her girlhood? He couldn't hope for
+      much!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips pressed the middle of his cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Daddy!&rdquo; she said, and was past and gone! Daddy! She hadn't
+      called him that for years. He drew a long breath and followed slowly down.
+      There was all the folly with that confetti stuff and the rest of it to go
+      through with yet. But he would like just to catch her smile, if she leaned
+      out, though they would hit her in the eye with the shoe, if they didn't
+      take care. Young Mont's voice said fervently in his ear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye, sir; and thank you! I'm so fearfully bucked.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;don't miss your train.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood on the bottom step but three, whence he could see above the heads&mdash;the
+      silly hats and heads. They were in the car now; and there was that stuff,
+      showering, and there went the shoe. A flood of something welled up in
+      Soames, and&mdash;he didn't know&mdash;he couldn't see!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0132" id="link2H_4_0132">
+       <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.&mdash;THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When they came to prepare that terrific symbol Timothy Forsyte&mdash;the
+      one pure individualist left, the only man who hadn't heard of the
+      Great War&mdash;they found him wonderful&mdash;not even death had
+      undermined his soundness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Smither and Cook that preparation came like final evidence of what they
+      had never believed possible&mdash;the end of the old Forsyte family on
+      earth. Poor Mr. Timothy must now take a harp and sing in the company of
+      Miss Forsyte, Mrs. Julia, Miss Hester; with Mr. Jolyon, Mr. Swithin, Mr.
+      James, Mr. Roger, and Mr. Nicholas of the party. Whether Mrs. Hayman would
+      be there was more doubtful, seeing that she had been cremated. Secretly
+      Cook thought that Mr. Timothy would be upset&mdash;he had always been so
+      set against barrel organs. How many times had she not said: &ldquo;Drat
+      the thing! There it is again! Smither, you'd better run up and see
+      what you can do.&rdquo; And in her heart she would so have enjoyed the
+      tunes, if she hadn't known that Mr. Timothy would ring the bell in a
+      minute and say: &ldquo;Here, take him a halfpenny and tell him to move on.&rdquo;
+      Often they had been obliged to add threepence of their own before the man
+      would go&mdash;Timothy had ever underrated the value of emotion. Luckily
+      he had taken the organs for blue-bottles in his last years, which had been
+      a comfort, and they had been able to enjoy the tunes. But a harp! Cook
+      wondered. It was a change! And Mr. Timothy had never liked change. But she
+      did not speak of this to Smither, who did so take a line of her own in
+      regard to heaven that it quite put one about sometimes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She cried while Timothy was being prepared, and they all had sherry
+      afterward out of the yearly Christmas bottle, which would not be needed
+      now. Ah! dear! She had been there five-and-forty years and Smither
+      three-and-forty! And now they would be going to a tiny house in Tooting,
+      to live on their savings and what Miss Hester had so kindly left them&mdash;for
+      to take fresh service after the glorious past&mdash;No! But they would
+      like just to see Mr. Soames again, and Mrs. Dartie, and Miss Francie, and
+      Miss Euphemia. And even if they had to take their own cab, they felt they
+      must go to the funeral. For six years Mr. Timothy had been their baby,
+      getting younger and younger every day, till at last he had been too young
+      to live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They spent the regulation hours of waiting in polishing and dusting, in
+      catching the one mouse left, and asphyxiating the last beetle so as to
+      leave it nice, discussing with each other what they would buy at the sale.
+      Miss Ann's workbox; Miss Juley's (that is Mrs. Julia's)
+      seaweed album; the fire-screen Miss Hester had crewelled; and Mr. Timothy's
+      hair&mdash;little golden curls, glued into a black frame. Oh! they must
+      have those&mdash;only the price of things had gone up so!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It fell to Soames to issue invitations for the funeral. He had them drawn
+      up by Gradman in his office&mdash;only blood relations, and no flowers.
+      Six carriages were ordered. The Will would be read afterward at the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He arrived at eleven o'clock to see that all was ready. At a quarter
+      past old Gradman came in black gloves and crape on his hat. He and Soames
+      stood in the drawing-room waiting. At half-past eleven the carriages drew
+      up in a long row. But no one else appeared. Gradman said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It surprises me, Mr. Soames. I posted them myself.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Soames; &ldquo;he'd lost
+      touch with the family.&rdquo; Soames had often noticed in old days how
+      much more neighbourly his family were to the dead than to the living. But,
+      now, the way they had flocked to Fleur's wedding and abstained from
+      Timothy's funeral, seemed to show some vital change. There might, of
+      course, be another reason; for Soames felt that if he had not known the
+      contents of Timothy's Will, he might have stayed away himself
+      through delicacy. Timothy had left a lot of money, with nobody in
+      particular to leave it to. They mightn't like to seem to expect
+      something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At twelve o'clock the procession left the door; Timothy alone in the
+      first carriage under glass. Then Soames alone; then Gradman alone; then
+      Cook and Smither together. They started at a walk, but were soon trotting
+      under a bright sky. At the entrance to Highgate Cemetery they were delayed
+      by service in the Chapel. Soames would have liked to stay outside in the
+      sunshine. He didn't believe a word of it; on the other hand, it was
+      a form of insurance which could not safely be neglected, in case there
+      might be something in it after all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked up two and two&mdash;he and Gradman, Cook and Smither&mdash;to
+      the family vault. It was not very distinguished for the funeral of the
+      last old Forsyte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took Gradman into his carriage on the way back to the Bayswater Road
+      with a certain glow in his heart. He had a surprise in pickle for the old
+      chap who had served the Forsytes four-and-fifty years-a treat that was
+      entirely his doing. How well he remembered saying to Timothy the day&mdash;after
+      Aunt Hester's funeral: &ldquo;Well; Uncle Timothy, there's
+      Gradman. He's taken a lot of trouble for the family. What do you say
+      to leaving him five thousand?&rdquo; and his surprise, seeing the
+      difficulty there had been in getting Timothy to leave anything, when
+      Timothy had nodded. And now the old chap would be as pleased as Punch, for
+      Mrs. Gradman, he knew, had a weak heart, and their son had lost a leg in
+      the War. It was extraordinarily gratifying to Soames to have left him five
+      thousand pounds of Timothy's money. They sat down together in the
+      little drawing-room, whose walls&mdash;like a vision of heaven&mdash;were
+      sky-blue and gold with every picture-frame unnaturally bright, and every
+      speck of dust removed from every piece of furniture, to read that little
+      masterpiece&mdash;the Will of Timothy. With his back to the light in Aunt
+      Hester's chair, Soames faced Gradman with his face to the light, on
+      Aunt Ann's sofa; and, crossing his legs, began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the last Will and Testament of me Timothy Forsyte of The
+      Bower Bayswater Road, London I appoint my nephew Soames Forsyte of The
+      Shelter Mapleduram and Thomas Gradman of 159 Folly Road Highgate
+      (hereinafter called my Trustees) to be the trustees and executors of this
+      my Will To the said Soames Forsyte I leave the sum of one thousand pounds
+      free of legacy duty and to the said Thomas Gradman I leave the sum of five
+      thousand pounds free of legacy duty.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames paused. Old Gradman was leaning forward, convulsively gripping a
+      stout black knee with each of his thick hands; his mouth had fallen open
+      so that the gold fillings of three teeth gleamed; his eyes were blinking,
+      two tears rolled slowly out of them. Soames read hastily on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the rest of my property of whatsoever description I bequeath to
+      my Trustees upon Trust to convert and hold the same upon the following
+      trusts namely To pay thereout all my debts funeral expenses and outgoings
+      of any kind in connection with my Will and to hold the residue thereof in
+      trust for that male lineal descendant of my father Jolyon Forsyte by his
+      marriage with Ann Pierce who after the decease of all lineal descendants
+      whether male or female of my said father by his said marriage in being at
+      the time of my death shall last attain the age of twenty-one years
+      absolutely it being my desire that my property shall be nursed to the
+      extreme limit permitted by the laws of England for the benefit of such
+      male lineal descendant as aforesaid.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames read the investment and attestation clauses, and, ceasing, looked
+      at Gradman. The old fellow was wiping his brow with a large handkerchief,
+      whose brilliant colour supplied a sudden festive tinge to the proceedings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My word, Mr. Soames!&rdquo; he said, and it was clear that the
+      lawyer in him had utterly wiped out the man: &ldquo;My word! Why, there
+      are two babies now, and some quite young children&mdash;if one of them
+      lives to be eighty&mdash;it's not a great age&mdash;and add
+      twenty-one&mdash;that's a hundred years; and Mr. Timothy worth a
+      hundred and fifty thousand pound net if he's worth a penny. Compound
+      interest at five per cent. doubles you in fourteen years. In fourteen
+      years three hundred thousand-six hundred thousand in twenty-eight&mdash;twelve
+      hundred thousand in forty-two&mdash;twenty-four hundred thousand in
+      fifty-six&mdash;four million eight hundred thousand in seventy&mdash;nine
+      million six hundred thousand in eighty-four&mdash;Why, in a hundred years
+      it'll be twenty million! And we shan't live to use it! It is a
+      Will!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames said dryly: &ldquo;Anything may happen. The State might take the
+      lot; they're capable of anything in these days.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And carry five,&rdquo; said Gradman to himself. &ldquo;I forgot&mdash;Mr.
+      Timothy's in Consols; we shan't get more than two per cent.
+      with this income tax. To be on the safe side, say eight millions. Still,
+      that's a pretty penny.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames rose and handed him the Will. &ldquo;You're going into the
+      City. Take care of that, and do what's necessary. Advertise; but
+      there are no debts. When's the sale?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tuesday week,&rdquo; said Gradman. &ldquo;Life or lives in bein'
+      and twenty-one years afterward&mdash;it's a long way off. But I'm
+      glad he's left it in the family....&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sale&mdash;not at Jobson's, in view of the Victorian nature of
+      the effects&mdash;was far more freely attended than the funeral, though
+      not by Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give them
+      their heart's desires. Winifred was present, Euphemia, and Francie,
+      and Eustace had come in his car. The miniatures, Barbizons, and J. R.
+      drawings had been bought in by Soames; and relics of no marketable value
+      were set aside in an off-room for members of the family who cared to have
+      mementoes. These were the only restrictions upon bidding characterised by
+      an almost tragic languor. Not one piece of furniture, no picture or
+      porcelain figure appealed to modern taste. The humming birds had fallen
+      like autumn leaves when taken from where they had not hummed for sixty
+      years. It was painful to Soames to see the chairs his aunts had sat on,
+      the little grand piano they had practically never played, the books whose
+      outsides they had gazed at, the china they had dusted, the curtains they
+      had drawn, the hearth-rug which had warmed their feet; above all, the beds
+      they had lain and died in&mdash;sold to little dealers, and the housewives
+      of Fulham. And yet&mdash;what could one do? Buy them and stick them in a
+      lumber-room? No; they had to go the way of all flesh and furniture, and be
+      worn out. But when they put up Aunt Ann's sofa and were going to
+      knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out, suddenly: &ldquo;Five
+      pounds!&rdquo; The sensation was considerable, and the sofa his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those Victorian
+      ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October sunshine feeling as if
+      cosiness had died out of the world, and the board &ldquo;To Let&rdquo; was
+      up, indeed. Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in Spain; no comfort in
+      Annette; no Timothy's on the Bayswater Road. In the irritable
+      desolation of his soul he went into the Goupenor Gallery. That chap Jolyon's
+      watercolours were on view there. He went in to look down his nose at them&mdash;it
+      might give him some faint satisfaction. The news had trickled through from
+      June to Val's wife, from her to Val, from Val to his mother, from
+      her to Soames, that the house&mdash;the fatal house at Robin Hill&mdash;was
+      for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British Columbia, or some
+      such place. For one wild moment the thought had come to Soames: 'Why
+      shouldn't I buy it back? I meant it for my!' No sooner come
+      than gone. Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many humiliating memories
+      for himself and Fleur. She would never live there after what had happened.
+      No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer. It had been a
+      bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud; and with the
+      woman gone, it was an empty shell. &ldquo;For Sale or To Let.&rdquo; With
+      his mind's eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied
+      wall which he had built.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery. There was
+      certainly a body of work! And now that the fellow was dead it did not seem
+      so trivial. The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense of
+      atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work. 'His father
+      and my father; he and I; his child and mine!' thought Soames. So it
+      had gone on! And all about that woman! Softened by the events of the past
+      week, affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came
+      nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth&mdash;passing
+      the understanding of a Forsyte pure&mdash;that the body of Beauty has a
+      spiritual essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks not of
+      self. After all, he was near that truth in his devotion to his daughter;
+      perhaps that made him understand a little how he had missed the prize. And
+      there, among the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that which
+      he had found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance
+      which surprised him. But he did not buy a drawing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air he met
+      with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his mind when
+      he went into the Gallery&mdash;Irene, herself, coming in. So she had not
+      gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that fellow's
+      remains! He subdued the little involuntary leap of his subconsciousness,
+      the mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm of this once-owned
+      woman, and passed her with averted eyes. But when he had gone by he could
+      not for the life of him help looking back. This, then, was finality&mdash;the
+      heat and stress of his life, the madness and the longing thereof, the only
+      defeat he had known, would be over when she faded from his view this time;
+      even such memories had their own queer aching value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She, too, was looking back. Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her lips
+      smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak. It was the turn of Soames
+      to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell wave; he went out
+      into the fashionable street quivering from head to foot. He knew what she
+      had meant to say: &ldquo;Now that I am going for ever out of the reach of
+      you and yours&mdash;forgive me; I wish you well.&rdquo; That was the
+      meaning; last sign of that terrible reality&mdash;passing morality, duty,
+      common sense&mdash;her aversion from him who had owned her body, but had
+      never touched her spirit or her heart. It hurt; yes&mdash;more than if she
+      had kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-cab
+      to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the Forsyte
+      vault. Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria, tall, ugly, and
+      individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive system. He could
+      remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated the addition to its
+      face of the pheasant proper. The proposal had been rejected in favour of a
+      wreath in stone, above the stark words: &ldquo;The family vault of Jolyon
+      Forsyte: 1850.&rdquo; It was in good order. All trace of the recent
+      interment had been removed, and its sober grey gloomed reposefully in the
+      sunshine. The whole family lay there now, except old Jolyon's wife,
+      who had gone back under a contract to her own family vault in Suffolk; old
+      Jolyon himself lying at Robin Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that
+      none knew where she might be. Soames gazed at it with satisfaction&mdash;massive,
+      needing little attention; and this was important, for he was well aware
+      that no one would attend to it when he himself was gone, and he would have
+      to be looking out for lodgings soon. He might have twenty years before
+      him, but one never knew. Twenty years without an aunt or uncle, with a
+      wife of whom one had better not know anything, with a daughter gone from
+      home. His mood inclined to melancholy and retrospection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This cemetery was full, they said&mdash;of people with extraordinary
+      names, buried in extraordinary taste. Still, they had a fine view up here,
+      right over London. Annette had once given him a story to read by that
+      Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern, where all the skeletons
+      emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious inscriptions on the
+      stones were altered to descriptions of their sins. Not a true story at
+      all. He didn't know about the French, but there was not much real
+      harm in English people except their teeth and their taste, which was
+      certainly deplorable. &ldquo;The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850.&rdquo;
+      A lot of people had been buried here since then&mdash;a lot of English
+      life crumbled to mould and dust! The boom of an airplane passing under the
+      gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift his eyes. The deuce of a lot of
+      expansion had gone on. But it all came back to a cemetery&mdash;to a name
+      and a date on a tomb. And he thought with a curious pride that he and his
+      family had done little or nothing to help this feverish expansion. Good
+      solid middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.
+      &ldquo;Superior Dosset,&rdquo; indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon
+      painted in a doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of
+      them all had soiled his hands by creating anything&mdash;unless you
+      counted Val Dartie and his horse-breeding. Collectors, solicitors,
+      barristers, merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents,
+      even soldiers&mdash;there they had been! The country had expanded, as it
+      were, in spite of them. They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken
+      advantage of the process and when you considered how &ldquo;Superior
+      Dosset&rdquo; had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal
+      descendants already owned what old Gradman estimated at between a million
+      and a million and a half, it was not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as
+      if the family bolt was shot, their possessive instinct dying out. They
+      seemed unable to make money&mdash;this fourth generation; they were going
+      into art, literature, farming, or the army; or just living on what was
+      left them&mdash;they had no push and no tenacity. They would die out if
+      they didn't take care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze. The air up here
+      would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the feeling that
+      mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the crosses and the urns, the
+      angels, the &ldquo;immortelles,&rdquo; the flowers, gaudy or withering;
+      and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different from anything
+      else up there that he was obliged to walk the few necessary yards and look
+      at it. A sober corner, with a massive queer-shaped cross of grey
+      rough-hewn granite, guarded by four dark yew-trees. The spot was free from
+      the pressure of the other graves, having a little box-hedged garden on the
+      far side, and in front a goldening birch-tree. This oasis in the desert of
+      conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and he sat
+      down there in the sunshine. Through those trembling gold birch leaves he
+      gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of memory. He thought of
+      Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair was rusty-golden and her white
+      shoulders his&mdash;Irene, the prize of his love-passion, resistant to his
+      ownership. He saw Bosinney's body lying in that white mortuary, and
+      Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with the eyes of a dying bird.
+      Again he thought of her by the little green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne,
+      once more rejecting him. His fancy took him on beside his drifting river
+      on the November day when Fleur was to be born, took him to the dead leaves
+      floating on the green-tinged water and the snake-headed weed for ever
+      swaying and nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered. And on again to the window
+      opened to the cold starry night above Hyde Park, with his father lying
+      dead. His fancy darted to that picture of &ldquo;the future town,&rdquo;
+      to that boy's and Fleur's first meeting; to the bluish trail
+      of Prosper Profond's cigar, and Fleur in the window pointing down to
+      where the fellow prowled. To the sight of Irene and that dead fellow
+      sitting side by side in the stand at Lord's. To her and that boy at
+      Robin Hill. To the sofa, where Fleur lay crushed up in the corner; to her
+      lips pressed into his cheek, and her farewell &ldquo;Daddy.&rdquo; And
+      suddenly he saw again Irene's grey-gloved hand waving its last
+      gesture of release.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the scut of his
+      possessive instinct, warming himself even with its failures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Let&rdquo;&mdash;the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man
+      owned his soul, his investments, and his woman, without check or question.
+      And now the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman had
+      herself, and God knew who had his soul. &ldquo;To Let&rdquo;&mdash;that
+      sane and simple creed!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new forms
+      only when their destructive flood should have passed its full. He sat
+      there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts resolutely set on the
+      past&mdash;as a man might ride into a wild night with his face to the tail
+      of his galloping horse. Athwart the Victorian dykes the waters were
+      rolling on property, manners, and morals, on melody and the old forms of
+      art&mdash;waters bringing to his mouth a salt taste as of blood, lapping
+      to the foot of this Highgate Hill where Victorianism lay buried. And
+      sitting there, high up on its most individual spot, Soames&mdash;like a
+      figure of Investment&mdash;refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he
+      would not fight them&mdash;there was in him too much primeval wisdom, of
+      Man the possessive animal. They would quiet down when they had fulfilled
+      their tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when the creations and
+      the properties of others were sufficiently broken and defected&mdash;they
+      would lapse and ebb, and fresh forms would rise based on an instinct older
+      than the fever of change&mdash;the instinct of Home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Je m'en fiche,&rdquo; said Prosper Profond. Soames did not
+      say &ldquo;Je m'en fiche&rdquo;&mdash;it was French, and the fellow
+      was a thorn in his side&mdash;but deep down he knew that change was only
+      the interval of death between two forms of life, destruction necessary to
+      make room for fresher property. What though the board was up, and cosiness
+      to let?&mdash;some one would come along and take it again some day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there&mdash;the melancholy
+      craving in his heart&mdash;because the sun was like enchantment on his
+      face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's
+      rustle was so gentle, and the yewtree green so dark, and the sickle of a
+      moon pale in the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He might wish and wish and never get it&mdash;the beauty and the loving in
+      the world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="cutpages (132K)" src="images/cutpages.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Awakening and To Let, by John Galsworthy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Awakening and To Let
+       The Forsyte Saga, Part 3.
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: September 24, 2004 [EBook #2596]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AWAKENING AND TO LET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FORSYTE SAGA
+
+VOLUME III
+
+
+AWAKENING and TO LET
+
+By John Galsworthy
+
+
+[NOTE: Spelling conforms to the original: "s's" instead of our "z's"; and
+"c's" where we would have "s's"; and "...our" as in colour and flavour;
+many interesting double consonants; etc.]
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+TO LET
+
+TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the
+July sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway turned;
+and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-linen-suited.
+His hair was shining, and his eyes, from beneath a frown, for he was
+considering how to go downstairs, this last of innumerable times, before
+the car brought his father and mother home. Four at a time, and five at
+the bottom?  Stale!  Down the banisters? But in which fashion?  On his
+face, feet foremost?  Very stale.  On his stomach, sideways?  Paltry!  On
+his back, with his arms stretched down on both sides?  Forbidden!  Or on
+his face, head foremost, in a manner unknown as yet to any but himself?
+Such was the cause of the frown on the illuminated face of little Jon....
+
+In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to simplify
+the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of little Jon, or they
+would have claimed him for a disciple.  But one can be too simple in this
+life, for his real name was Jolyon, and his living father and dead
+half-brother had usurped of old the other shortenings, Jo and Jolly.  As
+a fact little Jon had done his best to conform to convention and spell
+himself first Jhon, then John; not till his father had explained the
+sheer necessity, had he spelled his name Jon.
+
+Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart by the
+groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse "Da," who wore the
+violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins in that
+private life lived at odd moments even by domestic servants. His mother
+had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling delicious,
+smoothing his forehead just before he fell asleep, and sometimes docking
+his hair, of a golden brown colour.  When he cut his head open against
+the nursery fender she was there to be bled over; and when he had
+nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle his head against her neck.
+She was precious but remote, because "Da" was so near, and there is
+hardly room for more than one woman at a time in a man's heart.  With his
+father, too, of course, he had special bonds of union; for little Jon
+also meant to be a painter when he grew up--with the one small
+difference, that his father painted pictures, and little Jon intended to
+paint ceilings and walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders,
+in a dirty-white apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash.  His father also
+took him riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because
+it was so-coloured.
+
+Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was rather
+curly and large.  He had never heard his father or his mother speak in an
+angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody else; the groom,
+Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other servants, even "Da," who alone
+restrained him in his courses, had special voices when they talked to
+him.  He was therefore of opinion that the world was a place of perfect
+and perpetual gentility and freedom.
+
+A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just over
+that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing for the
+Liberal revival of 1906.  Coercion was unpopular, parents had exalted
+notions of giving their offspring a good time.  They spoiled their rods,
+spared their children, and anticipated the results with enthusiasm.  In
+choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had
+already lost an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight,
+whose first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely.
+What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a little
+prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for even little Jon
+could see that she was not merely just his mother, and that he played
+second fiddle to her in his father's heart: What he played in his
+mother's heart he knew not yet. As for "Auntie" June, his half-sister
+(but so old that she had grown out of the relationship) she loved him, of
+course, but was too sudden.  His devoted "Da," too, had a Spartan touch.
+His bath was cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged to be
+sorry for himself.  As to the vexed question of his education, little Jon
+shared the theory of those who considered that children should not be
+forced.  He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came for two hours every
+morning to teach him her language, together with history, geography and
+sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave him disagreeable,
+for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune, never making him
+practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that he remained eager
+to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his father he learned to
+draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a highly educated little
+boy.  Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed in his mouth without
+spoiling it, though "Da" sometimes said that other children would do him
+a "world of good."
+
+It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held
+him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which she did
+not approve.  This first interference with the free individualism of a
+Forsyte drove him almost frantic.  There was something appalling in the
+utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to whether it
+would ever come to an end.  Suppose she never let him get up any more!
+He suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds.  Worse
+than anything was his perception that "Da" had taken all that time to
+realise the agony of fear he was enduring.  Thus, dreadfully, was
+revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.
+
+When he was let up he remained convinced that "Da" had done a dreadful
+thing.  Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had been
+compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say: "Mum, don't
+let 'Da' hold me down on my back again."
+
+His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
+hair--"couleur de feuille morte," as little Jon had not yet learned to
+call it--had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown velvet
+tunic, and answered:
+
+"No, darling, I won't."
+
+She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
+especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
+happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his
+father:
+
+"Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I?  She's so devoted to him";
+and his father's answer:
+
+"Well, she mustn't show it that way.  I know exactly what it feels like
+to be held down on one's back.  No Forsyte can stand it for a minute."
+
+Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon
+was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed where
+he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
+
+Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence. Nothing
+much had been revealed to him after that, till one day, having gone down
+to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from the cow, after Garratt
+had finished milking, he had seen Clover's calf, dead.  Inconsolable, and
+followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought "Da"; but suddenly aware that
+she was not the person he wanted, had rushed away to find his father, and
+had run into the arms of his mother.
+
+"Clover's calf's dead!  Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!"
+
+His mother's clasp, and her:
+
+"Yes, darling, there, there!" had stayed his sobbing.  But if Clover's
+calf could die, anything could--not only bees, flies, beetles and
+chickens--and look soft like that!  This was appalling--and soon
+forgotten!
+
+The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant experience,
+which his mother had understood much better than "Da"; and nothing of
+vital importance had happened after that till the year turned; when,
+following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease composed
+of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine oranges.  It
+was then that the world had flowered.  To "Auntie" June he owed that
+flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than she came rushing
+down from London, bringing with her the books which had nurtured her own
+Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of 1869.  Aged, and of many
+colours, they were stored with the most formidable happenings.  Of these
+she read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to himself; whereupon
+she whisked back to London and left them with him in a heap.  Those books
+cooked his fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but midshipmen
+and dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses, sharks,
+battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
+extravagant delights.  The moment he was suffered to get up, he rigged
+his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath across green
+seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of its mahogany
+drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking tumbler screwed to
+his eye, in search of rescuing sails.  He made a daily raft out of the
+towel stand, the tea tray, and his pillows.  He saved the juice from his
+French plums, bottled it in an empty medicine bottle, and provisioned the
+raft with the rum that it became; also with pemmican made out of little
+saved-up bits of chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with lime
+juice against scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a little
+economised juice.  He made a North Pole one morning from the whole of his
+bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark canoe (in
+private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a polar bear
+fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up in "Da's"
+nightgown.  After that, his father, seeking to steady his imagination,
+brought him Ivanboe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur, and Tom Brown's
+Schooldays.  He read the first, and for three days built, defended and
+stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every part in the piece except
+those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing cries of: "En avant, de
+Bracy!" and similar utterances.  After reading the book about King Arthur
+he became almost exclusively Sir Lamorac de Galis, because, though there
+was very little about him, he preferred his name to that of any other
+knight; and he rode his old rocking-horse to death, armed with a long
+bamboo.  Bevis he found tame; besides, it required woods and animals, of
+which he had none in his nursery, except his two cats, Fitz and Puck
+Forsyte, who permitted no liberties.  For Tom Brown he was as yet too
+young. There was relief in the house when, after the fourth week, he was
+permitted to go down and out.
+
+The month being March the trees were exceptionally like the masts of
+ships, and for little Jon that was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard on
+his knees, suits, and the patience of "Da," who had the washing and
+reparation of his clothes.  Every morning the moment his breakfast was
+over, he could be viewed by his mother and father, whose windows looked
+out that way, coming from the study, crossing the terrace, climbing the
+old oak tree, his face resolute and his hair bright.  He began the day
+thus because there was not time to go far afield before his lessons.  The
+old tree's variety never staled; it had mainmast, foremast, top-gallant
+mast, and he could always come down by the halyards--or ropes of the
+swing.  After his lessons, completed by eleven, he would go to the
+kitchen for a thin piece of cheese, a biscuit and two French
+plums--provision enough for a jolly-boat at least--and eat it in some
+imaginative way; then, armed to the teeth with gun, pistols, and sword,
+he would begin the serious climbing of the morning, encountering by the
+way innumerable slavers, Indians, pirates, leopards, and bears.  He was
+seldom seen at that hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like
+Dick Needham) amid the rapid explosion of copper caps.  And many were the
+gardeners he brought down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun.
+He lived a life of the most violent action.
+
+"Jon," said his father to his mother, under the oak tree, "is terrible.
+I'm afraid he's going to turn out a sailor, or something hopeless.  Do
+you see any sign of his appreciating beauty?"
+
+"Not the faintest."
+
+"Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines!  I can bear
+anything but that.  But I wish he'd take more interest in Nature."
+
+"He's imaginative, Jolyon."
+
+"Yes, in a sanguinary way.  Does he love anyone just now?"
+
+"No; only everyone.  There never was anyone born more loving or more
+lovable than Jon."
+
+"Being your boy, Irene."
+
+At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them, brought
+them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged, thick, in his
+small gizzard.  Loving, lovable, imaginative, sanguinary!
+
+The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
+which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always memorable
+for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons, and ginger
+beer.
+
+Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he stood in
+the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several important
+things had happened.
+
+"Da," worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious instinct
+which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the very day
+after his birthday in floods of tears "to be married"--of all things--"to
+a man."  Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was inconsolable for an
+afternoon.  It ought not to have been kept from him!  Two large boxes of
+soldiers and some artillery, together with The Young Buglers, which had
+been among his birthday presents, cooperated with his grief in a sort of
+conversion, and instead of seeking adventures in person and risking his
+own life, he began to play imaginative games, in which he risked the
+lives of countless tin soldiers, marbles, stones and beans.  Of these
+forms of "chair a canon" he made collections, and, using them
+alternately, fought the Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty Years,
+and other wars, about which he had been reading of late in a big History
+of Europe which had been his grandfather's.  He altered them to suit his
+genius, and fought them all over the floor in his day nursery, so that
+nobody could come in, for fearing of disturbing Gustavus Adolphus, King
+of Sweden, or treading on an army of Austrians.  Because of the sound of
+the word he was passionately addicted to the Austrians, and finding there
+were so few battles in which they were successful he had to invent them
+in his games.  His favourite generals were Prince Eugene, the Archduke
+Charles and Wallenstein.  Tilly and Mack ("music-hall turns" he heard his
+father call them one day, whatever that might mean) one really could not
+love very much, Austrian though they were. For euphonic reasons, too, he
+doted on Turenne.
+
+This phase, which caused his parents anxiety, because it kept him indoors
+when he ought to have been out, lasted through May and half of June, till
+his father killed it by bringing home to him Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
+Finn.  When he read those books something happened in him, and he went
+out of doors again in passionate quest of a river. There being none on
+the premises at Robin Hill, he had to make one out of the pond, which
+fortunately had water lilies, dragonflies, gnats, bullrushes, and three
+small willow trees.  On this pond, after his father and Garratt had
+ascertained by sounding that it had a reliable bottom and was nowhere
+more than two feet deep, he was allowed a little collapsible canoe, in
+which he spent hours and hours paddling, and lying down out of sight of
+Indian Joe and other enemies.  On the shore of the pond, too, he built
+himself a wigwam about four feet square, of old biscuit tins, roofed in
+by boughs.  In this he would make little fires, and cook the birds he had
+not shot with his gun, hunting in the coppice and fields, or the fish he
+did not catch in the pond because there were none.  This occupied the
+rest of June and that July, when his father and mother were away in
+Ireland.  He led a lonely life of "make believe" during those five weeks
+of summer weather, with gun, wigwam, water and canoe; and, however hard
+his active little brain tried to keep the sense of beauty away, she did
+creep in on him for a second now and then, perching on the wing of a
+dragon-fly, glistening on the water lilies, or brushing his eyes with her
+blue as he Jay on his back in ambush.
+
+"Auntie" June, who had been left in charge, had a "grown-up" in the
+house, with a cough and a large piece of putty which he was making into a
+face; so she hardly ever came down to see him in the pond. Once, however,
+she brought with her two other "grown-ups."  Little Jon, who happened to
+have painted his naked self bright blue and yellow in stripes out of his
+father's water-colour box, and put some duck's feathers in his hair, saw
+them coming, and--ambushed himself among the willows.  As he had
+foreseen, they came at once to his wigwam and knelt down to look inside,
+so that with a blood-curdling yell he was able to take the scalps of
+"Auntie" June and the woman "grown-up" in an almost complete manner
+before they kissed him.  The names of the two grown-ups were "Auntie"
+Holly and "Uncle" Val, who had a brown face and a little limp, and
+laughed at him terribly.  He took a fancy to "Auntie" Holly, who seemed
+to be a sister too; but they both went away the same afternoon and he did
+not see them again. Three days before his father and mother were to come
+home "Auntie" June also went off in a great hurry, taking the "grown-up"
+who coughed and his piece of putty; and Mademoiselle said: "Poor man, he
+was veree ill.  I forbid you to go into his room, Jon."  Little Jon, who
+rarely did things merely because he was told not to, refrained from
+going, though he was bored and lonely.  In truth the day of the pond was
+past, and he was filled to the brim of his soul with restlessness and the
+want of something--not a tree, not a gun--something soft.  Those last
+two days had seemed months in spite of Cast Up by the Sea, wherein he was
+reading about Mother Lee and her terrible wrecking bonfire.  He had gone
+up and down the stairs perhaps a hundred times in those two days, and
+often from the day nursery, where he slept now, had stolen into his
+mother's room, looked at everything, without touching, and on into the
+dressing-room; and standing on one leg beside the bath, like Slingsby,
+had whispered:
+
+"Ho, ho, ho!  Dog my cats!" mysteriously, to bring luck.  Then, stealing
+back, he had opened his mother's wardrobe, and taken a long sniff which
+seemed to bring him nearer to--he didn't know what.
+
+He had done this just before he stood in the streak of sunlight, debating
+in which of the several ways he should slide down the banisters.  They
+all seemed silly, and in a sudden languor he began descending the steps
+one by one.  During that descent he could remember his father quite
+distinctly--the short grey beard, the deep eyes twinkling, the furrow
+between them, the funny smile, the thin figure which always seemed so
+tall to little Jon; but his mother he couldn't see.  All that represented
+her was something swaying with two dark eyes looking back at him; and the
+scent of her wardrobe.
+
+Bella was in the hall, drawing aside the big curtains, and opening the
+front door.  Little Jon said, wheedling,
+
+"Bella!"
+
+"Yes, Master Jon."
+
+"Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know they'd like
+it best."
+
+"You mean you'd like it best."
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+"No, they would, to please me."
+
+Bella smiled.  "Very well, I'll take it out if you'll stay quiet here and
+not get into mischief before they come."
+
+Little Jon sat down on the bottom step, and nodded.  Bella came close,
+and looked him over.
+
+"Get up!" she said.
+
+Little Jon got up.  She scrutinized him behind; he was not green, and his
+knees seemed clean.
+
+"All right!" she said.  "My!  Aren't you brown?  Give me a kiss!"
+
+And little Jon received a peck on his hair.
+
+"What jam?" he asked.  "I'm so tired of waiting."
+
+"Gooseberry and strawberry."
+
+Num!  They were his favourites!
+
+When she was gone he sat still for quite a minute.  It was quiet in the
+big hall open to its East end so that he could see one of his trees, a
+brig sailing very slowly across the upper lawn.  In the outer hall
+shadows were slanting from the pillars.  Little Jon got up, jumped one of
+them, and walked round the clump of iris plants which filled the pool of
+grey-white marble in the centre.  The flowers were pretty, but only
+smelled a very little.  He stood in the open doorway and looked out.
+Suppose!--suppose they didn't come!  He had waited so long that he felt
+he could not bear that, and his attention slid at once from such finality
+to the dust motes in the bluish sunlight coming in: Thrusting his hand
+up, he tried to catch some.  Bella ought to have dusted that piece of
+air!  But perhaps they weren't dust--only what sunlight was made of, and
+he looked to see whether the sunlight out of doors was the same.  It was
+not.  He had said he would stay quiet in the hall, but he simply couldn't
+any more; and crossing the gravel of the drive he lay down on the grass
+beyond.  Pulling six daisies he named them carefully, Sir Lamorac, Sir
+Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Sir Palimedes, Sir Bors, Sir Gawain, and fought
+them in couples till only Sir Lamorac, whom he had selected for a
+specially stout stalk, had his head on, and even he, after three
+encounters, looked worn and waggly.  A beetle was moving slowly in the
+grass, which almost wanted cutting.  Every blade was a small tree, round
+whose trunk the beetle had to glide.  Little Jon stretched out Sir
+Lamorac, feet foremost, and stirred the creature up.  It scuttled
+painfully.  Little Jon laughed, lost interest, and sighed.  His heart
+felt empty.  He turned over and lay on his back. There was a scent of
+honey from the lime trees in flower, and in the sky the blue was
+beautiful, with a few white clouds which looked and perhaps tasted like
+lemon ice.  He could hear Bob playing: "Way down upon de Suwannee ribber"
+on his concertina, and it made him nice and sad.  He turned over again
+and put his ear to the ground--Indians could hear things coming ever so
+far--but he could hear nothing--only the concertina!  And almost
+instantly he did hear a grinding sound, a faint toot.  Yes! it was a
+car--coming--coming!  Up he jumped. Should he wait in the porch, or rush
+upstairs, and as they came in, shout: "Look!" and slide slowly down the
+banisters, head foremost? Should he?  The car turned in at the drive.  It
+was too late!  And he only waited, jumping up and down in his excitement.
+The car came quickly, whirred, and stopped.  His father got out, exactly
+like life.  He bent down and little Jon bobbed up--they bumped.  His
+father said,
+
+"Bless us!  Well, old man, you are brown!"  Just as he would; and the
+sense of expectation--of something wanted--bubbled unextinguished in
+little Jon.  Then, with a long, shy look he saw his mother, in a blue
+dress, with a blue motor scarf over her cap and hair, smiling.  He jumped
+as high as ever he could, twined his legs behind her back, and hugged.
+He heard her gasp, and felt her hugging back.  His eyes, very dark blue
+just then, looked into hers, very dark brown, till her lips closed on his
+eyebrow, and, squeezing with all his might, he heard her creak and laugh,
+and say:
+
+"You are strong, Jon!"
+
+He slid down at that, and rushed into the hall, dragging her by the hand.
+
+While he was eating his jam beneath the oak tree, he noticed things about
+his mother that he had never seemed to see before, her cheeks for
+instance were creamy, there were silver threads in her dark goldy hair,
+her throat had no knob in it like Bella's, and she went in and out
+softly.  He noticed, too, some little lines running away from the corners
+of her eyes, and a nice darkness under them.  She was ever so beautiful,
+more beautiful than "Da" or Mademoiselle, or "Auntie" June or even
+"Auntie" Holly, to whom he had taken a fancy; even more beautiful than
+Bella, who had pink cheeks and came out too suddenly in places.  This new
+beautifulness of his mother had a kind of particular importance, and he
+ate less than he had expected to.
+
+When tea was over his father wanted him to walk round the gardens. He had
+a long conversation with his father about things in general, avoiding his
+private life--Sir Lamorac, the Austrians, and the emptiness he had felt
+these last three days, now so suddenly filled up.  His father told him of
+a place called Glensofantrim, where he and his mother had been; and of
+the little people who came out of the ground there when it was very
+quiet.  Little Jon came to a halt, with his heels apart.
+
+"Do you really believe they do, Daddy?"  "No, Jon, but I thought you
+might."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You're younger than I; and they're fairies."  Little Jon squared the
+dimple in his chin.
+
+"I don't believe in fairies.  I never see any."  "Ha!" said his father.
+
+"Does Mum?"
+
+His father smiled his funny smile.
+
+"No; she only sees Pan."
+
+"What's Pan?"
+
+"The Goaty God who skips about in wild and beautiful places."
+
+"Was he in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Mum said so."
+
+Little Jon took his heels up, and led on.
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+"No; I only saw Venus Anadyomene."
+
+Little Jon reflected; Venus was in his book about the Greeks and Trojans.
+Then Anna was her Christian and Dyomene her surname?
+
+But it appeared, on inquiry, that it was one word, which meant rising
+from the foam.
+
+"Did she rise from the foam in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Yes; every day."
+
+"What is she like, Daddy?"
+
+"Like Mum."
+
+"Oh! Then she must be..." but he stopped at that, rushed at a wall,
+scrambled up, and promptly scrambled down again.  The discovery that his
+mother was beautiful was one which he felt must absolutely be kept to
+himself.  His father's cigar, however, took so long to smoke, that at
+last he was compelled to say:
+
+"I want to see what Mum's brought home.  Do you mind, Daddy?"
+
+He pitched the motive low, to absolve him from unmanliness, and was a
+little disconcerted when his father looked at him right through, heaved
+an important sigh, and answered:
+
+"All right, old man, you go and love her."
+
+He went, with a pretence of slowness, and then rushed, to make up. He
+entered her bedroom from his own, the door being open.  She was still
+kneeling before a trunk, and he stood close to her, quite still.
+
+She knelt up straight, and said:
+
+"Well, Jon?"
+
+"I thought I'd just come and see."
+
+Having given and received another hug, he mounted the window-seat, and
+tucking his legs up under him watched her unpack.  He derived a pleasure
+from the operation such as he had not yet known, partly because she was
+taking out things which looked suspicious, and partly because he liked to
+look at her.  She moved differently from anybody else, especially from
+Bella; she was certainly the refinedest-looking person he had ever seen.
+She finished the trunk at last, and knelt down in front of him.
+
+"Have you missed us, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon nodded, and having thus admitted his feelings, continued to
+nod.
+
+"But you had 'Auntie' June?"
+
+"Oh! she had a man with a cough."
+
+His mother's face changed, and looked almost angry.  He added hastily:
+
+"He was a poor man, Mum; he coughed awfully; I--I liked him."
+
+His mother put her hands behind his waist.
+
+"You like everybody, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+"Up to a point," he said: "Auntie June took me to church one Sunday."
+
+"To church?  Oh!"
+
+"She wanted to see how it would affect me."  "And did it?"
+
+"Yes.  I came over all funny, so she took me home again very quick. I
+wasn't sick after all.  I went to bed and had hot brandy and water, and
+read The Boys of Beechwood.  It was scrumptious."
+
+His mother bit her lip.
+
+"When was that?"
+
+"Oh! about--a long time ago--I wanted her to take me again, but she
+wouldn't.  You and Daddy never go to church, do you?"
+
+"No, we don't."
+
+"Why don't you?"
+
+His mother smiled.
+
+"Well, dear, we both of us went when we were little.  Perhaps we went
+when we were too little."
+
+"I see," said little Jon, "it's dangerous."
+
+"You shall judge for yourself about all those  things as you grow up."
+
+Little Jon replied in a calculating manner:
+
+"I don't want to grow up, much.  I don't want  to go to school."  A
+sudden overwhelming desire  to say something more, to say what he really
+felt, turned him red.  "I--I want to stay with you,  and be your lover,
+Mum."
+
+Then with an instinct to improve the situation, he added quickly   "I
+don't want to go to bed to-night, either.  I'm simply tired of going to
+bed, every night."
+
+"Have you had any more nightmares?"
+
+"Only about one.  May I leave the door open into your room to-night,
+Mum?"
+
+"Yes, just a little."  Little Jon heaved a sigh of satisfaction.
+
+"What did you see in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Nothing but beauty, darling."
+
+"What exactly is beauty?"
+
+"What exactly is--Oh! Jon, that's a  poser."
+
+"Can I see it, for instance?"   His mother got up, and sat beside him.
+"You do, every day.  The sky is beautiful, the  stars, and moonlit
+nights, and then the birds, the flowers, the trees--they're all
+beautiful.  Look out of the window--there's beauty for you, Jon."
+
+"Oh! yes, that's the view.  Is that all?"
+
+"All? no.  The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with their
+foam flying back."
+
+"Did you rise from it every day, Mum?"
+
+His mother smiled.  "Well, we bathed."
+
+Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.
+
+"I know," he said mysteriously, "you're it, really, and all the rest is
+make-believe."
+
+She sighed, laughed, said:  "Oh! Jon!"
+
+Little Jon said critically:
+
+"Do you think Bella beautiful, for instance?  I hardly do."
+
+"Bella is young; that's something."
+
+"But you look younger, Mum.  If you bump against Bella she hurts."
+
+"I don't believe 'Da' was beautiful, when I come to think of it; and
+Mademoiselle's almost ugly."
+
+"Mademoiselle has a very nice face."  "Oh! yes; nice.  I love your little
+rays, Mum."
+
+"Rays?"
+
+Little Jon put his finger to the outer corner of her eye.
+
+"Oh! Those?  But they're a sign of age."
+
+"They come when you smile."
+
+"But they usen't to."
+
+"Oh! well, I like them.  Do you love me, Mum?"
+
+"I do--I do love you, darling."
+
+"Ever so?"
+
+"Ever so!"
+
+"More than I thought you did?"
+
+"Much--much more."
+
+"Well, so do I; so that makes it even."
+
+Conscious that he had never in his life so given himself away, he felt a
+sudden reaction to the manliness of Sir Lamorac, Dick Needham, Huck Finn,
+and other heroes.
+
+"Shall I show you a thing or two?" he said; and slipping out of her arms,
+he stood on his head.  Then, fired by her obvious admiration, he mounted
+the bed, and threw himself head foremost from his feet on to his back,
+without touching anything with his hands.  He did this several times.
+
+That evening, having inspected what they had brought, he stayed up to
+dinner, sitting between them at the little round table they used when
+they were alone.  He was extremely excited.  His mother wore a
+French-grey dress, with creamy lace made out of little scriggly roses,
+round her neck, which was browner than the lace.  He kept looking at her,
+till at last his father's funny smile made him suddenly attentive to his
+slice of pineapple.  It was later than he had ever stayed up, when he
+went to bed.  His mother went up with him, and he undressed very slowly
+so as to keep her there.  When at last he had nothing on but his pyjamas,
+he said:
+
+"Promise you won't go while I say my prayers!"
+
+"I promise."
+
+Kneeling down and plunging his face into the bed, little Jon hurried up,
+under his breath, opening one eye now and then, to see her standing
+perfectly still with a smile on her face.  "Our Father"--so went his last
+prayer, "which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mum, thy Kingdom Mum--on
+Earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily Mum and forgive us
+our trespasses on earth as it is in heaven and trespass against us, for
+thine is the evil the power and the glory for ever and ever.  Amum!  Look
+out!"  He sprang, and for a long minute remained in her arms.  Once in
+bed, he continued to hold her hand.
+
+"You won't shut the door any more than that, will you?  Are you going to
+be long, Mum?"
+
+"I must go down and play to Daddy."
+
+"Oh! well, I shall hear you."
+
+"I hope not; you must go to sleep."
+
+"I can sleep any night."
+
+"Well, this is just a night like any other."
+
+"Oh! no--it's extra special."
+
+"On extra special nights one always sleeps soundest."
+
+"But if I go to sleep, Mum, I shan't hear you come up."
+
+"Well, when I do, I'll come in and give you a kiss, then if you're awake
+you'll know, and if you're not you'll still know you've had one."
+
+Little Jon sighed, "All right!" he said: "I suppose I must put up with
+that.  Mum?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"What was her name that Daddy believes in?  Venus Anna Diomedes?"
+
+"Oh! my angel!  Anadyomene."
+
+"Yes! but I like my name for you much better."
+
+"What is yours, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon answered shyly:
+
+"Guinevere! it's out of the Round Table--I've only just thought of it,
+only of course her hair was down."
+
+His mother's eyes, looking past him, seemed to float.
+
+"You won't forget to come, Mum?"
+
+"Not if you'll go to sleep."
+
+"That's a bargain, then."  And little Jon screwed up his eyes.
+
+He felt her lips on his forehead, heard her footsteps; opened his eyes to
+see her gliding through the doorway, and, sighing, screwed them up again.
+
+Then Time began.
+
+For some ten minutes of it he tried loyally to sleep, counting a great
+number of thistles in a row, "Da's" old recipe for bringing slumber.  He
+seemed to have been hours counting.  It must, he thought, be nearly time
+for her to come up now.  He threw the bedclothes back.  "I'm hot!" he
+said, and his voice sounded funny in the darkness, like someone else's.
+Why didn't she come?  He sat up. He must look!  He got out of bed, went
+to the window and pulled the curtain a slice aside.  It wasn't dark, but
+he couldn't tell whether because of daylight or the moon, which was very
+big.  It had a funny, wicked face, as if laughing at him, and he did not
+want to look at it.  Then, remembering that his mother had said moonlit
+nights were beautiful, he continued to stare out in a general way.  The
+trees threw thick shadows, the lawn looked like spilt milk, and a long,
+long way he could see; oh! very far; right over the world, and it all
+looked different and swimmy.  There was a lovely smell, too, in his open
+window.
+
+'I wish I had a dove like Noah!' he thought.
+
+"The moony moon was round and bright, It shone and shone and made it
+light."
+
+After that rhyme, which came into his head all at once, he became
+conscious of music, very soft-lovely!  Mum playing!  He bethought himself
+of a macaroon he had, laid up in his chest of drawers, and, getting it,
+came back to the window.  He leaned out, now munching, now holding his
+jaws to hear the music better.  "Da" used to say that angels played on
+harps in heaven; but it wasn't half so lovely as Mum playing in the moony
+night, with him eating a macaroon.  A cockchafer buzzed by, a moth flew
+in his face, the music stopped, and little Jon drew his head in.  She
+must be coming!  He didn't want to be found awake.  He got back into bed
+and pulled the clothes nearly over his head; but he had left a streak of
+moonlight coming in.  It fell across the floor, near the foot of the bed,
+and he watched it moving ever so slowly towards him, as if it were alive.
+The music began again, but he could only just hear it now; sleepy music,
+pretty--sleepy--music--sleepy--slee.....
+
+And time slipped by, the music rose, fell, ceased; the moonbeam crept
+towards his face.  Little Jon turned in his sleep till he lay on his
+back, with one brown fist still grasping the bedclothes.  The corners of
+his eyes twitched--he had begun to dream.  He dreamed he was drinking
+milk out of a pan that was the moon, opposite a great black cat which
+watched him with a funny smile like his father's.  He heard it whisper:
+"Don't drink too much!" It was the cat's milk, of course, and he put out
+his hand amicably to stroke the creature; but it was no longer there; the
+pan had become a bed, in which he was lying, and when he tried to get out
+he couldn't find the edge; he couldn't find it--he--he--couldn't get out!
+It was dreadful!
+
+He whimpered in his sleep.  The bed had begun to go round too; it was
+outside him and inside him; going round and round, and getting fiery, and
+Mother Lee out of Cast up by the Sea was stirring it!  Oh! so horrible
+she looked!  Faster and faster!--till he and the bed and Mother Lee and
+the moon and the cat were all one wheel going round and round and up and
+up--awful--awful--awful!
+
+He shrieked.
+
+A voice saying: "Darling, darling!" got through the wheel, and he awoke,
+standing on his bed, with his eyes wide open.
+
+There was his mother, with her hair like Guinevere's, and, clutching her,
+he buried his face in it.
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"It's all right, treasure.  You're awake now.  There!  There!  It's
+nothing!"
+
+But little Jon continued to say: "Oh! oh!"
+
+Her voice went on, velvety in his ear:
+
+"It was the moonlight, sweetheart, coming on your face."
+
+Little Jon burbled into her nightgown
+
+"You said it was beautiful.  Oh!"
+
+"Not to sleep in, Jon.  Who let it in?  Did you draw the curtains?"
+
+"I wanted to see the time; I--I looked out, I--I heard you playing, Mum;
+I--I ate my macaroon."  But he was growing slowly comforted; and the
+instinct to excuse his fear revived within him.
+
+"Mother Lee went round in me and got all fiery," he mumbled.
+
+"Well, Jon, what can you expect if you eat macaroons after you've gone to
+bed?"
+
+"Only one, Mum; it made the music ever so more beautiful.  I was waiting
+for you--I nearly thought it was to-morrow."
+
+"My ducky, it's only just eleven now."
+
+Little Jon was silent, rubbing his nose on her neck.
+
+"Mum, is Daddy in your room?"
+
+"Not to-night."
+
+"Can I come?"
+
+"If you wish, my precious."
+
+Half himself again, little Jon drew back.
+
+"You look different, Mum; ever so younger."
+
+"It's my hair, darling."
+
+Little Jon laid hold of it, thick, dark gold, with a few silver threads.
+
+"I like it," he said: "I like you best of all like this."
+
+Taking her hand, he had begun dragging her towards the door.  He shut it
+as they passed, with a sigh of relief.
+
+"Which side of the bed do you like, Mum?"
+
+"The left side."
+
+"All right."
+
+Wasting no time, giving her no chance to change her mind, little Jon got
+into the bed, which seemed much softer than his own.  He heaved another
+sigh, screwed his head into the pillow and lay examining the battle of
+chariots and swords and spears which always went on outside blankets,
+where the little hairs stood up against the light.
+
+"It wasn't anything, really, was it?" he said.
+
+From before her glass his mother answered:
+
+"Nothing but the moon and your imagination heated up.  You mustn't get so
+excited, Jon."
+
+But, still not quite in possession of his nerves, little Jon answered
+boastfully:
+
+"I wasn't afraid, really, of course!"  And again he lay watching the
+spears and chariots.  It all seemed very long.
+
+"Oh! Mum, do hurry up!"
+
+"Darling, I have to plait my hair."
+
+"Oh! not to-night.  You'll only have to unplait it again to-morrow. I'm
+sleepy now; if you don't come, I shan't be sleepy soon."
+
+His mother stood up white and flowey before the winged mirror: he could
+see three of her, with her neck turned and her hair bright under the
+light, and her dark eyes smiling.  It was unnecessary, and he said:
+
+"Do come, Mum; I'm waiting."
+
+"Very well, my love, I'll come."
+
+Little Jon closed his eyes.  Everything was turning out most
+satisfactory, only she must hurry up!  He felt the bed shake, she was
+getting in.  And, still with his eyes closed, he said sleepily: "It's
+nice, isn't it?"
+
+He heard her voice say something, felt her lips touching his nose, and,
+snuggling up beside her who lay awake and loved him with her thoughts, he
+fell into the dreamless sleep, which rounded off his past.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO LET
+
+"From out the fatal loins of those two foes
+A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life."
+                       --Romeo and Juliet.
+
+
+
+TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+ENCOUNTER
+
+Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was
+staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the intention of
+visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and
+looking into the Future.  He walked.  Since the War he never took a cab
+if he could help it.  Their drivers were, in his view, an uncivil lot,
+though now that the War was over and supply beginning to exceed demand
+again, getting more civil in accordance with the custom of human nature.
+Still, he had not forgiven them, deeply identifying them with gloomy
+memories, and now, dimly, like all members, of their class, with
+revolution.  The considerable anxiety he had passed through during the
+War, and the more considerable anxiety he had since undergone in the
+Peace, had produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature.  He
+had, mentally, so frequently experienced ruin, that he had ceased to
+believe in its material probability.  Paying away four thousand a year in
+income and super tax, one could not very well be worse off! A fortune of
+a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a wife and one daughter, and
+very diversely invested, afforded substantial guarantee even against that
+"wildcat notion" a levy on capital.  And as to confiscation of war
+profits, he was entirely in favour of it, for he had none, and "serve the
+beggars right!" The price of pictures, moreover, had, if anything, gone
+up, and he had done better with his collection since the War began than
+ever before.  Air-raids, also, had acted beneficially on a spirit
+congenitally cautious, and hardened a character already dogged.  To be in
+danger of being entirely dispersed inclined one to be less apprehensive
+of the more partial dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while
+the habit of condemning the impudence of the Germans had led naturally to
+condemning that of Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of his
+soul.
+
+He walked.  There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet him
+at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past two.  It
+was good for him to walk--his liver was a little constricted, and his
+nerves rather on edge.  His wife was always out when she was in Town, and
+his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all over the place like most young
+women since the War.  Still, he must be thankful that she had been too
+young to do anything in that War itself.  Not, of course, that he had not
+supported the War from its inception, with all his soul, but between that
+and supporting it with the bodies of his wife and daughter, there had
+been a gap fixed by something old-fashioned within him which abhorred
+emotional extravagance.  He had, for instance, strongly objected to
+Annette, so attractive, and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her native
+France, her "chere patrie" as, under the stimulus of war, she had begun
+to call it, to nurse her "braves poilus," forsooth!  Ruining her health
+and her looks!  As if she were really a nurse!  He had put a stopper on
+it.  Let her do needlework for them at home, or knit!  She had not gone,
+therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since.  A bad tendency
+of hers to mock at him, not openly, but in continual little ways, had
+grown.  As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed problem whether or
+not she should go to school.  She was better away from her mother in her
+war mood, from the chance of air-raids, and the impetus to do extravagant
+things; so he had placed her in a seminary as far West as had seemed to
+him compatible with excellence, and had missed her horribly.  Fleur!  He
+had never regretted the somewhat outlandish name by which at her birth he
+had decided so suddenly to call her--marked concession though it had been
+to the French.  Fleur!  A pretty name--a pretty child!  But restless--too
+restless; and wilful!  Knowing her power too over her father!  Soames
+often reflected on the mistake it was to dote on his daughter.  To get
+old and dote!  Sixty-five!  He was getting on; but he didn't feel it,
+for, fortunately perhaps, considering Annette's youth and good looks, his
+second marriage had turned out a cool affair.  He had known but one real
+passion in his life--for that first wife of his--Irene.  Yes, and that
+fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who had gone off with her, was looking very
+shaky, they said.  No wonder, at seventy-two, after twenty years of a
+third marriage!
+
+Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the Row.
+A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house in Park
+Lane which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and the little
+house in Montpellier Square where thirty-five years ago he had enjoyed
+his first edition of matrimony.  Now, after twenty years of his second
+edition, that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous existence--which
+had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he had hoped for.  For
+many years he had ceased regretting, even vaguely, the son who had not
+been born; Fleur filled the bill in his heart.  After all, she bore his
+name; and he was not looking forward at all to the time when she would
+change it.  Indeed, if he ever thought of such a calamity, it was
+seasoned by the vague feeling that he could make her rich enough to
+purchase perhaps and extinguish the name of the fellow who married
+her--why not, since, as it seemed, women were equal to men nowadays?  And
+Soames, secretly convinced that they were not, passed his curved hand
+over his face vigorously, till it reached the comfort of his chin.
+Thanks to abstemious habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his nose was
+pale and thin, his grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight unimpaired.
+A slight stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to his face by
+the heightening of his forehead in the recession of his grey hair. Little
+change had Time wrought in the "warmest" of the young Forsytes, as the
+last of the old Forsytes--Timothy-now in his hundred and first year,
+would have phrased it.
+
+The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had given
+up top hats--it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days like
+these.  Plane-trees!  His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid--the
+Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that Goya
+picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his
+spot.  The fellow had impressed him--great range, real genius!  Highly as
+the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with
+him.  The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first; oh,
+yes!  And he had bought.  On that visit he had--as never
+before--commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called "La Vendimia,"
+wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded him
+of his daughter.  He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather
+poor it was--you couldn't copy Goya.  He would still look at it, however,
+if his daughter were not there, for the sake of something irresistibly
+reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the width between
+the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.  Curious that
+Fleur should have dark eyes, when his own were grey--no pure Forsyte had
+brown eyes--and her mother's blue!  But of course her grandmother
+Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!
+
+He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner.  No greater change in
+all England than in the Row!  Born almost within hail of it, he could
+remember it from 1860 on.  Brought there as a child between the
+crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with a
+cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top hats;
+the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in a long red
+waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs on several
+strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles spaniels,
+Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline--you never saw them
+now.  You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working people sitting
+in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young bouncing females in
+pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials charging up and down on
+dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there, little girls on ponies, or
+old gentlemen jogging their livers, or an orderly trying a great
+galumphing cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no
+scraping, no gossip--nothing; only the trees the same--the trees
+in--different to the generations and declensions of mankind.  A
+democratic England--dishevelled, hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an
+apex.  And that something fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over
+within him.  Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish!  Wealth
+there was--oh, yes! wealth--he himself was a richer man than his father
+had ever been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one
+vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.  Little
+half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and there,
+dispersed and chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever again firm
+and coherent to look up to.  And into this new hurly-burly of bad manners
+and loose morals his daughter--flower of his life--was flung!  And when
+those Labour chaps got power--if they ever did--the worst was yet to
+come.
+
+He passed out under the archway, at last no longer--thank goodness!
+--disfigured by the gungrey of its search-light.  'They'd better put a
+search-light on to where they're all going,' he thought, 'and light up
+their precious democracy!' And he directed his steps along the Club
+fronts of Piccadilly.  George Forsyte, of course, would be sitting in the
+bay window of the Iseeum.  The chap was so big now that he was there
+nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic, humorous eye noting
+the decline of men and things.  And Soames hurried, ever constitutionally
+uneasy beneath his cousin's glance. George, who, as he had heard, had
+written a letter signed "Patriot" in the middle of the War, complaining
+of the Government's hysteria in docking the oats of race-horses.  Yes,
+there he was, tall, ponderous, neat, clean-shaven, with his smooth hair,
+hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of the best hair-wash, and a pink
+paper in his hand.  Well, he didn't change!  And for perhaps the first
+time in his life Soames felt a kind of sympathy tapping in his waistcoat
+for that sardonic kinsman.  With his weight, his perfectly parted hair,
+and bull-like gaze, he was a guarantee that the old order would take some
+shifting yet.  He saw George move the pink paper as if inviting him to
+ascend--the chap must want to ask something about his property.  It was
+still under Soames' control; for in the adoption of a sleeping
+partnership at that painful period twenty years back when he had divorced
+Irene, Soames had found himself almost insensibly retaining control of
+all purely Forsyte affairs.
+
+Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in.  Since the death of
+his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite
+known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide--the
+Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames. George, too, he knew,
+had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the
+joys of the table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight
+down, and owning, as he said, "just one or two old screws to give me an
+interest in life."  He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window
+without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel
+up there. George put out a well-kept hand.
+
+"Haven't seen you since the War," he said.  "How's your wife?"
+
+"Thanks," said Soames coldly, "well enough."
+
+Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George's fleshy face, and gloated
+from his eye.
+
+"That Belgian chap, Profond," he said, "is a member here now.  He's a rum
+customer."
+
+"Quite!" muttered Soames.  "What did you want to see me about?"
+
+"Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment.  I suppose he's
+made his Will."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up--last of the old lot;
+he's a hundred, you know.  They say he's like a rummy.  Where are you
+goin' to put him?  He ought to have a pyramid by rights."
+
+Soames shook his head.  "Highgate, the family vault."
+
+"Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere else.
+They say he still takes an interest in food.  He might last on, you know.
+Don't we get anything for the old Forsytes?   Ten of them--average age
+eighty-eight--I worked it out.  That ought to be equal to triplets."
+
+"Is that all?" said Soames, "I must be getting on."
+
+'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer.  "Yes, that's
+all: Look him up in his mausoleum--the old chap might want to prophesy."
+The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he added: "Haven't you
+attorneys invented a way yet of dodging this damned income tax?  It hits
+the fixed inherited income like the very deuce.  I used to have two
+thousand five hundred a year; now I've got a beggarly fifteen hundred,
+and the price of living doubled."
+
+"Ah!" murmured Soames, "the turf's in danger."
+
+Over George's face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.
+
+"Well," he said, "they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in the
+sear and yellow, getting poorer every day.  These Labour chaps mean to
+have the lot before they've done.  What are you going to do for a living
+when it comes?  I shall work a six-hour day teaching politicians how to
+see a joke.  Take my tip, Soames; go into Parliament, make sure of your
+four hundred--and employ me."
+
+And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.
+
+Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his cousin's
+words.  He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George always a
+drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began, it was he--the
+worker and the saver--who would be looted! That was the negation of all
+virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles.  Could civilization be
+built on any other?  He did not think so.  Well, they wouldn't confiscate
+his pictures, for they wouldn't know their worth.  But what would they be
+worth, if these maniacs once began to milk capital?  A drug on the
+market.  'I don't care about myself,' he thought; 'I could live on five
+hundred a year, and never know the difference, at my age.'  But Fleur!
+This fortune, so widely invested, these treasures so carefully chosen and
+amassed, were all for--her.  And if it should turn out that he couldn't
+give or leave them to her--well, life had no meaning, and what was the
+use of going in to look at this crazy, futuristic stuff with the view of
+seeing whether it had any future?
+
+Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his shilling,
+picked up a catalogue, and entered.  Some ten persons were prowling
+round.  Soames took steps and came on what looked to him like a lamp-post
+bent by collision with a motor omnibus.  It was advanced some three paces
+from the wall, and was described in his catalogue as "Jupiter."  He
+examined it with curiosity, having recently turned some of his attention
+to sculpture.  'If that's Jupiter,' he thought, 'I wonder what Juno's
+like.'  And suddenly he saw her, opposite.  She appeared to him like
+nothing so much as a pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow.  He was
+still gazing at her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left.
+"Epatant!" he heard one say.
+
+"Jargon!" growled Soames to himself.
+
+The other's boyish voice replied
+
+"Missed it, old bean; he's pulling your leg.  When Jove and Juno created
+he them, he was saying: 'I'll see how much these fools will swallow.'
+And they've lapped up the lot."
+
+"You young duffer!  Vospovitch is an innovator.  Don't you see that he's
+brought satire into sculpture?  The future of plastic art, of music,
+painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric.  It was bound to.
+People are tired--the bottom's tumbled out of sentiment."
+
+"Well, I'm quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty.  I was
+through the War.  You've dropped your handkerchief, sir."
+
+Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him.  He took it with some
+natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose.  It had the right
+scent--of distant Eau de Cologne--and his initials in a corner. Slightly
+reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man's face.  It had rather
+fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush growing out of
+it on each side, and small lively eyes, above a normally dressed
+appearance.
+
+"Thank you," he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: "Glad to
+hear you like beauty; that's rare, nowadays."
+
+"I dote on it," said the young man; "but you and I are the last of the
+old guard, sir."
+
+Soames smiled.
+
+"If you really care for pictures," he said, "here's my card.  I can show
+you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you're down the river and care to
+look in."
+
+"Awfully nice of you, sir.  I'll drop in like a bird.  My name's
+Mont-Michael."  And he took off his hat.
+
+Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in
+response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had a
+purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look--as
+if he were a poet!
+
+It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went
+and sat down in an alcove.  What had possessed him to give his card to a
+rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that?  And Fleur,
+always at the back of his thoughts, started out like a filigree figure
+from a clock when the hour strikes.  On the screen opposite the alcove
+was a large canvas with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on it,
+and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat.  He
+looked at his catalogue: "No. 32 'The Future Town'--Paul Post."  'I
+suppose that's satiric too,' he thought.  'What a thing!' But his second
+impulse was more cautious. It did not do to condemn hurriedly.  There had
+been those stripey, streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out
+such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin.  Why, even since
+the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be
+sneezed at.  During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life,
+indeed, he had marked so many "movements," seen the tides of taste and
+technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything
+except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion.
+This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial
+instinct, or lose the market.  He got up and stood before the picture,
+trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato
+blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said: "He's
+got the airplanes wonderfully, don't you think!" Below the tomato blobs
+was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could assign
+no meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring: "What
+expression he gets with his foreground!"  Expression?  Of what?  Soames
+went back to his seat. The thing was "rich," as his father would have
+said, and he wouldn't give a damn for it.  Expression!  Ah! they were all
+Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent.  So it was coming
+here too, was it?  He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887--or
+'8--hatched in China, so they said.  He wondered where this--this
+Expressionism had been hatched.  The thing was a regular disease!
+
+He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and
+the "Future Town."  Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames put
+his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed through
+the slit between.  No mistaking that back, elegant as ever though the
+hair above had gone grey.  Irene!  His divorced wife--Irene!  And this,
+no doubt, was--her son--by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte--their boy, six
+months older than his own girl! And mumbling over in his mind the bitter
+days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat down
+again.  She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was
+still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if
+fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor of
+them, had never seen them smile.  Grudgingly he admitted her still
+beautiful and in figure almost as young as ever.  And how that boy smiled
+back at her! Emotion squeezed Soames' heart.  The sight infringed his
+sense of justice.  He grudged her that boy's smile--it went beyond what
+Fleur gave him, and it was undeserved.  Their son might have been his
+son; Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight!  He
+lowered his catalogue.  If she saw him, all the better!  A reminder of
+her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing of it,
+would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis which surely
+must soon or late visit her!  Then, half-conscious that such a thought
+was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took out his watch.
+Past four!  Fleur was late.  She had gone to his niece Imogen Cardigan's,
+and there they would keep her smoking cigarettes and gossiping, and that.
+He heard the boy laugh, and say eagerly: "I say, Mum, is this by one of
+Auntie June's lame ducks?"
+
+"Paul Post--I believe it is, darling."
+
+The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her use
+it.  And then she saw him.  His eyes must have had in them something of
+George Forsyte's sardonic look; for her gloved hand crisped the folds of
+her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went stony.  She moved on.
+
+"It is a caution," said the boy, catching her arm again.
+
+Soames stared after them.  That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte
+chin, and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a glass
+of old sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair. Better than
+they deserved--those two!  They passed from his view into the next room,
+and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but saw it not.  A little
+smile snarled up his lips.  He was despising the vehemence of his own
+feelings after all these years.  Ghosts! And yet as one grew old--was
+there anything but what was ghost-like left?  Yes, there was Fleur!  He
+fixed his eyes on the entrance.  She was due; but she would keep him
+waiting, of course!  And suddenly he became aware of a sort of human
+breeze--a short, slight form clad in a sea-green djibbah with a metal
+belt and a fillet binding unruly red-gold hair all streaked with grey.
+She was talking to the Gallery attendants, and something familiar riveted
+his gaze--in her eyes, her chin, her hair, her spirit--something which
+suggested a thin Skye terrier just before its dinner.  Surely June
+Forsyte!  His cousin June--and coming straight to his recess!  She sat
+down beside him, deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil
+note.  Soames sat unmoving.  A confounded thing, cousinship!
+"Disgusting!" he heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of
+an overhearing stranger, she looked at him.  The worst had happened.
+
+"Soames!"
+
+Soames turned his head a very little.
+
+"How are you?" he said.  "Haven't seen you for twenty years."
+
+"No.  Whatever made you come here?"
+
+"My sins," said Soames.  "What stuff!"
+
+"Stuff?  Oh, yes--of course; it hasn't arrived yet.
+
+"It never will," said Soames; "it must be making a dead loss."
+
+"Of course it is."
+
+"How d'you know?"
+
+"It's my Gallery."
+
+Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
+
+"Yours?  What on earth makes you run a show like this?"
+
+"I don't treat Art as if it were grocery."
+
+Soames pointed to the Future Town.  "Look at that!  Who's going to live
+in a town like that, or with it on his walls?"
+
+June contemplated the picture for a moment.
+
+"It's a vision," she said.
+
+"The deuce!"
+
+There was silence, then June rose.  'Crazylooking creature!' he thought.
+
+"Well," he said, "you'll find your young stepbrother here with a woman I
+used to know.  If you take my advice, you'll close this exhibition."
+
+June looked back at him.  "Oh! You Forsyte!" she said, and moved on.
+About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a look of
+dangerous decisions.  Forsyte!  Of course, he was a Forsyte! And so was
+she!  But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought Bosinney into
+his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June and never would!
+And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a Gallery!... And
+suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of his own family.  The
+old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many years; there was no
+clearing-house for news.  What had they all done in the War?  Young
+Roger's boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's second son killed; young
+Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or whatever they gave them.  They
+had all joined up somehow, he believed.  That boy of Jolyon's and
+Irene's, he supposed, had been too young; his own generation, of course,
+too old, though Giles Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross--and
+Jesse Hayman been a special constable--those "Dromios" had always been of
+a sporting type!  As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read
+the papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought
+no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he
+could have done at his age.  Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him that
+he and his family had taken this war very differently to that affair with
+the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the resources of the
+Empire.  In that old war, of course, his nephew Val Dartie had been
+wounded, that fellow Jolyon's first son had died of enteric, "the
+Dromios" had gone out on horses, and June had been a nurse; but all that
+had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in this war everybody had
+done "their bit," so far as he could make out, as a matter of course.  It
+seemed to show the growth of something or other--or perhaps the decline
+of something else.  Had the Forsytes become less individual, or more
+Imperial, or less provincial?  Or was it simply that one hated
+Germans?...  Why didn't Fleur come, so that he could get away?  He saw
+those three return together from the other room and pass back along the
+far side of the screen.  The boy was standing before the Juno now.  And,
+suddenly, on the other side of her, Soames saw--his daughter, with
+eyebrows raised, as well they might be.  He could see her eyes glint
+sideways at the boy, and the boy look back at her.  Then Irene slipped
+her hand through his arm, and drew him on.  Soames saw him glancing
+round, and Fleur looking after them as the three went out.
+
+A voice said cheerfully: "Bit thick, isn't it, sir?"
+
+The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing.
+Soames nodded.
+
+"I don't know what we're coming to."
+
+"Oh! That's all right, sir," answered the young man cheerfully; "they
+don't either."
+
+Fleur's voice said: "Hallo, Father!  Here you are!" precisely as if he
+had been keeping her waiting.
+
+The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.
+
+"Well," said Soames, looking her up and down, "you're a punctual sort of
+young woman!"
+
+This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and colour,
+with short, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes were set in
+whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and yet in repose were
+almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids, held over them in a
+sort of suspense.  She had a charming profile, and nothing of her father
+in her face save a decided chin.  Aware that his expression was softening
+as he looked at her, Soames frowned to preserve the unemotionalism proper
+to a Forsyte.  He knew she was only too inclined to take advantage of his
+weakness.
+
+Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:
+
+"Who was that?"
+
+"He picked up my handkerchief.  We talked about the pictures."
+
+"You're not going to buy that, Father?"
+
+"No," said Soames grimly; "nor that Juno you've been looking at."
+
+Fleur dragged at his arm.  "Oh! Let's go!  It's a ghastly show."
+
+In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner. But
+Soames had hung out a board marked "Trespassers will be prosecuted," and
+he barely acknowledged the young fellow's salute.
+
+"Well," he said in the street, "whom did you meet at Imogen's?"
+
+"Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond."
+
+"Oh!" muttered Soames; "that chap!  What does your aunt see in him?"
+
+"I don't know.  He looks pretty deep--mother says she likes him."
+
+Soames grunted.
+
+"Cousin Val and his wife were there, too."
+
+"What!" said Soames.  "I thought they were back in South Africa."
+
+"Oh, no!  They've sold their farm.  Cousin Val is going to train
+race-horses on the Sussex Downs.  They've got a jolly old manor-house;
+they asked me down there."
+
+Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him.  "What's his wife like
+now?"
+
+"Very quiet, but nice, I think."
+
+Soames coughed again.  "He's a rackety chap, your Cousin Val."
+
+"Oh! no, Father; they're awfully devoted.  I promised to go--Saturday to
+Wednesday next."
+
+"Training race-horses!" said Soames.  It was extravagant, but not the
+reason for his distaste.  Why the deuce couldn't his nephew have stayed
+out in South Africa?  His own divorce had been bad enough, without his
+nephew's marriage to the daughter of the co-respondent; a half-sister too
+of June, and of that boy whom Fleur had just been looking at from under
+the pump-handle.  If he didn't look out, she would come to know all about
+that old disgrace!  Unpleasant things! They were round him this afternoon
+like a swarm of bees!
+
+"I don't like it!" he said.
+
+"I want to see the race-horses," murmured Fleur; "and they've promised I
+shall ride.  Cousin Val can't walk much, you know; but he can ride
+perfectly.  He's going to show me their gallops."
+
+"Racing!" said Soames.  "It's a pity the War didn't knock that on the
+head.  He's taking after his father, I'm afraid."
+
+"I don't know anything about his father."
+
+"No," said Soames, grimly.  "He took an interest in horses and broke his
+neck in Paris, walking down-stairs.  Good riddance for your aunt."  He
+frowned, recollecting the inquiry into those stairs which he had attended
+in Paris six years ago, because.  Montague Dartie could not attend it
+himself--perfectly normal stairs in a house where they played baccarat.
+Either his winnings or the way he had celebrated them had gone to his
+brother-in-law's head.  The French procedure had been very loose; he had
+had a lot of trouble with it.
+
+A sound from Fleur distracted his attention.  "Look! The people who were
+in the Gallery with us."
+
+"What people?" muttered Soames, who knew perfectly well.
+
+"I think that woman's beautiful."
+
+"Come into this pastry-cook's," said Soames abruptly, and tightening his
+grip on her arm he turned into a confectioner's.  It was--for him--a
+surprising thing to do, and he said rather anxiously: "What will you
+have?"
+
+"Oh! I don't want anything.  I had a cocktail and a tremendous lunch."
+
+"We must have something now we're here," muttered Soames, keeping hold of
+her arm.
+
+"Two teas," he said; "and two of those nougat things."
+
+But no sooner was his body seated than his soul sprang up.  Those
+three--those three were coming in!  He heard Irene say something to her
+boy, and his answer:
+
+"Oh! no, Mum; this place is all right.  My stunt."  And the three sat
+down.
+
+At that moment, most awkward of his existence, crowded with ghosts and
+shadows from his past, in presence of the only two women he had ever
+loved--his divorced wife and his daughter by her successor--Soames was
+not so much afraid of them as of his cousin June.  She might make a
+scene--she might introduce those two children--she was capable of
+anything.  He bit too hastily at the nougat, and it stuck to his plate.
+Working at it with his finger, he glanced at Fleur. She was masticating
+dreamily, but her eyes were on the boy.  The Forsyte in him said: "Think,
+feel, and you're done for!"  And he wiggled his finger desperately.
+Plate!  Did Jolyon wear a plate? Did that woman wear a plate?  Time had
+been when he had seen her wearing nothing!  That was something, anyway,
+which had never been stolen from him.  And she knew it, though she might
+sit there calm and self-possessed, as if she had never been his wife.  An
+acid humour stirred in his Forsyte blood; a subtle pain divided by hair's
+breadth from pleasure.  If only June did not suddenly bring her hornets
+about his ears!  The boy was talking.
+
+"Of course, Auntie June"--so he called his half-sister "Auntie," did
+he?--well, she must be fifty, if she was a day!--"it's jolly good of you
+to encourage them.  Only--hang it all!"  Soames stole a glance. Irene's
+startled eyes were bent watchfully on her boy.  She--she had these
+devotions--for Bosinney--for that boy's father--for this boy! He touched
+Fleur's arm, and said:
+
+"Well, have you had enough?"
+
+"One more, Father, please."
+
+She would be sick!  He went to the counter to pay.  When he turned round
+again he saw Fleur standing near the door, holding a handkerchief which
+the boy had evidently just handed to her.
+
+"F. F.," he heard her say.  "Fleur Forsyte--it's mine all right. Thank
+you ever so."
+
+Good God!  She had caught the trick from what he'd told her in the
+Gallery--monkey!
+
+"Forsyte?  Why--that's my name too.  Perhaps we're cousins."
+
+"Really!  We must be.  There aren't any others.  I live at Mapledurham;
+where do you?"
+
+"Robin Hill."
+
+Question and answer had been so rapid that all was over before he could
+lift a finger.  He saw Irene's face alive with startled feeling, gave the
+slightest shake of his head, and slipped his arm through Fleur's.
+
+"Come along!" he said.
+
+She did not move.
+
+"Didn't you hear, Father?  Isn't it queer--our name's the same.  Are we
+cousins?"
+
+"What's that?" he said.  "Forsyte?  Distant, perhaps."
+
+"My name's Jolyon, sir.  Jon, for short."
+
+"Oh! Ah!" said Soames.  "Yes.  Distant.  How are you?  Very good of you.
+Good-bye!"
+
+He moved on.
+
+"Thanks awfully," Fleur was saying.  "Au revoir!"
+
+"Au revoir!" he heard the boy reply.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
+
+Emerging from the "pastry-cook's," Soames' first impulse was to vent his
+nerves by saying to his daughter: 'Dropping your hand-kerchief!' to which
+her reply might well be: 'I picked that up from you!' His second impulse
+therefore was to let sleeping dogs lie.  But she would surely question
+him.  He gave her a sidelong look, and found she was giving him the same.
+She said softly:
+
+"Why don't you like those cousins, Father?"  Soames lifted the corner of
+his lip.
+
+"What made you think that?"
+
+"Cela se voit."
+
+'That sees itself!'  What a way of putting it!  After twenty years of a
+French wife Soames had still little sympathy with her language; a
+theatrical affair and connected in his mind with all the refinements of
+domestic irony.
+
+"How?" he asked.
+
+"You must know them; and you didn't make a sign.  I saw them looking at
+you."
+
+"I've never seen the boy in my life," replied Soames with perfect truth.
+
+"No; but you've seen the others, dear."
+
+Soames gave her another look.  What had she picked up?  Had her Aunt
+Winifred, or Imogen, or Val Dartie and his wife, been talking?  Every
+breath of the old scandal had been carefully kept from her at home, and
+Winifred warned many times that he wouldn't have a whisper of it reach
+her for the world.  So far as she ought to know, he had never been
+married before.  But her dark eyes, whose southern glint and clearness
+often almost frightened him, met his with perfect innocence.
+
+"Well," he said, "your grandfather and his brother had a quarrel. The two
+families don't know each other."
+
+"How romantic!"
+
+'Now, what does she mean by that?' he thought.  The word was to him
+extravagant and dangerous--it was as if she had said: "How jolly!"
+
+"And they'll continue not to know each, other," he added, but instantly
+regretted the challenge in those words.  Fleur was smiling. In this age,
+when young people prided themselves on going their own ways and paying no
+attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had said the very thing to
+excite her wilfulness.  Then, recollecting the expression on Irene's
+face, he breathed again.
+
+"What sort of a quarrel?" he heard Fleur say.
+
+"About a house.  It's ancient history for you.  Your grandfather died the
+day you were born.  He was ninety."
+
+"Ninety?  Are there many Forsytes besides those in the Red Book?"
+
+"I don't know," said Soames.  "They're all dispersed now.  The old ones
+are dead, except Timothy."
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.
+
+"Timothy?  Isn't that delicious?"
+
+"Not at all," said Soames.  It offended him that she should think
+"Timothy" delicious--a kind of insult to his breed.  This new generation
+mocked at anything solid and tenacious.  "You go and see the old boy.  He
+might want to prophesy."  Ah!  If Timothy could see the disquiet England
+of his great-nephews and great-nieces, he would certainly give tongue.
+And involuntarily he glanced up at the Iseeum; yes--George was still in
+the window, with the same pink paper in his hand.
+
+"Where is Robin Hill, Father?"
+
+Robin Hill!  Robin Hill, round which all that tragedy had centred! What
+did she want to know for?
+
+"In Surrey," he muttered; "not far from Richmond.  Why?"
+
+"Is the house there?"
+
+"What house?"
+
+"That they quarrelled about."
+
+"Yes.  But what's all that to do with you?  We're going home
+to-morrow--you'd better be thinking about your frocks."
+
+"Bless you!  They're all thought about.  A family feud?  It's like the
+Bible, or Mark Twain--awfully exciting.  What did you do in the feud,
+Father?"
+
+"Never you mind."
+
+"Oh! But if I'm to keep it up?"
+
+"Who said you were to keep it up?"
+
+"You, darling."
+
+"I?  I said it had nothing to do with you."
+
+"Just what I think, you know; so that's all right."
+
+She was too sharp for him; fine, as Annette sometimes called her. Nothing
+for it but to distract her attention.
+
+"There's a bit of rosaline point in here," he said, stopping before a
+shop, "that I thought you might like."
+
+When he had paid for it and they had resumed their progress, Fleur said:
+
+"Don't you think that boy's mother is the most beautiful woman of her age
+you've ever seen?"
+
+Soames shivered.  Uncanny, the way she stuck to it!
+
+"I don't know that I noticed her."
+
+"Dear, I saw the corner of your eye."
+
+"You see everything--and a great deal more, it seems to me!"
+
+"What's her husband like?  He must be your first cousin, if your fathers
+were brothers."
+
+"Dead, for all I know," said Soames, with sudden vehemence.  "I haven't
+seen him for twenty years."
+
+"What was he?"
+
+"A painter."
+
+"That's quite jolly."
+
+The words: "If you want to please me you'll put those people out of your
+head," sprang to Soames' lips, but he choked them back--he must not let
+her see his feelings.
+
+"He once insulted me," he said.
+
+Her quick eyes rested on his face.
+
+"I see!  You didn't avenge it, and it rankles.  Poor Father!  You let me
+have a go!"
+
+It was really like lying in the dark with a mosquito hovering above his
+face.  Such pertinacity in Fleur was new to him, and, as they reached the
+hotel, he said grimly:
+
+"I did my best.  And that's enough about these people.  I'm going up till
+dinner."
+
+"I shall sit here."
+
+With a parting look at her extended in a chair--a look half-resentful,
+half-adoring--Soames moved into the lift and was transported to their
+suite on the fourth floor.  He stood by the window of the sitting-room
+which gave view over Hyde Park, and drummed a finger on its pane.  His
+feelings were confused, tetchy, troubled.  The throb of that old wound,
+scarred over by Time and new interests, was mingled with displeasure and
+anxiety, and a slight pain in his chest where that nougat stuff had
+disagreed.  Had Annette come in?  Not that she was any good to him in
+such a difficulty. Whenever she had questioned him about his first
+marriage, he had always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it
+had been the great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself but
+domestic makeshift.  She had always kept the grudge of that up her
+sleeve, as it were, and used it commercially.  He listened.  A sound--the
+vague murmur of a woman's movements--was coming through the door.  She
+was in.  He tapped.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"I," said Soames.
+
+She had been changing her frock, and was still imperfectly clothed; a
+striking figure before her glass.  There was a certain magnificence about
+her arms, shoulders, hair, which had darkened since he first knew her,
+about the turn of her neck, the silkiness of her garments, her
+dark-lashed, greyblue eyes--she was certainly as handsome at forty as she
+had ever been.  A fine possession, an excellent housekeeper, a sensible
+and affectionate enough mother.  If only she weren't always so frankly
+cynical about the relations between them! Soames, who had no more real
+affection for her than she had for him, suffered from a kind of English
+grievance in that she had never dropped even the thinnest veil of
+sentiment over their partnership. Like most of his countrymen and women,
+he held the view that marriage should be based on mutual love, but that
+when from a marriage love had disappeared, or, been found never to have
+really existed--so that it was manifestly not based on love--you must not
+admit it.  There it was, and the love was not--but there you were, and
+must continue to be!  Thus you had it both ways, and were not tarred with
+cynicism, realism, and immorality like the French.  Moreover, it was
+necessary in the interests of property.  He knew that she knew that they
+both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not
+to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand
+what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.  He said:
+
+"Whom have you got at 'The Shelter' next week?"
+
+Annette went on touching her lips delicately with salve--he always wished
+she wouldn't do that.
+
+"Your sister Winifred, and the Car-r-digans"--she took up a tiny stick of
+black--"and Prosper Profond."
+
+"That Belgian chap?  Why him?"
+
+Annette turned her neck lazily, touched one eyelash, and said:
+
+"He amuses Winifred."
+
+"I want some one to amuse Fleur; she's restive."
+
+"R-restive?" repeated Annette.  "Is it the first time you see that, my
+friend?  She was born r-restive, as you call it."
+
+Would she never get that affected roll out of her r's?
+
+He touched the dress she had taken off, and asked:
+
+"What have you been doing?"
+
+Annette looked at him, reflected in her glass.  Her just-brightened lips
+smiled, rather full, rather ironical.
+
+"Enjoying myself," she said.
+
+"Oh!" answered Soames glumly.  "Ribbandry, I suppose."
+
+It was his word for all that incomprehensible running in and out of shops
+that women went in for.  "Has Fleur got her summer dresses?"
+
+"You don't ask if I have mine."
+
+"You don't care whether I do or not."
+
+"Quite right.  Well, she has; and I have mine--terribly expensive."
+
+"H'm!" said Soames.  "What does that chap Profond do in England?"
+
+Annette raised the eyebrows she had just finished.
+
+"He yachts."
+
+"Ah!" said Soames; "he's a sleepy chap."
+
+"Sometimes," answered Annette, and her face had a sort of quiet
+enjoyment.  "But sometimes very amusing."
+
+"He's got a touch of the tar-brush about him."
+
+Annette stretched herself.
+
+"Tar-brush?" she said.  "What is that?  His mother was Armenienne."
+
+"That's it, then," muttered Soames.  "Does he know anything about
+pictures?"
+
+"He knows about everything--a man of the world."
+
+"Well, get some one for Fleur.  I want to distract her.  She's going off
+on Saturday to Val Dartie and his wife; I don't like it."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Since the reason could not be explained without going into family
+history, Soames merely answered:
+
+"Racketing about.  There's too much of it."
+
+"I like that little Mrs. Val; she is very quiet and clever."
+
+"I know nothing of her except--This thing's new."  And Soames took up a
+creation from the bed.
+
+Annette received it from him.
+
+"Would you hook me?" she said.
+
+Soames hooked.  Glancing once over her shoulder into the glass, he saw
+the expression on her face, faintly amused, faintly contemptuous, as much
+as to say: "Thanks!  You will never learn!"  No, thank God, he wasn't a
+Frenchman!  He finished with a jerk, and the words: "It's too low here."
+And he went to the door, with the wish to get away from her and go down
+to Fleur again.
+
+Annette stayed a powder-puff, and said with startling suddenness
+
+"Que to es grossier!"
+
+He knew the expression--he had reason to.  The first time she had used it
+he had thought it meant "What a grocer you are!" and had not known
+whether to be relieved or not when better informed.  He resented the
+word--he was not coarse!  If he was coarse, what was that chap in the
+room beyond his, who made those horrible noises in the morning when he
+cleared his throat, or those people in the Lounge who thought it
+well-bred to say nothing but what the whole world could hear at the top
+of their voices--quacking inanity!  Coarse, because he had said her dress
+was low!  Well, so it was!  He went out without reply.
+
+Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where he
+had left her.  She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot in
+silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming.  Her eyes
+showed it too--they went off like that sometimes.  And then, in a moment,
+she would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a monkey.  And
+she knew so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen. What was that
+odious word?  Flapper!  Dreadful young creatures--squealing and
+squawking and showing their legs!  The worst of them bad dreams, the best
+of them powdered angels!  Fleur was not a flapper, not one of those
+slangy, ill-bred young females.  And yet she was frighteningly
+self-willed, and full of life, and determined to enjoy it.  Enjoy!  The
+word brought no puritan terror to Soames; but it brought the terror
+suited to his temperament.  He had always been afraid to enjoy to-day for
+fear he might not enjoy tomorrow so much.  And it was terrifying to feel
+that his daughter was divested of that safeguard.  The very way she sat
+in that chair showed it--lost in her dream.  He had never been lost in a
+dream himself--there was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got
+it from he did not know!  Certainly not from Annette!  And yet Annette,
+as a young girl, when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery
+look.  Well, she had lost it now!
+
+Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down at
+a writing-table.  Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to write as if
+she had not time to breathe before she got her letter written.  And
+suddenly she saw him.  The air of desperate absorption vanished, she
+smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were a little puzzled
+and a little bored.
+
+Ah!  She was "fine"--"fine!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AT ROBIN HILL
+
+Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill,
+quietly going into his affairs.  He did everything quietly now, because
+his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked the
+idea of dying.  He had never realised how much till one day, two years
+ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms, and been told:
+
+"At any moment, on any overstrain."
+
+He had taken it with a smile--the natural Forsyte reaction against an
+unpleasant truth.  But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the
+way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over him.  To
+leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work--though he did little enough
+work now!  To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable
+state, for such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind
+stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.  Of
+such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he never
+could, and must still hover on the hope that he might see again those he
+loved!  To realise this was to endure very poignant spiritual anguish.
+Before he reached home that day he had determined to keep it from Irene.
+He would have to be more careful than man had ever been, for the least
+thing would give it away and make her as wretched as himself, almost.
+His doctor had passed him sound in other respects, and seventy was
+nothing of an age--he would last a long time yet, if he could.
+
+Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the
+full the subtler side of character.  Naturally not abrupt, except when
+nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate.  The sad patience
+of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a smile which his
+lips preserved even in private.  He devised continually all manner of
+cover to conceal his enforced lack of exertion.
+
+Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the Simple
+Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no
+coffee in it.  In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in his
+condition could, under the rose of his mild irony.  Secure from
+discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had spent the
+fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow
+without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final polish to his
+terrestrial state.  Having docketed and enclosed it in his father's old
+Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words
+outside: "Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the exact
+state of me, J. F.," and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be
+always about him, in case of accident. Then, ringing for tea, he went out
+to have it under the old oak-tree.
+
+All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little
+more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought
+habitually, like other people, of other things.  He thought of his son
+now.
+
+Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
+Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his dead
+half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed to avoid
+the evil and contain the good of the Public School system, may or may not
+contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in April perfectly
+ignorant of whit he wanted to become.  The War, which had promised to go
+on for ever, had ended just as he was about to join the Army, six months
+before his time.  It had taken him ever since to get used to the idea
+that he could now choose for himself. He had held with his father several
+discussions, from which, under a cheery show of being ready for
+anything--except, of course, the Church, Army, Law, Stage, Stock
+Exchange, Medicine, Business, and Engineering--Jolyon had gathered rather
+clearly that Jon wanted to go in for nothing.  He himself had felt
+exactly like that at the same age.  With him that pleasant vacuity had
+soon been ended by an early marriage, and its unhappy consequences.
+Forced to become an underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity
+before his artistic talent had outcropped.  But having--as the simple say
+--"learned" his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that Jon
+would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his
+aversion from everything else meant that he was going to be a writer.
+Holding, however, the view that experience was necessary even for that
+profession, there seemed to Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for Jon, but
+University, travel, and perhaps the eating of dinners for the Bar.  After
+that one would see, or more probably one would not. In face of these
+proffered allurements, however, Jon had remained undecided.
+
+Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether the
+world had really changed.  People said that it was a new age. With the
+profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived that under
+slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it had been.
+Mankind was still divided into two species: The few who had "speculation"
+in their souls, and the many who had none, with a belt of hybrids like
+himself in the middle.  Jon appeared to have speculation; it seemed to
+his father a bad lookout.
+
+With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard the
+boy say, a fortnight ago: "I should like to try farming, Dad; if it won't
+cost you too much.  It seems to be about the only sort of life that
+doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and of course that's out of the
+question for me."
+
+Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:
+
+"All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first Jolyon
+in 1760.  It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no doubt, you
+may grow a better turnip than he did."
+
+A little dashed, Jon had answered:
+
+"But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?"
+
+"'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it, you'll do
+more good than most men, which is little enough."
+
+To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it.  I give him
+four years.  Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'
+
+After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to his
+daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near them on
+the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice.  Holly's answer had been
+enthusiastic.  There was an excellent man quite close; she and Val would
+love Jon to live with them.
+
+The boy was due to go to-morrow.
+
+Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of the
+old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
+thirty-two years.  The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day older!
+So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the
+whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk.  A tree of memories, which
+would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut it
+down--would see old England out at the pace things were going!  He
+remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
+with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
+hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree.  Next day they had found a
+bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm.  That was before he knew that he was
+under sentence of death.  He could almost have wished the bomb had
+finished him.  It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many hours of
+cold fear in the pit of his stomach.  He had counted on living to the
+normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene would be seventy.
+As it was, she would miss him.  Still there was Jon, more important in
+her life than himself; Jon, who adored his mother.
+
+Under that tree, where old Jolyon--waiting for Irene to come to him
+across the lawn--had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
+whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not better
+close his own eyes and drift away.  There was something undignified in o
+parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of a life wherein he
+regretted two things only--the long division between his father and
+himself when he was young, and the lateness of his union o with Irene.
+
+From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
+Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and his
+heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower again.
+Spring!  Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his heart was still
+young enough to love beauty!  Blackbirds sang recklessly in the
+shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves above him glistened; and
+over the fields was every imaginable tint of early foliage, burnished by
+the level sunlight, away to where the distant "smoke-bush" blue was
+trailed along the horizon.  Irene's flowers in their narrow beds had
+startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of gay life.
+Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had known how
+to get that startling little ego into each painted flower, and bird, and
+beast--the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of life as
+well. They were the fellows!  'I've made nothing that will live!' thought
+Jolyon; 'I've been an amateur--a mere lover, not a creator.  Still, I
+shall leave Jon behind me when I go.'   What luck that the boy had not
+been caught by that ghastly war!  He might so easily have been killed,
+like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal.  Jon would do
+something some day--if the Age didn't spoil him--an imaginative chap!
+His whim to take up farming was but a bit of sentiment, and about as
+likely to last.  And just then he saw them coming up the field: Irene and
+the boy; walking from the station, with their arms linked.  And getting
+up, he strolled down through the new rose garden to meet them....
+
+Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window.  She sat
+there without speaking till he said:
+
+"What is it, my love?"
+
+"We had an encounter to-day."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Soames."
+
+Soames!  He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two years;
+conscious that it was bad for him.  And, now, his heart moved in a
+disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within his chest.
+
+Irene went on quietly:
+
+"He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
+confectioner's where we had tea."
+
+Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.
+
+"How did he look?"
+
+"Grey; but otherwise much the same."
+
+"And the daughter?"
+
+"Pretty.  At least, Jon thought so."
+
+Jolyon's heart side-slipped again.  His wife's face had a strained and
+puzzled look.
+
+"You didn't-?" he began.
+
+"No; but Jon knows their name.  The girl dropped her handkerchief and he
+picked it up."
+
+Jolyon sat down on his bed.  An evil chance!
+
+"June was with you.  Did she put her foot into it?"
+
+"No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it was."
+
+Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
+
+"I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from him. He'll
+find out some day."
+
+"The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard judgment.
+When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your mother if she
+had done what I have?"
+
+Yes!  There it was!  Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of the
+tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the prisoned
+grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or passion--knew
+nothing at all, as yet!
+
+"What have you told him?" he said at last.
+
+"That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had never
+cared much for your family, or they for you.  I expect he will be asking
+you."
+
+Jolyon smiled.  "This promises to take the place of air-raids," he said.
+"After all, one misses them."
+
+Irene looked up at him.
+
+"We've known it would come some day."
+
+He answered her with sudden energy:
+
+"I could never stand seeing Jon blame you.  He shan't do that, even in
+thought.  He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's put to him
+properly.  I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
+otherwise."
+
+"Not yet, Jolyon."
+
+That was like her--she had no foresight, and never went to meet trouble.
+Still--who knew?--she might be right.  It was ill going against a
+mother's instinct.  It might be well to let the boy go on, if possible,
+till experience had given him some touchstone by which he could judge the
+values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing, had deepened
+his charity.  All the same, one must take precautions--every precaution
+possible!  And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over
+those precautions.  He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew
+nothing as yet of family history. Holly was discreet, she would make sure
+of her husband, she would see to it!  Jon could take the letter with him
+when he went to-morrow.
+
+And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate died
+out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for Jolyon in
+the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so rounded off and
+polished....
+
+But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the
+prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, "love at
+first sight!"  He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of those
+dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno--a conviction that this was
+his 'dream'; so that what followed had seemed to him at once natural and
+miraculous.  Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for one who was
+terribly susceptible to the charm of words.  In a homoeopathic Age, when
+boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was
+almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned.  His modern school
+took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy
+friends, or his parents alone.  He had never, therefore, been inoculated
+against the germs of love by small doses of the poison.  And now in the
+dark his temperature was mounting fast.  He lay awake, featuring
+Fleur--as they called it--recalling her words, especially that "Au
+revoir!" so soft and sprightly.
+
+He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
+shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out
+through the study window.  It was just light; there was a smell of grass.
+'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!'  It was mysteriously white out of doors,
+with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp.  'I'll go
+down into the coppice,' he thought.  He ran down through the fields,
+reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice.
+Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was
+mystery--the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality.  Jon
+sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening
+light.  Fleur!  It rhymed with her!  And she lived at Mapleduram--a jolly
+name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas
+presently.  He would write to her.  But would she answer?  Oh! She must.
+She had said "Au revoir!"  Not good-bye!  What luck that she had dropped
+her handkerchief!  He would never have known her but for that.  And the
+more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.
+Fleur!  It certainly rhymed with her!  Rhythm thronged his head; words
+jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.
+
+Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned
+to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out
+of sheer exhilaration.  Then, remembering that the study window was open,
+he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate
+all traces of his feeling.  The thing was too deep to be revealed to
+mortal soul-even-to his mother.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE MAUSOLEUM
+
+There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving
+their bodies in the limbo of London.  Such was not quite the condition of
+"Timothy's" on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul still had one foot
+in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of
+camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it
+twice a day.
+
+To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box, a
+series of layers in the last of which was Timothy.  One did not reach
+him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of old-time
+habit or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon and ask
+after their surviving uncle.  Such were Francie, now quite emancipated
+from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old
+Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her "man of the world."  But, after
+all, everybody was emancipated now, or said they were--perhaps not quite
+the same thing!
+
+When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on the
+morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of
+seeing Timothy in the flesh.  His heart made a faint demonstration within
+him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep
+of that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one
+dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and out
+of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened with,
+fardels of family gossip; the house of the "old people" of another
+century, another age.
+
+The sight of Smither--still corseted up to the armpits because the new
+fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been
+considered "nice" by Aunts Juley and Hester--brought a pale friendliness
+to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to old pattern in
+every detail, an invaluable servant--none such left--smiling back at
+him, with the words: "Why! it's Mr. Soames, after all this time!  And how
+are you, sir?  Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to know you've been."
+
+"How is he?"
+
+"Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's a
+wonderful man.  As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It would
+please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how he relishes
+a baked apple still.  But he's quite deaf.  And a mercy, I always think.
+For what we should have done with him in the air-raids, I don't know."
+
+"Ah!" said Soames.  "What did you do with him?"
+
+"We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the cellar,
+so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang.  It would never have done
+to let him know there was a war on.  As I said to Cook, 'If Mr. Timothy
+rings, they may do what they like--I'm going up.  My dear mistresses
+would have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody going to him.'
+But he slept through them all beautiful.  And the one in the daytime he
+was having his bath.  It was a mercy, because he might have noticed the
+people in the street all looking up--he often looks out of the window."
+
+"Quite!" murmured Soames.  Smither was getting garrulous!  "I just want
+to look round and see if there's anything to be done."
+
+"Yes, sir.  I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice in the
+dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of.  It's funny they should
+be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not coming down,
+just before the War.  But they're nasty little things; you never know
+where they'll take you next."
+
+"Does he leave his bed?"--
+
+"Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window in
+the morning, not to risk a change of air.  And he's quite comfortable in
+himself; has his Will out every day regular.  It's a great consolation to
+him--that."
+
+"Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything to
+say to me."
+
+Smither coloured up above her corsets.
+
+"It will be an occasion!" she said.  "Shall I take you round the house,
+sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?"
+
+"No, you go to him," said Soames.  "I can go round the house by myself."
+
+One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt that
+he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so saturated with
+the past.  When Smither, creaking with excitement, had left him, Soames
+entered the dining-room and sniffed.  In his opinion it wasn't mice, but
+incipient wood-rot, and he examined the panelling.  Whether it was worth
+a coat of paint, at Timothy's age, he was not sure.  The room had always
+been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile curled Soames'
+lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted the oak dado; a heavy
+metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling divided by imitation
+beams. The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a bargain, one day at
+Jobson's sixty years ago--three Snyder "still lifes," two faintly
+coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather charming, which bore the
+initials "J. R."--Timothy had always believed they might turn out to be
+Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who admired them, had discovered that they
+were only John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of a white pony being
+shod.  Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed dark mahogany chairs with
+deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and a mahogany dining-table as
+large as the room was small, such was an apartment which Soames could
+remember unchanged in soul or body since he was four years old.  He
+looked especially at the two drawings, and thought: 'I shall buy those at
+the sale.'
+
+From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study.  He did not remember
+ever having been in that room.  It was lined from floor to ceiling with
+volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity.  One wall seemed devoted
+to educational books, which Timothy's firm had published two generations
+back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book.  Soames read their
+titles and shuddered.  The middle wall had precisely the same books as
+used to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane, from which he
+deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out
+together one day and bought a brace of small libraries.  The third wall
+he approached with more excitement.  Here, surely, Timothy's own taste
+would be found.  It was.  The books were dummies.  The fourth wall was
+all heavily curtained window.  And turned toward it was a large chair
+with a mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded
+copy of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to
+come down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him
+still.  In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by
+Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and
+permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday
+afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with
+Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was
+always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been
+sick too.  Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at
+least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a
+spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing into his
+purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in latitude 44.
+
+'Mausoleum!' he thought.  'George was right!'  And he went out and up the
+stairs.  On the half-landing he stopped before the case of stuffed
+humming-birds which had delighted his childhood.  They looked not a day
+older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass.  If the case were opened
+the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing would crumble, he
+suspected.  It wouldn't be worth putting that into the sale!  And
+suddenly he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann--dear old Aunt
+Ann--holding him by the hand in front of that case and saying: "Look,
+Soamey!  Aren't they bright and pretty, dear little humming-birds!"
+Soames remembered his own answer: "They don't hum, Auntie."  He must have
+been six, in a black velveteen suit with a light-blue collar-he
+remembered that suit well!  Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery
+kind hands, and her grave old aquiline smile--a fine old lady, Aunt Ann!
+He moved on up to the drawing-room door.  There on each side of it were
+the groups of miniatures.  Those he would certainly buy in!  The
+miniatures of his four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and
+one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy. They had all been painted by a young
+lady friend of the family at a time, 1830, about, when miniatures were
+considered very genteel, and lasting too, painted as they were on ivory.
+Many a time had he heard the tale of that young lady: "Very talented, my
+dear; she had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went
+into a consumption and died: so like Keats--we often spoke of it."
+
+Well, there they were!  Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan--quite a small child;
+Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
+waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on heaven.
+Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been rather like
+that--a wonderful man to the last.  Yes, she must have had talent, and
+miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet of their own, little
+subject to the currents of competition on aesthetic Change.  Soames
+opened the drawing-room door.  The room was dusted, the furniture
+uncovered, the curtains drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still dwelt
+there patiently waiting.  And a thought came to him: When Timothy
+died--why not?  Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this
+house--like Carlyle's--and put up a tablet, and show it?  "Specimen of
+mid-Victorian abode--entrance, one shilling, with catalogue."  After all,
+it was the completest thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of
+to-day.  Perfect in its special taste and culture, if, that is, he took
+down and carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon pictures he
+had given them.  The still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned
+with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the
+cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of little
+knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey, Cowper,
+Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in
+a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full
+of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their mother's
+father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant's
+tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in
+jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it,
+recording God knew what!  And the pictures crowding on the walls--all
+water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like tile foreigners they
+were, and doubtful customers at that--pictures bright and illustrative,
+"Telling the Bees," "Hey for the Ferry!" and two in the style of Frith,
+all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin.  Oh! many, many
+pictures at which Soames had gazed a thousand times in supercilious
+fascination; a marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt frames.
+
+And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed as
+ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it.  And the
+gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked.  And on one side of the
+fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
+Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on
+the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light,
+for Aunt Hester.  Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them
+sitting there.  Ah! and the atmosphere--even now, of too many stuffs and
+washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings.  'No,' he
+thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.'  And,
+by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life
+never departed from, for fastidiousness of skin and eye and nose and
+feeling, it beat to-day hollow--to-day with its Tubes and cars, its
+perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the
+knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the
+satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
+feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and
+their "So longs," and their "Old Beans," and their laughter--girls who
+gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them;
+and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him the
+shudders too. No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their
+eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a standard,
+and reverence for past and future.
+
+With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
+upstairs.  He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order of
+the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls.  At the
+top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors.  Which of them was
+Timothy's?  And he listened.  A sound, as of a child slowly dragging a
+hobby-horse about, came to his ears.  That must be Timothy!  He tapped,
+and a door was opened by Smither, very red in the face.
+
+Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him to
+attend.  If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see him
+through the door.
+
+Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.
+
+The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
+impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
+affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the window,
+a distance of some twelve feet.  The lower part of his square face, no
+longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as short as it
+could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where the hair was
+also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a good yellow.  One
+hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the skirt of his Jaeger
+dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked ankles and
+feet thrust into Jaeger slippers.  The expression on his face was that of
+a crossed child, intent on something that he has not got.  Each time he
+turned he stumped the stick, and then dragged it, as if to show that he
+could do without it:
+
+"He still looks strong," said Soames under his breath.
+
+"Oh! yes, sir.  You should see him take his bath--it's wonderful; he does
+enjoy it so."
+
+Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight.  Timothy had resumed his
+babyhood.
+
+"Does he take any interest in things generally?" he said, also loud.
+
+"Oh I yes, sir; his food and his Will.  It's quite a sight to see him
+turn it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every now and then
+he asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a slate for him--very
+large.  Of course, I always write the same, what they were when he last
+took notice, in 1914.  We got the doctor to forbid him to read the paper
+when the War broke out.  Oh! he did take on about that at first.  But he
+soon came round, because he knew it tired him; and he's a wonder to
+conserve energy as he used to call it when my dear mistresses were alive,
+bless their hearts!  How he did go on at them about that; they were
+always so active, if you remember, Mr. Soames."
+
+"What would happen if I were to go in?" asked Soames: "Would he remember
+me?  I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in 1907."
+
+"Oh! that, sir," replied Smither doubtfully, "I couldn't take on me to
+say.  I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his age."
+
+Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn, said in a
+loud voice: "Uncle Timothy!"
+
+Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.
+
+"Eh?" he said.
+
+"Soames," cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out his hand,
+"Soames Forsyte!"
+
+"No!" said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the floor, he
+continued his walk.
+
+"It doesn't seem to work," said Soames.
+
+"No, sir," replied Smither, rather crestfallen; "you see, he hasn't
+finished his walk.  It always was one thing at a time with him.  I expect
+he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the gas, and a pretty job I
+shall have to make him understand."
+
+"Do you think he ought to have a man about him?"
+
+Smither held up her hands.  "A man!  Oh! no.  Cook and me can manage
+perfectly.  A strange man about would send him crazy in no time.  And my
+mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house.  Besides, we're
+so--proud of him."
+
+"I suppose the doctor comes?"
+
+"Every morning.  He makes special terms for such a quantity, and Mr.
+Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to put out his
+tongue."
+
+"Well," said Soames, turning away, "it's rather sad and painful to me."
+
+"Oh! sir," returned Smither anxiously, "you mustn't think that.  Now that
+he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life, really he does.
+As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man than he ever was.  You
+see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his bath, he's eatin', and when
+he's not eatin', he's sleepin'; and there it is. There isn't an ache or a
+care about him anywhere."
+
+"Well," said Soames, "there's something in that.  I'll go down.  By the
+way, let me see his Will."
+
+"I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under his
+pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active."
+
+"I only want to know if it's the one I made," said Soames; "you take a
+look at its date some time, and let me know."
+
+"Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and Cook witnessed, you
+remember, and there's our names on it still, and we've only done it
+once."
+
+"Quite," said Soames.  He did remember.  Smither and Jane had been proper
+witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they might have no
+interest in Timothy's death.  It had been--he fully admitted--an almost
+improper precaution, but Timothy had wished it, and, after all, Aunt
+Hester had provided for them amply.
+
+"Very well," he said; "good-bye, Smither.  Look after him, and if he
+should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me know."
+
+"Oh I yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that.  It's been such a
+pleasant change to see you.  Cook will be quite excited when I tell her."
+
+Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs.  He stood for fully two
+minutes by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many times. 'So
+it all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins again.  Poor old
+chap!'  And he listened, if perchance the sound of Timothy trailing his
+hobby-horse might come down the well of the stairs; or some ghost of an
+old face show over the bannisters, and an old voice say: 'Why, it's dear
+Soames, and we were only saying that we hadn't seen him for a week!'
+
+Nothing--nothing!  Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a sunbeam
+through the fanlight over the door.  The little old house!  A mausoleum!
+And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his train.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE NATIVE HEATH
+
+          "His foot's upon his native heath,
+           His name's--Val Dartie."
+
+With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his age,
+set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old manor-house he
+had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs.  His destination was
+Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn of 1899, when he
+stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire.  He paused at the door to
+give his wife a kiss, and put a flask of port into his pocket.
+
+"Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much."
+
+With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes looking into
+his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe.  He should be moderate; Holly was
+always right--she had a natural aptitude.  It did not seem so remarkable
+to him, perhaps, as it might to others, that--half Dartie as he was--he
+should have been perfectly faithful to his young first cousin during the
+twenty years since he married her romantically out in the Boer War; and
+faithful without any feeling of sacrifice or boredom--she was so quick,
+so slyly always a little in front of his mood.  Being first cousins they
+had decided, rather needlessly, to have no children; and, though a little
+sallower, she had kept her looks, her slimness, and the colour of her
+dark hair. Val particularly admired the life of her own she carried on,
+besides carrying on his, and riding better every year.  She kept up her
+music, she read an awful lot--novels, poetry, all sorts of stuff. Out on
+their farm in Cape colony she had looked after all the "nigger" babies
+and women in a miraculous manner.  She was, in fact, clever; yet made no
+fuss about it, and had no "side."  Though not remarkable for humility,
+Val had come to have the feeling that she was his superior, and he did
+not grudge it--a great tribute.  It might be noted that he never looked
+at Holly without her knowing of it, but that she looked at him sometimes
+unawares.
+
+He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so on the
+platform, though she was going to the station with him, to drive the car
+back.  Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles inseparable
+from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened in the Boer War,
+had probably saved his life in the War just past, Val was still much as
+he had been in the days of his courtship; his smile as wide and charming,
+his eyelashes, if anything, thicker and darker, his eyes screwed up under
+them, as bright a grey, his freckles rather deeper, his hair a little
+grizzled at the sides.  He gave the impression of one who has lived
+actively with horses in a sunny climate.
+
+Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:
+
+"When is young Jon coming?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+"Is there anything you want for him?  I could bring it down on Saturday."
+
+"No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur--one-forty."
+
+Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new country
+on bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects heaven at every
+hole.
+
+"That's a young woman who knows her way about," he said.  "I say, has it
+struck you?"
+
+"Yes," said Holly.
+
+"Uncle Soames and your Dad--bit awkward, isn't it?"
+
+"She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be said, of course.
+It's only for five days, Val."
+
+"Stable secret!  Righto!"  If Holly thought it safe, it was. Glancing
+slyly round at him, she said: "Did you notice how beautifully she asked
+herself?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Well, she did.  What do you think of her, Val?"
+
+"Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she got her
+monkey up, I should say."
+
+"I'm wondering," Holly murmured, "whether she is the modern young woman.
+One feels at sea coming home into all this."
+
+"You?  You get the hang of things so quick."
+
+Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.
+
+"You keep one in the know," said Val encouraged.  "What do you think of
+that Belgian fellow, Profond?"
+
+"I think he's rather 'a good devil.'"
+
+Val grinned.
+
+"He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family.  In fact, our
+family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying a
+Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first.  Our grandfathers
+would have had fits!"
+
+"So would anybody's, my dear."
+
+"This car," Val said suddenly, "wants rousing; she doesn't get her hind
+legs under her uphill.  I shall have to give her her head on the slope if
+I'm to catch that train."
+
+There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really
+sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his guidance
+compared with its running under that of Holly was always noticeable.  He
+caught the train.
+
+"Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can.  Good-bye,
+darling."
+
+"Good-bye," called Holly, and kissed her hand.
+
+In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between thoughts of
+Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim memory
+of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square book, all
+names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and shape of
+horses.  The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a certain
+strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie
+hankering for a Nutter.  On getting back to England, after the profitable
+sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun
+seldom shone, Val had said to himself: "I've absolutely got to have an
+interest in life, or this country will give me the blues.  Hunting's not
+enough, I'll breed and I'll train."  With just that extra pinch of
+shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val
+had seen the weak point of modern breeding.  They were all hypnotised by
+fashion and high price.  He should buy for looks, and let names go hang!
+And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain
+of blood! Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in this damned
+climate which makes one go round in a ring.  All the same, I must have a
+strain of Mayfly blood.'
+
+In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes.  It was one of those
+quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather
+than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His
+twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he
+had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and
+given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called "the silly
+haw-haw" of some Englishmen, the "flapping cockatoory" of some
+English-women--Holly had none of that and Holly was his model.
+Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a
+transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a
+Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:
+
+"Mr. Val Dartie?  How's Mrs. Val Dartie?  She's well, I hope."  And he
+saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.
+
+"Prosper Profond--I met you at lunch," said the voice.
+
+"How are you?" murmured Val.
+
+"I'm very well," replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
+inimitable slowness.  "A good devil," Holly had called him.  Well! He
+looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard; a
+sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly
+intelligent.
+
+"Here's a gentleman wants to know you--cousin of yours--Mr. George
+Forsyde."
+
+Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
+lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
+remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at
+the Iseeum Club.
+
+"I used to go racing with your father," George was saying: "How's the
+stud?  Like to buy one of my screws?"
+
+Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen out of
+breeding.  They believed in nothing over here, not even in horses.
+George Forsyte, Prosper Profond!  The devil himself was not more
+disillusioned than those two.
+
+"Didn't know you were a racing man," he said to Monsieur Profond.
+
+"I'm not.  I don't care for it.  I'm a yachtin' man.  I don't care for
+yachtin' either, but I like to see my friends.  I've got some lunch, Mr.
+Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you'd like to 'ave some; not
+much--just a small one--in my car."
+
+"Thanks," said Val; "very good of you.  I'll come along in about quarter
+of an hour."
+
+"Over there.  Mr. Forsyde's comin'," and Monsieur Profond "poinded" with
+a yellow-gloved finger; "small car, with a small lunch"; he moved on,
+groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte following, neat, huge, and
+with his jesting air.
+
+Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly.  George Forsyte, of course, was
+an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val felt
+extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which those two had
+laughed.  The animal had lost reality.
+
+"That 'small' mare"--he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur Profond
+--"what do you see in her?--we must all die!"
+
+And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still!  The Mayfly
+strain--was it any better than any other?  He might just as well have a
+flutter with his money instead.
+
+"No, by gum!" he muttered suddenly, "if it's no good breeding horses,
+it's no good doing anything.  What did I come for?  I'll buy her."
+
+He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the
+stand.  Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers looking as
+if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their lives; tall,
+flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women; young men with an
+air as if trying to take it seriously--two or three of them with only one
+arm.
+
+'Life over here's a game!'  thought Val.  'Muffin bell rings, horses run,
+money changes hands; ring again, run again, money changes back.'
+
+But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to watch
+the Mayfly filly canter down.  She moved well; and he made his way over
+to the "small" car.  The "small" lunch was the sort a man dreams of but
+seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond walked back with
+him to the paddock.
+
+"Your wife's a nice woman," was his surprising remark.
+
+"Nicest woman I know," returned Val dryly.
+
+"Yes," said Monsieur Profond; "she has a nice face.  I admire nice
+women."
+
+Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct in the
+heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the moment.
+
+"Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small cruise."
+
+"Thanks," said Val, in arms again, "she hates the sea."
+
+"So do I," said Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Then why do you yacht?"
+
+The Belgian's eyes smiled.  "Oh! I don't know.  I've done everything;
+it's the last thing I'm doin'."
+
+"It must be d-d expensive.  I should want more reason than that."
+
+Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a heavy
+lower lip.
+
+"I'm an easy-goin' man," he said.
+
+"Were you in the War?" asked Val.
+
+"Ye-es.  I've done that too.  I was gassed; it was a small bit
+unpleasant."  He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity, as if
+he had caught it from his name.
+
+Whether his saying "small" when he ought to have said "little" was
+genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
+evidently capable of anything.
+
+Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
+Monsieur Profond said:
+
+"You goin' to bid?"
+
+Val nodded.  With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of
+faith.  Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the
+forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year to
+which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her
+grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could touch, having
+spent most of what he had realised from his South African farm on his
+establishment in Sussex.  And very soon he was thinking: 'Dash it! she's
+going beyond me!'  His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he dropped out of
+the bidding.  The Mayfly filly passed under the hammer at seven hundred
+and fifty guineas.  He was turning away vexed when the slow voice of
+Monsieur Profond said in his ear:
+
+"Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you take her
+and give her to your wife."
+
+Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour in
+his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.
+
+"I made a small lot of money in the War," began Monsieur Profond in
+answer to that look.  "I 'ad armament shares.  I like to give it away.
+I'm always makin' money.  I want very small lot myself.  I like my
+friends to 'ave it."
+
+"I'll buy her of you at the price you gave," said Val with sudden
+resolution.
+
+"No," said Monsieur Profond.  "You take her.  I don' want her."
+
+"Hang it! one doesn't--"
+
+"Why not?" smiled Monsieur Profond.  "I'm a friend of your family."
+
+"Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars," said Val
+impatiently.
+
+"All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you like
+with her."
+
+"So long as she's yours," said Val.  "I don't mind that."
+
+"That's all right," murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.
+
+Val watched; he might be "a good devil," but then again he might not. He
+saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no more.
+
+He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green Street.
+
+Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering the
+three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague Dartie,
+till almost happily released by a French staircase.  It was to her a
+vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from South Africa
+after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and to have taken a
+fancy to his wife.  Winifred, who in the late seventies, before her
+marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom, pleasure, and fashion,
+confessed her youth outclassed by the donzellas of the day.  They seemed,
+for instance, to regard marriage as an incident, and Winifred sometimes
+regretted that she had not done the same; a second, third, fourth
+incident might have secured her a partner of less dazzling inebriety;
+though, after all, he had left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a
+colonel and unharmed by the War)--none of whom had been divorced as yet.
+The steadiness of her children often amazed one who remembered their
+father; but, as she was fond of believing, they were really all Forsytes,
+favouring herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen.  Her brother's
+"little girl" Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred.  The child was as restless
+as any of these modern young women--"She's a small flame in a draught,"
+Prosper Profond had said one day after dinner--but she did not flop, or
+talk at the top of her voice.  The steady Forsyteism in Winifred's own
+character instinctively resented the feeling in the air, the modern
+girl's habits and her motto: "All's much of a muchness!  Spend, to-morrow
+we shall be poor!"  She found it a saving grace in Fleur that, having set
+her heart on a thing, she had no change of heart until she got
+it--though--what happened after, Fleur was, of course, too young to have
+made evident.  The child was a "very pretty little thing," too, and quite
+a credit to take about, with her mother's French taste and gift for
+wearing clothes; everybody turned to look at Fleur--great consideration
+to Winifred, a lover of the style and distinction which had so cruelly
+deceived her in the case of Montague Dartie.
+
+In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning, Winifred
+dwelt on the family skeleton.
+
+"That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene, Val--it's
+old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing about it--making a
+fuss.  Your Uncle Soames is very particular about that.  So you'll be
+careful."
+
+"Yes!  But it's dashed awkward--Holly's young half-brother is coming to
+live with us while he learns farming.  He's there already."
+
+"Oh!" said Winifred.  "That is a gaff!  What is he like?"
+
+"Only saw him once--at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909; he was
+naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes--a jolly little chap."
+
+Winifred thought that "rather nice," and added comfortably: "Well,
+Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with it.  I shan't tell your
+uncle.  It'll only bother him.  It's a great comfort to have you back, my
+dear boy, now that I'm getting on."
+
+"Getting on!  Why! you're as young as ever.  That chap Profond, Mother,
+is he all right?"
+
+"Prosper Profond!  Oh! the most amusing man I know."
+
+Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.
+
+"That's so like him," murmured Winifred.  "He does all sorts of things."
+
+"Well," said Val shrewdly, "our family haven't been too lucky with that
+kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted for us."
+
+It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute before she
+answered:
+
+"Oh! well!  He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances."
+
+"All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow."
+
+And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and left her
+for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria station.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+JON
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen deeply in
+love, fortunately with something of her own, for the object of her
+passion was the prospect in front of her windows, the cool clear light on
+the green Downs.  It was England again, at last! England more beautiful
+than she had dreamed.  Chance had, in fact, guided the Val Darties to a
+spot where the South Downs had real charm when the sun shone.  Holly had
+enough of her father's eye to apprehend the rare quality of their
+outlines and chalky radiance; to go up there by the ravine-like lane and
+wander along toward Chanctonbury or Amberley, was still a delight which
+she hardly attempted to share with Val, whose admiration of Nature was
+confused by a Forsyte's instinct for getting something out of it, such as
+the condition of the turf for his horses' exercise.
+
+Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she promised
+herself that the first use she would make of Jon would be to take him up
+there, and show him "the view" under this May-day sky.
+
+She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a motherliness not
+exhausted by Val.  A three-day visit to Robin Hill, soon after their
+arrival home, had yielded no sight of him--he was still at school; so
+that her recollection, like Val's, was of a little sunny-haired boy,
+striped blue and yellow, down by the pond.
+
+Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad, embarrassing.
+Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's courtship; the ageing of
+her father, not seen for twenty years, something funereal in his ironic
+gentleness which did not escape one who had much subtle instinct; above
+all, the presence of her stepmother, whom she could still vaguely
+remember as the "lady in grey" of days when she was little and
+grandfather alive and Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because that intruder
+gave her music lessons--all these confused and tantalised a spirit which
+had longed to find Robin Hill untroubled. But Holly was adept at keeping
+things to herself, and all had seemed to go quite well.
+
+Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she was sure
+had trembled.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said, "the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has it? If
+only you could have brought Jolly back with you!  I say, can you stand
+this spiritualistic racket?  When the oak-tree dies, it dies, I'm
+afraid."
+
+From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had let the
+cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.
+
+"Spiritualism--queer word, when the more they manifest the more they
+prove that they've got hold of matter."
+
+"How?" said Holly.
+
+"Why!  Look at their photographs of auric presences.  You must have
+something material for light and shade to fall on before you can take a
+photograph.  No, it'll end in our calling all matter spirit, or all
+spirit matter--I don't know which."
+
+"But don't you believe in survival, Dad?"
+
+Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face impressed
+her deeply.
+
+"Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death.  I've been
+looking into it a bit.  But for the life of me I can't find anything that
+telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from the storehouse of this
+world can't account for just as well.  Wish I could!  Wishes father
+thought but they don't breed evidence." Holly had pressed her lips again
+to his forehead with the feeling that it confirmed his theory that all
+matter was becoming spirit--his brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.
+
+But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been watching,
+unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter from Jon.  It
+was--she decided--the prettiest sight she had ever seen.  Irene, lost as
+it were in the letter of her boy, stood at a window where the light fell
+on her face and her fine grey hair; her lips were moving, smiling, her
+dark eyes laughing, dancing, and the hand which did not hold the letter
+was pressed against her breast.  Holly withdrew as from a vision of
+perfect love, convinced that Jon must be nice.
+
+When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in either hand,
+she was confirmed in her predisposition.  He was a little like Jolly,
+that long-lost idol of her childhood, but eager-looking and less formal,
+with deeper eyes and brighter-coloured hair, for he wore no hat;
+altogether a very interesting "little" brother!
+
+His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance in
+the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him home,
+instead of his driving her.  Shouldn't he have a shot?  They hadn't a car
+at Robin Hill since the War, of course, and he had only driven once, and
+landed up a bank, so she oughtn't to mind his trying.  His laugh, soft
+and infectious, was very attractive, though that word, she had heard, was
+now quite old-fashioned.  When they reached the house he pulled out a
+crumpled letter which she read while he was washing--a quite short
+letter, which must have cost her father many a pang to write.
+"MY DEAR,
+
+"You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of family
+history.  His mother and I think he is too young at present. The boy is
+very dear, and the apple of her eye.  Verbum sapientibus. your loving
+father,
+"J. F."
+
+That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur was
+coming.
+
+After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up the hill.
+They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit grown over with
+brambles and goosepenny.  Milkwort and liverwort starred the green slope,
+the larks sang, and thrushes in the brake, and now and then a gull
+flighting inland would wheel very white against the paling sky, where the
+vague moon was coming up.  Delicious fragrance came to them, as if little
+invisible creatures were running and treading scent out of the blades of
+grass.
+
+Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:
+
+"I say, this is wonderful!  There's no fat on it at all.  Gull's flight
+and sheep-bells"
+
+"'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'!  You're a poet, my dear!"
+
+Jon sighed.
+
+"Oh, Golly!  No go!"
+
+"Try!  I used to at your age."
+
+"Did you?  Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so rotten.  Have you any of
+yours for me to see?"
+
+"My dear," Holly murmured, "I've been married nineteen years.  I only
+wrote verses when I wanted to be."
+
+"Oh!" said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she could see
+was a charming colour.  Was Jon "touched in the wind," then, as Val would
+have called it?  Already?  But, if so, all the better, he would take no
+notice of young Fleur.  Besides, on Monday he would begin his farming.
+And she smiled.  Was it Burns who followed the plough, or only Piers
+Plowman?  Nearly every young man and most young women seemed to be poets
+now, judging from the number of their books she had read out in South
+Africa, importing them from Hatchus and Bumphards; and quite good--oh!
+quite; much better than she had been herself!  But then poetry had only
+really come in since her day--with motor-cars.  Another long talk after
+dinner over a wood fire in the low hall, and there seemed little left to
+know about Jon except anything of real importance.  Holly parted from him
+at his bedroom door, having seen twice over that he had everything, with
+the conviction that she would love him, and Val would like him.  He was
+eager, but did not gush; he was a splendid listener, sympathetic,
+reticent about himself.  He evidently loved their father, and adored his
+mother.  He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games. He saved
+moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them out of doors
+in screws of paper sooner than kill them.  In a word, he was amiable.
+She went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer horribly if anybody hurt
+him; but who would hurt him?
+
+Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of paper and a
+pencil, writing his first "real poem" by the light of a candle because
+there was not enough moon to see by, only enough to make the night seem
+fluttery and as if engraved on silver.  Just the night for Fleur to walk,
+and turn her eyes, and lead on-over the hills and far away.  And Jon,
+deeply furrowed in his ingenuous brow, made marks on the paper and rubbed
+them out and wrote them in again, and did all that was necessary for the
+completion of a work of art; and he had a feeling such as the winds of
+Spring must have, trying their first songs among the coming blossom.  Jon
+was one of those boys (not many) in whom a home-trained love of beauty
+had survived school life.  He had had to keep it to himself, of course,
+so that not even the drawing-master knew of it; but it was there,
+fastidious and clear within him.  And his poem seemed to him as lame and
+stilted as the night was winged.  But he kept it, all the same.  It was a
+"beast," but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible.
+And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show it
+to Mother.'  He slept terribly well, when he did sleep, overwhelmed by
+novelty.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FLEUR
+
+To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered, all
+that had been told Jon was:
+
+"There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end."
+
+For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: "We've got a
+youngster staying with us."
+
+The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore in a
+manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired. They were
+thus introduced by Holly:
+
+"This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon."
+
+Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong sunlight,
+was so confounded by the providential nature of this miracle, that he had
+time to hear Fleur say calmly: "Oh, how do you do?" as if he had never
+seen her, and to understand dimly from the quickest imaginable little
+movement of her head that he never had seen her.  He bowed therefore over
+her hand in an intoxicated manner, and became more silent than the grave.
+He knew better than to speak. Once in his early life, surprised reading
+by a nightlight, he had said fatuously "I was just turning over the
+leaves, Mum," and his mother had replied: "Jon, never tell stories,
+because of your face nobody will ever believe them."
+
+The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
+success of spoken untruth.  He listened therefore to Fleur's swift and
+rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with scones and
+jam, and got away as soon as might be.  They say that in delirium tremens
+you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which suddenly changes shape and
+position.  Jon saw the fixed object; it had dark eyes and passably dark
+hair, and changed its position, but never its shape.  The knowledge that
+between him and that object there was already a secret understanding
+(however impossible to understand) thrilled him so that he waited
+feverishly, and began to copy out his poem--which of course he would
+never dare to--show her--till the sound of horses' hoofs roused him,
+and, leaning from his window, he saw her riding forth with Val.  It was
+clear that she wasted no time, but the sight filled him with grief.  He
+wasted his. If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy, he might have
+been asked to go too.  And from his window he sat and watched them
+disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge once
+more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down.  'Silly brute!' he
+thought; 'I always miss my chances.'
+
+Why couldn't he be self-confident and ready?  And, leaning his chin on
+his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her.  A week-end
+was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it. Did he know any
+one except himself who would have been such a flat? He did not.
+
+He dressed for dinner early, and was first down.  He would miss no more.
+But he missed Fleur, who came down last.  He sat opposite her at dinner,
+and it was terrible--impossible to say anything for fear of saying the
+wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her in the only natural
+way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one with whom in fancy he had
+already been over the hills and far away; conscious, too, all the time,
+that he must seem to her, to all of them, a dumb gawk.  Yes, it was
+terrible!  And she was talking so well--swooping with swift wing this way
+and that.  Wonderful how she had learned an art which he found so
+disgustingly difficult.  She must think him hopeless indeed!
+
+His sister's eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged him
+at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and eager,
+seeming to say, "Oh! for goodness' sake!" obliged him to look at Val,
+where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet--that, at least, had no
+eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.
+
+"Jon is going to be a farmer," he heard Holly say; "a farmer and a poet."
+
+He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow just
+like their father's, laughed, and felt better.
+
+Val recounted the incident of Monsieur Prosper Profond; nothing could
+have been more favourable, for, in relating it, he regarded Holly, who in
+turn regarded him, while Fleur seemed to be regarding with a slight frown
+some thought of her own, and Jon was really free to look at her at last.
+She had on a white frock, very simple and well made; her arms were bare,
+and her hair had a white rose in it.  In just that swift moment of free
+vision, after such intense discomfort, Jon saw her sublimated, as one
+sees in the dark a slender white fruit-tree; caught her like a verse of
+poetry flashed before the eyes of the mind, or a tune which floats out in
+the distance and dies. He wondered giddily how old she was--she seemed so
+much more self-possessed and experienced than himself.  Why mustn't he
+say they had met?  He remembered suddenly his mother's face; puzzled,
+hurt-looking, when she answered: "Yes, they're relations, but we don't
+know them."  Impossible that his mother, who loved beauty, should not
+admire Fleur if she did know her.
+
+Alone with Val after dinner, he sipped port deferentially and answered
+the advances of this new-found brother-in-law.  As to riding (always the
+first consideration with Val) he could have the young chestnut, saddle
+and unsaddle it himself, and generally look after it when he brought it
+in.  Jon said he was accustomed to all that at home, and saw that he had
+gone up one in his host's estimation.
+
+"Fleur," said Val, "can't ride much yet, but she's keen.  Of course, her
+father doesn't know a horse from a cart-wheel.  Does your Dad ride?"
+
+"He used to; but now he's--you know, he's--"  He stopped, so hating the
+word "old."  His father was old, and yet not old; no--never!
+
+"Quite," muttered Val.  "I used to know your brother up at Oxford, ages
+ago, the one who died in the Boer War.  We had a fight in New College
+Gardens.  That was a queer business," he added, musing; "a good deal came
+out of it."
+
+Jon's eyes opened wide; all was pushing him toward historical research,
+when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:
+
+"Come along, you two," and he rose, his heart pushing him toward
+something far more modern.
+
+Fleur having declared that it was "simply too wonderful to stay indoors,"
+they all went out.  Moonlight was frosting the dew, and an old sundial
+threw a long shadow.  Two box hedges at right angles, dark and square,
+barred off the orchard.  Fleur turned through that angled opening.
+
+"Come on!" she called.  Jon glanced at the others, and followed.  She was
+running among the trees like a ghost.  All was lovely and foamlike above
+her, and there was a scent of old trunks, and of nettles.  She vanished.
+He thought he had lost her, then almost ran into her standing quite
+still.
+
+"Isn't it jolly?" she cried, and Jon answered:
+
+"Rather!"
+
+She reached up, twisted off a blossom and, twirling it in her fingers,
+said:
+
+"I suppose I can call you Jon?"
+
+"I should think so just."
+
+"All right!  But you know there's a feud between our families?"
+
+Jon stammered: "Feud?  Why?"
+
+"It's ever so romantic and silly.  That's why I pretended we hadn't met.
+Shall we get up early to-morrow morning and go for a walk before
+breakfast and have it out?  I hate being slow about things, don't you?"
+
+Jon murmured a rapturous assent.
+
+"Six o'clock, then.  I think your mother's beautiful"
+
+Jon said fervently: "Yes, she is."
+
+"I love all kinds of beauty," went on Fleur, "when it's exciting.  I
+don't like Greek things a bit."
+
+"What!  Not Euripides?"
+
+"Euripides?  Oh! no, I can't bear Greek plays; they're so long.  I think
+beauty's always swift.  I like to look at one picture, for instance, and
+then run off.  I can't bear a lot of things together. Look!"  She held up
+her blossom in the moonlight.  "That's better than all the orchard, I
+think."
+
+And, suddenly, with her other hand she caught Jon's.
+
+"Of all things in the world, don't you think caution's the most awful?
+Smell the moonlight!"
+
+She thrust the blossom against his face; Jon agreed giddily that of all
+things in the world caution was the worst, and bending over, kissed the
+hand which held his.
+
+"That's nice and old-fashioned," said Fleur calmly.  "You're frightfully
+silent, Jon.  Still I like silence when it's swift."  She let go his
+hand.  "Did you think I dropped my handkerchief on purpose?"
+
+"No!" cried Jon, intensely shocked.
+
+"Well, I did, of course.  Let's get back, or they'll think we're doing
+this on purpose too."  And again she ran like a ghost among the trees.
+Jon followed, with love in his heart, Spring in his heart, and over all
+the moonlit white unearthly blossom.  They came out where they had gone
+in, Fleur walking demurely.
+
+"It's quite wonderful in there," she said dreamily to Holly.
+
+Jon preserved silence, hoping against hope that she might be thinking it
+swift.
+
+She bade him a casual and demure good-night, which made him think he had
+been dreaming....
+
+In her bedroom Fleur had flung off her gown, and, wrapped in a shapeless
+garment, with the white flower still in her hair, she looked like a
+mousme, sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing by candlelight.
+"DEAREST CHERRY,
+
+"I believe I'm in love.  I've got it in the neck, only the feeling is
+really lower down.  He's a second cousin-such a child, about six months
+older and ten years younger than I am.  Boys always fall in love with
+their seniors, and girls with their juniors or with old men of forty.
+Don't laugh, but his eyes are the truest things I ever saw; and he's
+quite divinely silent!  We had a most romantic first meeting in London
+under the Vospovitch Juno.  And now he's sleeping in the next room and
+the moonlight's on the blossom; and to-morrow morning, before anybody's
+awake, we're going to walk off into Down fairyland.  There's a feud
+between our families, which makes it really exciting.  Yes! and I may
+have to use subterfuge and come on you for invitations--if so, you'll
+know why!  My father doesn't want us to know each other, but I can't help
+that.  Life's too short. He's got the most beautiful mother, with lovely
+silvery hair and a young face with dark eyes.  I'm staying with his
+sister--who married my cousin; it's all mixed up, but I mean to pump her
+to-morrow. We've often talked about love being a spoil-sport; well,
+that's all tosh, it's the beginning of sport, and the sooner you feel it,
+my dear, the better for you.
+
+"Jon (not simplified spelling, but short for Jolyon, which is a name in
+my family, they say) is the sort that lights up and goes out; about five
+feet ten, still growing, and I believe he's going to be a poet.  If you
+laugh at me I've done with you forever.  I perceive all sorts of
+difficulties, but you know when I really want a thing I get it.  One of
+the chief effects of love is that you see the air sort of inhabited, like
+seeing a face in the moon; and you feel--you feel dancey and soft at the
+same time, with a funny sensation--like a continual first sniff of
+orange--blossom--Just above your stays. This is my first, and I feel as
+if it were going to be my last, which is absurd, of course, by all the
+laws of Nature and morality.  If you mock me I will smite you, and if you
+tell anybody I will never forgive you.  So much so, that I almost don't
+think I'll send this letter.  Anyway, I'll sleep over it.  So good-night,
+my Cherry--oh! "Your,
+"FLEUR."
+VIII
+IDYLL ON GRASS
+
+When those two young Forsytes emerged from the chine lane, and set their
+faces east toward the sun, there was not a cloud in heaven, and the Downs
+were dewy.  They had come at a good bat up the slope and were a little
+out of breath; if they had anything to say they did not say it, but
+marched in the early awkwardness of unbreakfasted morning under the songs
+of the larks.  The stealing out had been fun, but with the freedom of the
+tops the sense of conspiracy ceased, and gave place to dumbness.
+
+"We've made one blooming error," said Fleur, when they had gone half a
+mile.  "I'm hungry."
+
+Jon produced a stick of chocolate.  They shared it and their tongues were
+loosened.  They discussed the nature of their homes and previous
+existences, which had a kind of fascinating unreality up on that lonely
+height.  There remained but one thing solid in Jon's past--his mother;
+but one thing solid in Fleur's--her father; and of these figures, as
+though seen in the distance with disapproving faces, they spoke little.
+
+The Down dipped and rose again toward Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of far
+sea came into view, a sparrow-hawk hovered in the sun's eye so that the
+blood-nourished brown of his wings gleamed nearly red.  Jon had a passion
+for birds, and an aptitude for sitting very still to watch them;
+keen-sighted, and with a memory for what interested him, on birds he was
+almost worth listening to.  But in Chanctonbury Ring there were none--its
+great beech temple was empty of life, and almost chilly at this early
+hour; they came out willingly again into the sun on the far side.  It was
+Fleur's turn now.  She spoke of dogs, and the way people treated them.
+It was wicked to keep them on chains! She would like to flog people who
+did that.  Jon was astonished to find her so humanitarian.  She knew a
+dog, it seemed, which some farmer near her home kept chained up at the
+end of his chicken run, in all weathers, till it had almost lost its
+voice from barking!
+
+"And the misery is," she said vehemently, "that if the poor thing didn't
+bark at every one who passes it wouldn't be kept there.  I do think men
+are cunning brutes.  I've let it go twice, on the sly; it's nearly bitten
+me both times, and then it goes simply mad with joy; but it always runs
+back home at last, and they chain it up again.  If I had my way, I'd
+chain that man up."  Jon saw her teeth and her eyes gleam.  "I'd brand
+him on his forehead with the word 'Brute'; that would teach him!"
+
+Jon agreed that it would be a good remedy.
+
+"It's their sense of property," he said, "which makes people chain
+things.  The last generation thought of nothing but property; and that's
+why there was the War."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur, "I never thought of that.  Your people and mine
+quarrelled about property.  And anyway we've all got it--at least, I
+suppose your people have."
+
+"Oh! yes, luckily; I don't suppose I shall be any good at making money."
+
+"If you were, I don't believe I should like you."
+
+Jon slipped his hand tremulously under her arm.  Fleur looked straight
+before her and chanted:
+
+"Jon, Jon, the farmer's son, Stole a pig, and away he run!"
+
+Jon's arm crept round her waist.
+
+"This is rather sudden," said Fleur calmly; "do you often do it?"
+
+Jon dropped his arm.  But when she laughed his arm stole back again; and
+Fleur began to sing:
+
+"O who will oer the downs so free, O who will with me ride? O who will up
+and follow me---"
+
+"Sing, Jon!"
+
+Jon sang.  The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning church
+far away over in Steyning.  They went on from tune to tune, till Fleur
+said:
+
+"My God!  I am hungry now!"
+
+"Oh! I am sorry!"
+
+She looked round into his face.
+
+"Jon, you're rather a darling."
+
+And she pressed his hand against her waist.  Jon almost reeled from
+happiness.  A yellow-and-white dog coursing a hare startled them apart.
+They watched the two vanish down the slope, till Fleur said with a sigh:
+"He'll never catch it, thank goodness!  What's the time? Mine's stopped.
+I never wound it."
+
+Jon looked at his watch.  "By Jove!" he said, "mine's stopped; too."
+
+They walked on again, but only hand in hand.
+
+"If the grass is dry," said Fleur, "let's sit down for half a minute."
+
+Jon took off his coat, and they shared it.
+
+"Smell!  Actually wild thyme!"
+
+With his arm round her waist again, they sat some minutes in silence.
+
+"We are goats!" cried Fleur, jumping up; "we shall be most fearfully
+late, and look so silly, and put them on their guard.  Look here, Jon We
+only came out to get an appetite for breakfast, and lost our way. See?"
+
+"Yes," said Jon.
+
+"It's serious; there'll be a stopper put on us.  Are you a good liar?"
+
+"I believe not very; but I can try."
+
+Fleur frowned.
+
+"You know," she said, "I realize that they don't mean us to be friends."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I told you why."
+
+"But that's silly."
+
+"Yes; but you don't know my father!"
+
+"I suppose he's fearfully fond of you."
+
+"You see, I'm an only child.  And so are you--of your mother.  Isn't it a
+bore?  There's so much expected of one.  By the time they've done
+expecting, one's as good as dead."
+
+"Yes," muttered Jon, "life's beastly short.  One wants to live forever,
+and know everything."
+
+"And love everybody?"
+
+"No," cried Jon; "I only want to love once--you."
+
+"Indeed!  You're coming on!  Oh! Look!  There's the chalk-pit; we can't
+be very far now.  Let's run."
+
+Jon followed, wondering fearfully if he had offended her.
+
+The chalk-pit was full of sunshine and the murmuration of bees. Fleur
+flung back her hair.
+
+"Well," she said, "in case of accidents, you may give me one kiss, Jon,"
+and she pushed her cheek forward.  With ecstasy he kissed that hot soft
+cheek.
+
+"Now, remember!  We lost our way; and leave it to me as much as you can.
+I'm going to be rather beastly to you; it's safer; try and be beastly to
+me!"
+
+Jon shook his head.  "That's impossible."
+
+"Just to please me; till five o'clock, at all events."
+
+"Anybody will be able to see through it," said Jon gloomily.
+
+"Well, do your best.  Look!  There they are!  Wave your hat!  Oh! you
+haven't got one.  Well, I'll cooee!  Get a little away from me, and look
+sulky."
+
+Five minutes later, entering the house and doing his utmost to look
+sulky, Jon heard her clear voice in the dining-room:
+
+"Oh! I'm simply ravenous!  He's going to be a farmer--and he loses his
+way!  The boy's an idiot!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+GOYA
+
+Lunch was over and Soames mounted to the picture-gallery in his house
+near Mapleduram.  He had what Annette called "a grief."  Fleur was not
+yet home.  She had been expected on Wednesday; had wired that it would be
+Friday; and again on Friday that it would be Sunday afternoon; and here
+were her aunt, and her cousins the Cardigans, and this fellow Profond,
+and everything flat as a pancake for the want of her.  He stood before
+his Gauguin--sorest point of his collection. He had bought the ugly great
+thing with two early Matisses before the War, because there was such a
+fuss about those Post-Impressionist chaps.  He was wondering whether
+Profond would take them off his hands--the fellow seemed not to know what
+to do with his money--when he heard his sister's voice say: "I think
+that's a horrid thing, Soames," and saw that Winifred had followed him
+up.
+
+"Oh! you do?" he said dryly; "I gave five hundred for it."
+
+"Fancy!  Women aren't made like that even if they are black."
+
+Soames uttered a glum laugh.  "You didn't come up to tell me that."
+
+"No.  Do you know that Jolyon's boy is staying with Val and his wife?"
+
+Soames spun round.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Yes," drawled Winifred; "he's gone to live with them there while he
+learns farming."
+
+Soames had turned away, but her voice pursued him as he walked up and
+down.  "I warned Val that neither of them was to be spoken to about old
+matters."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me before?"
+
+Winifred shrugged her substantial shoulders.
+
+"Fleur does what she likes.  You've always spoiled her.  Besides, my dear
+boy, what's the harm?"
+
+"The harm!" muttered Soames.  "Why, she--" he checked himself.  The Juno,
+the handkerchief, Fleur's eyes, her questions, and now this delay in her
+return--the symptoms seemed to him so sinister that, faithful to his
+nature, he could not part with them.
+
+"I think you take too much care," said Winifred.  "If I were you, I
+should tell her of that old matter.  It's no good thinking that girls in
+these days are as they used to be.  Where they pick up their knowledge I
+can't tell, but they seem to know everything."
+
+Over Soames' face, closely composed, passed a sort of spasm, and Winifred
+added hastily:
+
+"If you don't like to speak of it, I could for you."
+
+Soames shook his head.  Unless there was absolute necessity the thought
+that his adored daughter should learn of that old scandal hurt his pride
+too much.
+
+"No," he said, "not yet.  Never if I can help it.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear.  Think what people are!"
+
+"Twenty years is a long time," muttered Soames.  "Outside our family,
+who's likely to remember?"
+
+Winifred was silenced.  She inclined more and more to that peace and
+quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in her youth. And,
+since pictures always depressed her, she soon went down again.
+
+Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya and
+the copy of the fresco "La Vendimia."  His acquisition of the real Goya
+rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested interests and
+passions which mesh the bright-winged fly of human life.  The real Goya's
+noble owner's ancestor had come into possession of it during some Spanish
+war--it was in a word loot.  The noble owner had remained in ignorance of
+its value until in the nineties an enterprising critic discovered that a
+Spanish painter named Goya was a genius.  It was only a fair Goya, but
+almost unique in England, and the noble owner became a marked man.
+Having many possessions and that aristocratic culture which, independent
+of mere sensuous enjoyment, is founded on the sounder principle that one
+must know everything and be fearfully interested in life, he had fully
+intended to keep an article which contributed to his reputation while he
+was alive, and to leave it to the nation after he was dead. Fortunately
+for Soames, the House of Lords was violently attacked in 1909, and the
+noble owner became alarmed and angry.  'If,' he said to himself, 'they
+think they can have it both ways they are very much mistaken.  So long as
+they leave me in quiet enjoyment the nation can have some of my pictures
+at my death.  But if the nation is going to bait me, and rob me like
+this, I'm damned if I won't sell the lot. They can't have my private
+property and my public spirit-both.'  He brooded in this fashion for
+several months till one morning, after reading the speech of a certain
+statesman, he telegraphed to his agent to come down and bring Bodkin.  On
+going over the collection Bodkin, than whose opinion on market values
+none was more sought, pronounced that with a free hand to sell to
+America, Germany, and other places where there was an interest in art, a
+lot more money could be made than by selling in England.  The noble
+owner's public spirit--he said--was well known but the pictures were
+unique.  The noble owner put this opinion in his pipe and smoked it for a
+year. At the end of that time he read another speech by the same
+statesman, and telegraphed to his agents: "Give Bodkin a free hand."  It
+was at this juncture that Bodkin conceived the idea which salved the Goya
+and two other unique pictures for the native country of the noble owner.
+With one hand Bodkin proffered the pictures to the foreign market, with
+the other he formed a list of private British collectors.  Having
+obtained what he considered the highest possible bids from across the
+seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the private British collectors,
+and invited them, of their public spirit, to outbid.  In three instances
+(including the Goya) out of twenty-one he was successful.  And why?  One
+of the private collectors made buttons--he had made so many that he
+desired that his wife should be called Lady "Buttons."  He therefore
+bought a unique picture at great cost, and gave it to the nation.  It was
+"part," his friends said, "of his general game."  The second of the
+private collectors was an Americophobe, and bought an unique picture to
+"spite the damned Yanks."  The third of the private collectors was
+Soames, who--more sober than either of the, others--bought after a visit
+to Madrid, because he was certain that Goya was still on the up grade.
+Goya was not booming at the moment, but he would come again; and, looking
+at that portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque in its directness, but with its
+own queer sharp beauty of paint, he was perfectly satisfied still that he
+had made no error, heavy though the price had been--heaviest he had ever
+paid.  And next to it was hanging the copy of "La Vendimia."  There she
+was--the little wretch-looking back at him in her dreamy mood, the mood
+he loved best because he felt so much safer when she looked like that.
+
+He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his nostrils,
+and a voice said:
+
+"Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?"
+
+That Belgian chap, whose mother-as if Flemish blood were not enough--had
+been Armenian!  Subduing a natural irritation, he said:
+
+"Are you a judge of pictures?"
+
+"Well, I've got a few myself."
+
+"Any Post-Impressionists?"
+
+"Ye-es, I rather like them."
+
+"What do you think of this?" said Soames, pointing to the Gauguin.
+
+Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard.
+
+"Rather fine, I think," he said; "do you want to sell it?"
+
+Soames checked his instinctive "Not particularly"--he would not chaffer
+with this alien.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"What do you want for it?"
+
+"What I gave."
+
+"All right," said Monsieur Profond.  "I'll be glad to take that small
+picture.  Post-Impressionists--they're awful dead, but they're amusin'.
+I don' care for pictures much, but I've got some, just a small lot."
+
+"What do you care for?"
+
+Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty nuts."
+
+"You're young," said Soames.  If the fellow must make a generalization,
+he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked solidity!
+
+"I don' worry," replied Monsieur Profond smiling; "we're born, and we
+die.  Half the world's starvin'.  I feed a small lot of babies out in my
+mother's country; but what's the use?  Might as well throw my money in
+the river."
+
+Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya.  He didn't know
+what the fellow wanted.
+
+"What shall I make my cheque for?" pursued Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Five hundred," said Soames shortly; "but I don't want you to take it if
+you don't care for it more than that."
+
+"That's all right," said Monsieur Profond; "I'll be 'appy to 'ave that
+picture."
+
+He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold. Soames
+watched the process uneasily.  How on earth had the fellow known that he
+wanted to sell that picture?  Monsieur Profond held out the cheque.
+
+"The English are awful funny about pictures," he said.  "So are the
+French, so are my people.  They're all awful funny."
+
+"I don't understand you," said Soames stiffly.
+
+"It's like hats," said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, "small or large,
+turnin' up or down--just the fashion.  Awful funny."  And, smiling, he
+drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the smoke of his
+excellent cigar.
+
+Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
+ownership had been called in question.  'He's a cosmopolitan,' he
+thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with Annette,
+and saunter down the lawn toward the river.  What his wife saw in the
+fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak her language;
+and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would have called a
+"small doubt" whether Annette was not too handsome to be walking with any
+one so "cosmopolitan."  Even at that distance he could see the blue fumes
+from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet sunlight; and his grey
+buckskin shoes, and his grey hat--the fellow was a dandy!  And he could
+see the quick turn of his wife's head, so very straight on her desirable
+neck and shoulders.  That turn of her neck always seemed to him a little
+too showy, and in the "Queen of all I survey" manner--not quite
+distinguished.  He watched them walk along the path at the bottom of the
+garden.  A young man in flannels joined them down there--a Sunday caller
+no doubt, from up the river. He went back to his Goya.  He was still
+staring at that replica of Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news, when
+his wife's voice said:
+
+"Mr. Michael Mont, Soames.  You invited him to see your pictures."
+
+There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!
+
+"Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne. Jolly
+day, isn't it?"
+
+Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized his
+visitor.  The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly--he
+seemed always grinning.  Why didn't he grow the rest of those idiotic
+little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall buffoon?  What
+on earth were young men about, deliberately lowering their class with
+these tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers?  Ugh! Affected young
+idiots!  In other respects he was presentable, and his flannels very
+clean.
+
+"Happy to see you!" he said.
+
+The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side, became
+transfixed.  "I say!" he said, "'some' picture!"
+
+Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark to
+the Goya copy.
+
+"Yes," he said dryly, "that's not a Goya.  It's a copy.  I had it painted
+because it reminded me of my daughter."
+
+"By Jove!  I thought I knew the face, sir.  Is she here?"
+
+The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.
+
+"She'll be in after tea," he said.  "Shall we go round the pictures?"
+
+And Soames began that round which never tired him.  He had not
+anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an
+original, but as they passed from section to section, period to period,
+he was startled by the young man's frank and relevant remarks.  Natively
+shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his mask, Soames had not spent
+thirty-eight years over his one hobby without knowing something more
+about pictures than their market values.  He was, as it were, the missing
+link between the artist and the commercial public.  Art for art's sake
+and all that, of course, was cant.  But aesthetics and good taste were
+necessary.  The appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what
+gave a work of art its permanent market value, or in other words made it
+"a work of art."  There was no real cleavage.  And he was sufficiently
+accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by one
+who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: "Good old haystacks!" or of James
+Maris: "Didn't he just paint and paper 'em!  Mathew was the real swell,
+sir; you could dig into his surfaces!"  It was after the young man had
+whistled before a Whistler, with the words, "D'you think he ever really
+saw a naked woman, sir?" that Soames remarked:
+
+"What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?"
+
+"I, sir?  I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that. Then in
+the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock Exchange, snug and
+warm and just noisy enough.  But the Peace knocked that, shares seem off,
+don't they?  I've only been demobbed about a year.  What do you
+recommend, sir?"
+
+"Have you got money?"
+
+"Well," answered the young man, "I've got a father; I kept him alive
+during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now.  Though, of course,
+there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang on to his
+property.  What do you think about that, sir?"
+
+Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.
+
+"The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet.  He's got
+land, you know; it's a fatal disease."
+
+"This is my real Goya," said Soames dryly.
+
+"By George!  He was a swell.  I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled me
+middle stump.  A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous lace.
+He made no compromise with the public taste.  That old boy was 'some'
+explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his day.
+Couldn't he just paint!  He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you think?"
+
+"I have no Velasquez," said Soames.
+
+The young man stared.  "No," he said; "only nations or profiteers can
+afford him, I suppose.  I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations
+sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers by
+force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an Old
+Master--see schedule--must hang it in a public gallery?  There seems
+something in that."
+
+"Shall we go down to tea?" said Soames.
+
+The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull.  'He's not dense,'
+thought Soames, following him off the premises.
+
+Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original "line," and
+the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to admiration
+the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the inglenook below.  He
+alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice to the sunlight
+filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely pallor of brass, the
+old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in pale amber tea; justice to
+Annette in her black lacey dress; there was something of the fair
+Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked the spirituality of that rare
+type; to Winifred's grey-haired, corseted solidity; to Soames, of a
+certain grey and flat-cheeked distinction; to the vivacious Michael Mont,
+pointed in ear and eye; to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance, growing a
+little stout; to Prosper Profond, with his expression as who should say,
+"Well, Mr. Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small party?" finally,
+to Jack Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity betraying
+the moving principle: "I'm English, and I live to be fit."
+
+Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly one
+day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man--they were so
+dull--should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so destroyed
+all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to rest with ten
+thousand other Englishmen without knowing the difference from the one she
+had chosen to repose beside.  "Oh!" she would say of him, in her
+"amusing" way, "Jack keeps himself so fearfully fit; he's never had a
+day's illness in his life.  He went right through the War without a
+finger-ache.  You really can't imagine how fit he is!"  Indeed, he was so
+"fit" that he couldn't see when she was flirting, which was such a
+comfort in a way.  All the same she was quite fond of him, so far as one
+could be of a sports-machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after
+his pattern.  Her eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with
+Prosper Profond. There was no "small" sport or game which Monsieur
+Profond had not played at too, it seemed, from skittles to
+tarpon-fishing, and worn out every one.  Imogen would sometimes wish that
+they had worn out Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them
+with the simple zeal of a school-girl learning hockey; at the age of
+Great-uncle Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing carpet golf
+in her bedroom, and "wiping somebody's eye."
+
+He was telling them now how he had "pipped the pro--a charmin' fellow,
+playin' a very good game," at the last hole this morning; and how he had
+pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying to incite Prosper
+Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea--do him good--"keep him
+fit.
+
+"But what's the use of keepin' fit?" said Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Yes, sir," murmured Michael Mont, "what do you keep fit for?"
+
+"Jack," cried Imogen, enchanted, "what do you keep fit for?"
+
+Jack Cardigan stared with all his health.  The questions were like the
+buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away. During the
+War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that it was over he
+either did not know, or shrank in delicacy from explanation of his moving
+principle.
+
+"But he's right," said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, "there's nothin'
+left but keepin' fit."
+
+The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed unanswered,
+but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.
+
+"Good!" he cried.  "That's the great discovery of the War.  We all
+thought we were progressing--now we know we're only changing."
+
+"For the worse," said Monsieur Profond genially.
+
+"How you are cheerful, Prosper!" murmured Annette.
+
+"You come and play tennis!" said Jack Cardigan; "you've got the hump.
+We'll soon take that down.  D'you play, Mr. Mont?"
+
+"I hit the ball about, sir."
+
+At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of
+preparation for the future which guided his existence.
+
+"When Fleur comes--" he heard Jack Cardigan say.
+
+Ah! and why didn't she come?  He passed through drawing-room, hall, and
+porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car. All was
+still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the air.  There
+were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by the sunlight.
+Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had waited in such agony
+with her life and her mother's balanced in his hands, came to him
+sharply.  He had saved her then, to be the flower of his life.  And now!
+was she going to give him trouble--pain--give him trouble?  He did not
+like the look of things!  A blackbird broke in on his reverie with an
+evening song--a great big fellow up in that acacia-tree.  Soames had
+taken quite an interest in his birds of late years; he and Fleur would
+walk round and watch them; her eyes were sharp as needles, and she knew
+every nest.  He saw her dog, a retriever, lying on the drive in a patch
+of sunlight, and called to him.  "Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!"
+The dog came slowly with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid a
+pat on his head. The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur for
+him; no more, no less.  'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too fond!'  He
+was like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea.  Uninsured again--as in
+that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and jealous in
+the wilderness of London, longing for that woman--his first wife--the
+mother of this infernal boy.  Ah!  There was the car at last!  It drew
+up, it had luggage, but no Fleur.
+
+"Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path."
+
+Walking all those miles?  Soames stared.  The man's face had the
+beginning of a smile on it.  What was he grinning at?  And very quickly
+he turned, saying, "All right, Sims!" and went into the house.  He
+mounted to the picture-gallery once more.  He had from there a view of
+the river bank, and stood with his eyes fixed on it, oblivious of the
+fact that it would be an hour at least before her figure showed there.
+Walking up! And that fellow's grin!  The boy--! He turned abruptly from
+the window.  He couldn't spy on her.  If she wanted to keep things from
+him--she must; he could not spy on her. His heart felt empty, and
+bitterness mounted from it into his very mouth.  The staccato shouts of
+Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball, the laugh of young Mont rose in the
+stillness and came in.  He hoped they were making that chap Profond run.
+And the girl in "La Vendimia" stood with her arm akimbo and her dreamy
+eyes looking past him. 'I've done all I could for you,' he thought,
+'since you were no higher than my knee.  You aren't going to--to--hurt
+me, are you?'
+
+But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to
+tone down.  'There's no real life in it,' thought Soames.  'Why doesn't
+she come?'
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+TRIO
+
+Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth
+generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end prolonged unto the
+ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to
+snapping-point.  Never had Fleur been so "fine," Holly so watchful, Val
+so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed.  What he learned of
+farming in that week might have been balanced on the point of a penknife
+and puffed off.  He, whose nature was essentially averse from intrigue,
+and whose adoration of Fleur disposed him to think that any need for
+concealing it was "skittles," chafed and fretted, yet obeyed, taking what
+relief he could in the few moments when they were alone.  On Thursday,
+while they were standing in the bay window of the drawing-room, dressed
+for dinner, she said to him:
+
+"Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if you were
+to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me down, and
+just get back here by the last train, after.  You were going home anyway,
+weren't you?"
+
+Jon nodded.
+
+"Anything to be with you," he said; "only why need I pretend--"
+
+Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:
+
+"You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me.  It's serious
+about our people.  We've simply got to be secret at present, if we want
+to be together."  The door was opened, and she added loudly: "You are a
+duffer, Jon."
+
+Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge about
+a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.
+
+On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning out
+of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of Paddington
+station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger-nail tapping on his
+door.  He rushed to it and listened.  Again the sound. It was a nail.  He
+opened.  Oh! What a lovely thing came in!
+
+"I wanted to show you my fancy dress," it said, and struck an attitude at
+the foot of his bed.
+
+Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door.  The apparition wore
+white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a
+wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist.
+
+It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a fan
+which touched its head.
+
+"This ought to be a basket of grapes," it whispered, "but I haven't got
+it here.  It's my Goya dress.  And this is the attitude in the picture.
+Do you like it?"
+
+"It's a dream."
+
+The apparition pirouetted.  "Touch it, and see."
+
+Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.
+
+"Grape colour," came the whisper, "all grapes--La Vendimia--the vintage."
+
+Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up, with
+adoring eyes.
+
+"Oh! Jon," it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again,
+and, gliding out, was gone.
+
+Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed. How
+long he stayed like that he did not know.  The little noises--of the
+tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling--as in a dream--went on about
+him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled and
+whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air. And his
+forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place between the
+brows, like the imprint of a flower.  Love filled his soul, that love of
+boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much, would not brush the
+down off for the world, and must become in time a fragrant memory--a
+searing passion--a humdrum mateship--or, once in many times, vintage full
+and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.
+
+Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to show
+what long marches lay between him and his great-great-grandfather, the
+first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea.  Jon was sensitive as a girl,
+more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the day; imaginative as one
+of his half-sister June's "lame duck" painters; affectionate as a son of
+his father and his mother naturally would be.  And yet, in his inner
+tissue, there was something of the old founder of his family, a secret
+tenacity of soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to
+know when he was beaten.  Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a
+bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark, and
+been but normally unhappy there.  Only with his mother had he, up till
+then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home to Robin
+Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had said that he
+must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had never yet kept
+anything, must not even tell her that they had met again, unless he found
+that she knew already.  So intolerable did this seem to him that he was
+very near to telegraphing an excuse and staying up in London.  And the
+first thing his mother said to him was:
+
+"So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon. What
+is she like on second thoughts?"
+
+With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:
+
+"Oh! awfully jolly, Mum."
+
+Her arm pressed his.
+
+Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to falsify
+Fleur's fears and to release his soul.  He turned to look at her, but
+something in her smiling face--something which only he perhaps would have
+caught--stopped the words bubbling up in him. Could fear go with a smile?
+If so, there was fear in her face.  And out of Jon tumbled quite other
+words, about farming, Holly, and the Downs.  Talking fast, he waited for
+her to come back to Fleur.  But she did not.  Nor did his father mention
+her, though of course he, too, must know.  What deprivation, and killing
+of reality was in his silence about Fleur--when he was so full of her;
+when his mother was so full of Jon, and his father so full of his mother!
+And so the trio spent the evening of that Saturday.
+
+After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
+liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing up
+where his fingers had run through it.  He gazed at his mother while she
+played, but he saw Fleur--Fleur in the moonlit orchard, Fleur in the
+sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying, whispering,
+stooping, kissing his forehead.  Once, while he listened, he forgot
+himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair. What was Dad
+looking like that for?  The expression on his face was so sad and
+puzzling.  It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that he got up and
+went and sat on the arm of his father's chair.  From there he could not
+see his face; and again he saw Fleur--in his mother's hands, slim and
+white on the keys, in the profile of her face and her powdery hair; and
+down the long room in the open window where the May night walked outside.
+
+When he went up to bed his mother came into his room.  She stood at the
+window, and said:
+
+"Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
+wonderfully.  I always think they look beautiful under a dropping moon.
+I wish you had known your grandfather, Jon."
+
+"Were you married to father when he was alive?" asked Jon suddenly.
+
+"No, dear; he died in '92--very old--eighty-five, I think."
+
+"Is Father like him?"
+
+"A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid."
+
+"I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?"
+
+"One of June's 'lame ducks.'  But it's quite good."
+
+Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm.  "Tell me about the family
+quarrel, Mum."
+
+He felt her arm quivering.  "No, dear; that's for your Father some day,
+if he thinks fit."
+
+"Then it was serious," said Jon, with a catch in his breath.
+
+"Yes."  And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether the
+arm or the hand within it were quivering most.
+
+"Some people," said Irene softly, "think the moon on her back is evil; to
+me she's always lovely.  Look at those cypress shadows! Jon, Father says
+we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months. Would you like?"
+
+Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp and so
+confused.  Italy with his mother!  A fortnight ago it would have been
+perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that the sudden
+suggestion had to do with Fleur.  He stammered out:
+
+"Oh! yes; only--I don't know.  Ought I--now I've just begun?  I'd like to
+think it over."
+
+Her voice answered, cool and gentle:
+
+"Yes, dear; think it over.  But better now than when you've begun farming
+seriously.  Italy with you!  It would be nice!"
+
+Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.
+
+"Do you think you ought to leave Father?" he said feebly, feeling very
+mean.
+
+"Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least before
+you settle down to anything."
+
+The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes--he knew--that his father
+and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he himself.  They
+wanted to keep him from Fleur.  His heart hardened. And, as if she felt
+that process going on, his mother said:
+
+"Good-night, darling.  Have a good sleep and think it over.  But it would
+be lovely!"
+
+She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face.  Jon
+stood feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty little boy;
+sore because he was not loving, and because he was justified in his own
+eyes.
+
+But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed through
+the dressing-room between it and her husband's.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He will think it over, Jolyon."
+
+Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said quietly:
+
+"You had better let me tell him, and have done with it.  After all, Jon
+has the instincts of a gentleman.  He has only to understand--"
+
+"Only!  He can't understand; that's impossible."
+
+"I believe I could have at his age."
+
+Irene caught his hand.  "You were always more of a realist than Jon; and
+never so innocent."
+
+"That's true," said Jolyon.  "It's queer, isn't it?  You and I would tell
+our stories to the world without a particle of shame; but our own boy
+stumps us."
+
+"We've never cared whether the world approves or not."
+
+"Jon would not disapprove of us!"
+
+"Oh! Jolyon, yes.  He's in love, I feel he's in love.  And he'd say: 'My
+mother once married without love!  How could she have!'  It'll seem to
+him a crime!  And so it was!"
+
+Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:
+
+"Ah! why on earth are we born young?  Now, if only we were born old and
+grew younger year by year, we should understand how things happen, and
+drop all our cursed intolerance.  But you know if the boy is really in
+love, he won't forget, even if he goes to Italy.  We're a tenacious
+breed; and he'll know by instinct why he's being sent. Nothing will
+really cure him but the shock of being told."
+
+"Let me try, anyway."
+
+Jolyon stood a moment without speaking.  Between this devil and this deep
+sea--the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of losing his wife
+for two months--he secretly hoped for the devil; yet if she wished for
+the deep sea he must put up with it.  After all, it would be training for
+that departure from which there would be no return. And, taking her in
+his arms, he kissed her eyes, and said:
+
+"As you will, my love."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+DUET
+
+That "small" emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with
+extinction.  Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his time
+and a full week after, as it seemed to him.  He stood at the appointed
+bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris tweed suit
+exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart. He read the
+names of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at last, to avoid
+being regarded with suspicion by the book-stall clerk. It was called "The
+Heart of the Trail!" which must mean something, though it did not seem
+to.  He also bought "The Lady's Mirror" and "The Landsman."  Every minute
+was an hour long, and full of horrid imaginings.  After nineteen had
+passed, he saw her with a bag and a porter wheeling her luggage.  She
+came swiftly; she came cool.  She greeted him as if he were a brother.
+
+"First class," she said to the porter, "corner seats; opposite."
+
+Jon admired her frightful self-possession.
+
+"Can't we get a carriage to ourselves," he whispered.
+
+"No good; it's a stopping train.  After Maidenhead perhaps.  Look
+natural, Jon."
+
+Jon screwed his features into a scowl.  They got in--with two other
+beasts!--oh! heaven!  He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his confusion.
+The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there, and looking as if
+he knew all about it into the bargain.
+
+Fleur hid herself behind "The Lady's Mirror."  Jon imitated her behind
+"The Landsman."  The train started.  Fleur let "The Lady's Mirror" fall
+and leaned forward.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+"It's seemed about fifteen days."
+
+She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.
+
+"Look natural," murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of laughter.
+It hurt him.  How could he look natural with Italy hanging over him?  He
+had meant to break it to her gently, but now he blurted it out.
+
+"They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months."
+
+Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her lips. "Oh!"
+she said.  It was all, but it was much.
+
+That "Oh!" was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing ready for
+riposte.  It came.
+
+"You must go!"
+
+"Go?" said Jon in a strangled voice.
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But--two months--it's ghastly."
+
+"No," said Fleur, "six weeks.  You'll have forgotten me by then. We'll
+meet in the National Gallery the day after you get back."
+
+Jon laughed.
+
+"But suppose you've forgotten me," he muttered into the noise of the
+train.
+
+Fleur shook her head.
+
+"Some other beast--" murmured Jon.
+
+Her foot touched his.
+
+"No other beast," she said, lifting "The Lady's Mirror."
+
+The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.
+
+'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at all.'
+
+The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.
+
+"I never let go," she said; "do you?"
+
+Jon shook his head vehemently.
+
+"Never!" he said.  "Will you write to me?"
+
+"No; but you can--to my Club."
+
+She had a Club; she was wonderful!
+
+"Did you pump Holly?" he muttered.
+
+"Yes, but I got nothing.  I didn't dare pump hard."
+
+"What can it be?" cried Jon.
+
+"I shall find out all right."
+
+A long silence followed till Fleur said: "This is Maidenhead; stand by,
+Jon!"
+
+The train stopped.  The remaining passenger got out.  Fleur drew down her
+blind.
+
+"Quick!" she cried.  "Hang out!  Look as much of a beast as you can."
+
+Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he scowled like
+that!  An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the handle.  It turned,
+but the door would not open.  The train moved, the young lady darted to
+another carriage.
+
+"What luck!" cried Jon.  "It Jammed."
+
+"Yes," said Fleur; "I was holding it."
+
+The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.
+
+"Look out for the corridor," she whispered; "and--quick!"
+
+Her lips met his.  And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten seconds,
+Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond, that, when he was again
+sitting opposite that demure figure, he was pale as death.  He heard her
+sigh, and the sound seemed to him the most precious he had ever heard--an
+exquisite declaration that he meant something to her.
+
+"Six weeks isn't really long," she said; "and you can easily make it six
+if you keep your head out there, and never seem to think of me."
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+"This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't you see?
+If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop being ridiculous
+about it.  Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain; there's a girl in a Goya
+picture at Madrid who's like me, Father says.  Only she isn't--we've got
+a copy of her."
+
+It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog.  "I'll make
+it Spain," he said, "Mother won't mind; she's never been there. And my
+Father thinks a lot of Goya."
+
+"Oh! yes, he's a painter--isn't he?"
+
+"Only water-colour," said Jon, with honesty.
+
+"When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to Caversham
+lock and wait for me.  I'll send the car home and we'll walk by the
+towing-path."
+
+Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the world
+well lost, and one eye on the corridor.  But the train seemed to run
+twice as fast now, and its sound was almost lost in that of Jon's
+sighing.
+
+"We're getting near," said Fleur; "the towing-path's awfully exposed. One
+more!  Oh! Jon, don't forget me."
+
+Jon answered with his kiss.  And very soon, a flushed, distracted-looking
+youth could have been seen--as they say--leaping from the train and
+hurrying along the platform, searching his pockets for his ticket.
+
+When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond
+Caversham lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure of
+equanimity.  If they had to part, he would not make a scene!  A breeze by
+the bright river threw the white side of the willow leaves up into the
+sunlight, and followed those two with its faint rustle.
+
+"I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy," said Fleur.  "Did you look
+pretty natural as you went out?"
+
+"I don't know.  What is natural?"
+
+"It's natural to you to look seriously happy.  When I first saw you I
+thought you weren't a bit like other people."
+
+"Exactly what I thought when I saw you.  I knew at once I should never
+love anybody else."
+
+Fleur laughed.
+
+"We're absurdly young.  And love's young dream is out of date, Jon.
+Besides, it's awfully wasteful.  Think of all the fun you might have. You
+haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really.  And there's me.  I wonder!"
+
+Confusion came on Jon's spirit.  How could she say such things just as
+they were going to part?
+
+"If you feel like that," he said, "I can't go.  I shall tell Mother that
+I ought to try and work.  There's always the condition of the world!"
+
+"The condition of the world!"
+
+Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
+
+"But there is," he said; "think of the people starving!"
+
+Fleur shook her head.  "No, no, I never, never will make myself miserable
+for nothing."
+
+"Nothing!  But there's an awful state of things, and of course one ought
+to help."
+
+"Oh! yes, I know all that.  But you can't help people, Jon; they're
+hopeless.  When you pull them out they only get into another hole. Look
+at them, still fighting and plotting and struggling, though they're dying
+in heaps all the time.  Idiots!"
+
+"Aren't you sorry for them?"
+
+"Oh! sorry--yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy about it;
+that's no good."
+
+And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each other's
+natures.
+
+"I think people are brutes and idiots," said Fleur stubbornly.
+
+"I think they're poor wretches," said Jon.  It was as if they had
+quarrelled--and at this supreme and awful moment, with parting visible
+out there in that last gap of the willows!
+
+"Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me."
+
+Jon stood still.  Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs
+trembled.  Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.
+
+"I must believe in things," said Jon with a sort of agony; "we're all
+meant to enjoy life."
+
+Fleur laughed.  "Yes; and that's what you won't do, if you don't take
+care.  But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself wretched.
+There are lots of people like that, of course."
+
+She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned.  Was it Fleur
+thus staring at the water?  Jon had an unreal feeling as if he were
+passing through the scene in a book where the lover has to choose between
+love and duty.  But just then she looked round at him. Never was anything
+so intoxicating as that vivacious look.  It acted on him exactly as the
+tug of a chain acts on a dog--brought him up to her with his tail wagging
+and his tongue out.
+
+"Don't let's be silly," she said, "time's too short.  Look, Jon, you can
+just see where I've got to cross the river.  There, round the bend, where
+the woods begin."
+
+Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the trees
+--and felt his heart sink.
+
+"I mustn't dawdle any more.  It's no good going beyond the next hedge, it
+gets all open.  Let's get on to it and say good-bye."
+
+They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge, where
+the may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.
+
+"My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street, Piccadilly.  Letters there
+will be quite safe, and I'm almost always up once a week."
+
+Jon nodded.  His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared straight
+before him.
+
+"To-day's the twenty-third of May," said Fleur; "on the ninth of July I
+shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne' at three o'clock; will
+you?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"If you feel as bad as I it's all right.  Let those people pass!"
+
+A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday
+fashion.
+
+The last of them passed the wicket gate.
+
+"Domesticity!" said Fleur, and blotted herself against the hawthorn
+hedge.  The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink cluster
+brushed her cheek.  Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.
+
+"Good-bye, Jon."  For a second they stood with hands hard clasped. Then
+their lips met for the third time, and when they parted Fleur broke away
+and fled through the wicket gate.  Jon stood where she had left him, with
+his forehead against that pink cluster.  Gone!  For an eternity--for
+seven weeks all but two days!  And here he was, wasting the last sight of
+her!  He rushed to the gate.  She was walking swiftly on the heels of the
+straggling children.  She turned her head, he saw her hand make a little
+flitting gesture; then she sped on, and the trailing family blotted her
+out from his view.
+
+The words of a comic song--
+
+        "Paddington groan-worst ever known
+         He gave a sepulchral Paddington groan--"
+
+came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading station.
+All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with "The Heart of
+the Trail" open on his knee, knitting in his head a poem so full of
+feeling that it would not rhyme.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+CAPRICE
+
+Fleur sped on.  She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and wanted
+all her wits about her when she got in.  She passed the islands, the
+station, and hotel, and was about to take the ferry, when she saw a skiff
+with a young man standing up in it, and holding to the bushes.
+
+"Miss Forsyte," he said; "let me put you across.  I've come on purpose."
+
+She looked at him in blank amazement.
+
+"It's all right, I've been having tea with your people.  I thought I'd
+save you the last bit.  It's on my way, I'm just off back to Pangbourne.
+My name's Mont.  I saw you at the picture-gallery--you remember--when
+your father invited me to see his pictures."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur; "yes--the handkerchief."
+
+To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped down
+into the skiff.  Still emotional, and a little out of breath, she sat
+silent; not so the young man.  She had never heard any one say so much in
+so short a time.  He told her his age, twenty-four; his weight, ten stone
+eleven; his place of residence, not far away; described his sensations
+under fire, and what it felt like to be gassed; criticized the Juno,
+mentioned his own conception of that goddess; commented on the Goya copy,
+said Fleur was not too awfully like it; sketched in rapidly the condition
+of England; spoke of Monsieur Profond--or whatever his name was--as "an
+awful sport"; thought her father had some "ripping" pictures and some
+rather "dug-up"; hoped he might row down again and take her on the river
+because he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave
+her his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet together some
+time--considered the name Fleur Forsyte simply topping; cursed his people
+for giving him the name of Michael on the top of Mont; outlined his
+father, and said that if she wanted a good book she should read "Job";
+his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.
+
+"But Job didn't have land," Fleur murmured; "he only had flocks and herds
+and moved on."
+
+"Ah!" answered Michael Mont, "I wish my gov'nor would move on.  Not that
+I want his land.  Land's an awful bore in these days, don't you think?"
+
+"We never have it in my family," said Fleur.  "We have everything else.
+I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental farm in Dorset,
+because we came from there originally, but it cost him more than it made
+him happy."
+
+"Did he sell it?"
+
+"No; he kept it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because nobody would buy it."
+
+"Good for the old boy!"
+
+"No, it wasn't good for him.  Father says it soured him.  His name was
+Swithin."
+
+"What a corking name!"
+
+"Do you know that we're getting farther off, not nearer?  This river
+flows."
+
+"Splendid!" cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; "it's good to meet a
+girl who's got wit."
+
+"But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural."
+
+Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.
+
+"Look out!" cried Fleur.  "Your scull!"
+
+"All right!  It's thick enough to bear a scratch."
+
+"Do you mind sculling?" said Fleur severely.  "I want to get in."
+
+"Ah!" said Mont; "but when you get in, you see, I shan't see you any more
+to-day.  Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on her bed after
+saying her prayers.  Don't you bless the day that gave you a French
+mother, and a name like yours?"
+
+"I like my name, but Father gave it me.  Mother wanted me called
+Marguerite."
+
+"Which is absurd.  Do you mind calling me M. M.  and letting me call you
+F. F.?  It's in the spirit of the age."
+
+"I don't mind anything, so long as I get in."
+
+Mont caught a little crab, and answered: "That was a nasty one!"
+
+"Please row."
+
+"I am."  And he did for several strokes, looking at her with rueful
+eagerness.  "Of course, you know," he ejaculated, pausing, "that I came
+to see you, not your father's pictures."
+
+Fleur rose.
+
+"If you don't row, I shall get out and swim."
+
+"Really and truly?  Then I could come in after you."
+
+"Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once."
+
+When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and grasping
+his hair with both hands, looked at her.
+
+Fleur smiled.
+
+"Don't!" cried the irrepressible Mont.  "I know you're going to say:
+'Out, damned hair!'"
+
+Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand.  "Good-bye, Mr. M.M.!"
+she called, and was gone among the rose-trees.  She looked at her
+wrist-watch and the windows of the house.  It struck her as curiously
+uninhabited.  Past six!  The pigeons were just gathering to roost, and
+sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy feathers, and beyond in a
+shower on the top boughs of the woods.  The click of billiard-balls came
+from the ingle-nook--Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a faint rustling, too, from
+an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in this old English garden.  She
+reached the verandah and was passing in, but stopped at the sound of
+voices from the drawing-room to her left.  Mother!  Monsieur Profond!
+From behind the verandah screen which fenced the ingle-nook she heard
+these words:
+
+"I don't, Annette."
+
+Did Father know that he called her mother "Annette"?  Always on the side
+of her Father--as children are ever on one side or the other in houses
+where relations are a little strained--she stood, uncertain. Her mother
+was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly metallic voice--one word she
+caught: "Demain."  And Profond's answer: "All right."  Fleur frowned.  A
+little sound came out into the stillness. Then Profond's voice: "I'm
+takin' a small stroll."
+
+Fleur darted through the window into the morning-room.  There he came
+from the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn; and the
+click of billiard-balls which, in listening for other sounds, she had
+ceased to hear, began again.  She shook herself, passed into the hall,
+and opened the drawing-room door.  Her mother was sitting on the sofa
+between the windows, her knees crossed, her head resting on a cushion,
+her lips half parted, her eyes half closed.  She looked extraordinarily
+handsome.
+
+"Ah!  Here you are, Fleur!  Your father is beginning to fuss."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In the picture-gallery.  Go up!"
+
+"What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?"
+
+"To-morrow?  I go up to London with your aunt."
+
+"I thought you might be.  Will you get me a quite plain parasol?" What
+colour?"
+
+"Green.  They're all going back, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, all; you will console your father.  Kiss me, then."
+
+Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead, and
+went out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in the other
+corner.  She ran up-stairs.
+
+Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the
+regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard imposed
+upon herself.  She claimed to regulate her own life, not those of others;
+besides, an unerring instinct for what was likely to advantage her own
+case was already at work.  In a disturbed domestic atmosphere the heart
+she had set on Jon would have a better chance. None the less was she
+offended, as a flower by a crisping wind.  If that man had really been
+kissing her mother it was--serious, and her father ought to know.
+"Demain!"  "All right!"  And her mother going up to Town!  She turned
+into her bedroom and hung out of the window to cool her face, which had
+suddenly grown very hot.  Jon must be at the station by now!  What did
+her father know about Jon?  Probably everything--pretty nearly!
+
+She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time, and
+ran up to the gallery.
+
+Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens--the
+picture he loved best.  He did not turn at the sound of the door, but she
+knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt.  She came up softly behind
+him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his shoulder
+till her cheek lay against his.  It was an advance which had never yet
+failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst. "Well," he said
+stonily, "so you've come!"
+
+"Is that all," murmured Fleur, "from a bad parent?" And she rubbed her
+cheek against his.
+
+Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.
+
+"Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and off?"
+
+"Darling, it was very harmless."
+
+"Harmless!  Much you know what's harmless and what isn't."
+
+Fleur dropped her arms.
+
+"Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it."
+
+And she went over to the window-seat.
+
+Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet. He
+looked very grey.  'He has nice small feet,' she thought, catching his
+eye, at once averted from her.
+
+"You're my only comfort," said Soames suddenly, "and you go on like
+this."
+
+Fleur's heart began to beat.
+
+"Like what, dear?"
+
+Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it, might
+have been called furtive.
+
+"You know what I told you," he said.  "I don't choose to have anything to
+do with that branch of our family."
+
+"Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't."
+
+Soames turned on his heel.
+
+"I'm not going into the reasons," he said; "you ought to trust me,
+Fleur!"
+
+The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon, and
+was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot.  Unconsciously she had
+assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of the other,
+with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her chest, and its
+hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her that was not
+involuted, and yet--in spite of all--she retained a certain grace.
+
+"You knew my wishes," Soames went on, "and yet you stayed on there four
+days.  And I suppose that boy came with you to-day."
+
+Fleur kept her eyes on him.
+
+"I don't ask you anything," said Soames; "I make no inquisition where
+you're concerned."
+
+Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on her
+hands.  The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched, quite
+still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-balls
+mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack Cardigan had
+turned the light up.
+
+"Will it make you any happier," she said suddenly, "if I promise you not
+to see him for say--the next six weeks?" She was not prepared for a sort
+of tremble in the blankness of his voice.
+
+"Six weeks?  Six years--sixty years more like.  Don't delude yourself,
+Fleur; don't delude yourself!"
+
+Fleur turned in alarm.
+
+"Father, what is it?"
+
+Soames came close enough to see her face.
+
+"Don't tell me," he said, "that you're foolish enough to have any feeling
+beyond caprice.  That would be too much!"  And he laughed.
+
+Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it is
+deep!  Oh! what is it?'  And putting her hand through his arm she said
+lightly:
+
+"No, of course; caprice.  Only, I like my caprices and I don't like
+yours, dear."
+
+"Mine!" said Soames bitterly, and turned away.
+
+The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the river.
+The trees had lost all gaiety of colour.  She felt a sudden hunger for
+Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again on hers.  And
+pressing her arms tight across her breast she forced out a little light
+laugh.
+
+"O la! la!  What a small fuss! as Profond would say.  Father, I don't
+like that man."
+
+She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.
+
+"You don't?" he said.  "Why?"
+
+"Nothing," murmured Fleur; "just caprice!"
+
+"No," said Soames; "not caprice!" And he tore what was in his hands
+across.  "You're right.  I don't like him either!"
+
+"Look!" said Fleur softly.  "There he goes!  I hate his shoes; they don't
+make any noise."
+
+Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his side
+pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced up at the
+sky, as if saying: "I don't think much of that small moon."
+
+Fleur drew back.  "Isn't he a great cat?" she whispered; and the sharp
+click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had capped the cat,
+the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: "In off the red!"
+
+Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in his
+beard.  What was it?  Oh! yes, from "Rigoletto": "Donna a mobile."  Just
+what he would think!  She squeezed her father's arm.
+
+"Prowling!" she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house.  It was
+past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and night-still and
+lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent clinging on the
+riverside air.  A blackbird suddenly burst out.  Jon would be in London
+by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the Serpentine, thinking of her!  A
+little sound beside her made her turn her eyes; her father was again
+tearing the paper in his hands.  Fleur saw it was a cheque.
+
+"I shan't sell him my Gauguin," he said.  "I don't know what your aunt
+and Imogen see in him."
+
+"Or Mother."
+
+"Your mother!" said Soames.
+
+'Poor Father!' she thought.  'He never looks happy--not really happy. I
+don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have to, when Jon
+comes back.  Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'
+
+"I'm going to dress," she said.
+
+In her room she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress.  It was of gold
+tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the ankles,
+a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes, and a
+gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold bells,
+especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she pealed.  When
+she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could not see her; it
+even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man Michael Mont would not
+have a view.  But the gong had sounded, and she went down.
+
+She made a sensation in the drawing-room.  Winifred thought it "Most
+amusing."  Imogen was enraptured.  Jack Cardigan called it "stunning,"
+"ripping," "topping," and "corking."
+
+Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: "That's a nice small
+dress!"  Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at her, and said
+nothing.  It remained for her father to apply the test of common sense.
+"What did you put on that thing for?  You're not going to dance."
+
+Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.
+
+"Caprice!"
+
+Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred. Jack
+Cardigan took her mother.  Prosper Profond took Imogen.  Fleur went in by
+herself, with her bells jingling....
+
+The "small" moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft and
+warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the billion
+caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men and women.
+Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white shoulder, fit as a
+flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for anything but baby's
+slumber.  For so many lay awake, or dreamed, teased by the criss-cross of
+the world.
+
+The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
+meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see; and
+the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones.  Pheasants in the tall trees
+of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above the gravel-pit
+at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and the sparrows of
+Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind.
+The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters, scraped at her
+straw a little; and the few night-flitting things--bats, moths,
+owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night lay in
+the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still.  Men and women,
+alone, riding the hobby-horses of anxiety or love, burned their wavering
+tapers of dream and thought into the lonely hours.
+
+Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled chime of
+twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an aspen's
+leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the distant
+rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which none can put
+a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of uncatalogued
+emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed
+Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world
+which had once suited their embodied spirits.  But Fleur heeded not these
+sounds; her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing from
+railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious of his
+forbidden image, and the sound of his voice, which was taboo.  And she
+crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of the riverside night
+that moment when his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her cheek.
+Long she leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings at life's
+candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the
+lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there is
+no open flame.  But at last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting her
+bells, drew quickly in.
+
+Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames, wakeful
+too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken from stars, or
+the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear such sounds.
+
+'Caprice!' he thought.  'I can't tell.  She's wilful.  What shall I do?
+Fleur!'
+
+And long into the "small" night he brooded.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+I
+MOTHER AND SON
+
+To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly would
+scarcely have been adequate.  He went as a well-natured dog goes for a
+walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on the lawn.  He
+went looking back at it.  Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are
+wont to sulk.  But Jon had little sulkiness in his composition.  He
+adored his mother, and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy by
+his simply saying: "I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to Italy so
+many times; I'd like it new to both of us."
+
+The fellow was subtle besides being naive.  He never forgot that he was
+going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
+therefore show no sign of wishing to do so.  For one with so enticing a
+mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
+companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food, and
+thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most travelled
+Englishman.  Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for
+he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could
+concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the
+priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros,
+cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening
+plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons,
+mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a
+fascinating land.
+
+It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
+Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not English,
+was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen.  He
+felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view of
+things than himself.  He confided to his mother that he must be an
+unsociable beast--it was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk
+about the things people did talk about.  To which Irene had replied
+simply:
+
+"Yes, Jon, I know."
+
+In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating what
+few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's love.
+Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly
+sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type
+of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which
+he now perceived to be no such thing.  Her beauty was neither English,
+French, Spanish, nor Italian--it was special! He appreciated, too, as
+never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct.  He could not tell, for
+instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya picture,
+"La Vendimia," or whether she knew that he had slipped back there after
+lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half an hour, a
+second and third time.  It was not Fleur, of course, but like enough to
+give him heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her standing at the
+foot of his bed with her hand held above her head.  To keep a postcard
+reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at
+became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
+themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy.  And his
+mother's were sharpened by all three.  In Granada he was fairly caught,
+sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented garden on
+the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at the view.  His
+mother, he had thought, was examining the potted stocks between the
+polled acacias, when her voice said:
+
+"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"
+
+He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school to
+conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."
+
+"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol' Your
+father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them when he was
+in Spain in '92."
+
+In '92--nine years before he had been born!  What had been the previous
+existences of his father and his mother?  If they had a right to share in
+his future, surely he had a right to share in their pasts.  He looked up
+at her.  But something in her face--a look of life hard-lived, the
+mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and suffering-seemed, with
+its incalculable depth, its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity
+impertinent.  His mother must have had a wonderfully interesting life;
+she was so beautiful, and so--so--but he could not frame what he felt
+about her.  He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
+all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in sinking
+sunlight.  Her life was like the past of this old Moorish city, full,
+deep, remote--his own life as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly
+ignorant and innocent! They said that in those mountains to the West,
+which rose sheer from the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea,
+Phoenicians had dwelt--a dark, strange, secret race, above the land!  His
+mother's life was as unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past
+was to the town down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played
+and clamoured so gaily, day in, day out.  He felt aggrieved that she
+should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved
+him and his father, and was beautiful.  His callow ignorance--he had not
+even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody else!--made him
+small in his own eyes.
+
+That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the roof of
+the town--as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and gold; and, long
+after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the sentry as the hours
+struck, and forming in his head these lines:
+
+     "Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
+      Spanish city darkened under her white stars!
+
+     "What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
+      Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
+      Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
+
+     "No!  Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
+      Just his cry: 'How long?'"
+
+The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but "bereaved"
+was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-long came to him,
+which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart is weeping."  It was
+past two by the time he had finished it, and past three before he went to
+sleep, having said it over to himself at least twenty-four times.  Next
+day he wrote it out and enclosed it in one of those letters to Fleur
+which he always finished before he went down, so as to have his mind free
+and companionable.
+
+About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he felt a
+sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in the eyes,
+and sickness.  The sun had touched him too affectionately. The next three
+days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled, aching indifference to
+all except the feel of ice on his forehead and his mother's smile.  She
+never moved from his room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance, which
+seemed to Jon angelic.  But there were moments when he was extremely
+sorry for himself, and wished terribly that Fleur could see him.  Several
+times he took a poignant imaginary leave of her and of the earth, tears
+oozing out of his eyes.  He even prepared the message he would send to
+her by his mother--who would regret to her dying day that she had ever
+sought to separate them--his poor mother!  He was not slow, however, in
+perceiving that he had now his excuse for going home.
+
+Toward half-past six each evening came a "gasgacha" of bells--a cascade
+of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling back chime
+on chime.  After listening to them on the fourth day he said suddenly:
+
+"I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot."
+
+"Very well, darling.  As soon as you're fit to travel"  And at once he
+felt better, and--meaner.
+
+They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home.  Jon's head
+was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a hat lined
+by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk and he still
+walked from choice in the shade.  As the long struggle of discretion
+between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more whether she
+could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had brought him
+away from.  Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a day in Madrid
+between their trains, it was but natural to go again to the Prado.  Jon
+was elaborately casual this time before his Goya girl.  Now that he was
+going back to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny.  It was his mother
+who lingered before the picture, saying:
+
+"The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite."
+
+Jon heard her uneasily.  Did she understand?  But he felt once more that
+he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety.  She could, in some
+supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret, feel the pulse of his
+thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped and feared and wished.  It
+made him terribly uncomfortable and guilty, having, beyond most boys, a
+conscience.  He wished she would be frank with him, he almost hoped for
+an open struggle.  But none came, and steadily, silently, they travelled
+north.  Thus did he first learn how much better than men women play a
+waiting game.  In Paris they had again to pause for a day.  Jon was
+grieved because it lasted two, owing to certain matters in connection
+with a dressmaker; as if his mother, who looked beautiful in anything,
+had any need of dresses!  The happiest moment of his travel was that when
+he stepped on to the Folkestone boat.
+
+Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said
+
+"I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon.  But you've been very sweet
+to me."
+
+Jon squeezed her arm.
+
+"Oh I yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately."
+
+And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of glamour
+over the past weeks--a kind of painful pleasure, such as he had tried to
+screw into those lines about the voice in the night crying; a feeling
+such as he had known as a small boy listening avidly to Chopin, yet
+wanting to cry.  And he wondered why it was that he couldn't say to her
+quite simply what she had said to him:
+
+"You were very sweet to me."  Odd--one never could be nice and natural
+like that!  He substituted the words: "I expect we shall be sick."
+
+They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six
+weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had
+hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
+
+Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found the
+solitude at Robin Hill intolerable.  A philosopher when he has all that
+he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not. Accustomed,
+however, to the idea, if not to the reality of resignation, he would
+perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter June.  He was a "lame
+duck" now, and on her conscience.  Having achieved--momentarily--the
+rescue of an etcher in low circumstances, which she happened to have in
+hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had
+gone.  June was living now in a tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick.
+A Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of responsibility was
+concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a
+manner satisfactory to herself and her father.  The rent of the Gallery
+off Cork Street which he had bought for her and her increased income tax
+happening to balance, it had been quite simpl--she no longer paid him the
+rent. The Gallery might be expected now at any time, after eighteen years
+of barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her father would
+not feel it.  Through this device she still had twelve hundred a year,
+and by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians in a poor
+way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically the same surplus for
+the relief of genius.  After three days at Robin Hill she carried her
+father back with her to Town.  In those three days she had stumbled on
+the secret he had kept for two years, and had instantly decided to cure
+him.  She knew, in fact, the very man. He had done wonders with.  Paul
+Post--that painter a little in advance of Futurism; and she was impatient
+with her father because his eyebrows would go up, and because he had
+heard of neither.  Of course, if he hadn't "faith" he would never get
+well!  It was absurd not to have faith in the man who had healed Paul
+Post so that he had only just relapsed, from having overworked, or
+overlived, himself again.  The great thing about this healer was that he
+relied on Nature.  He had made a special study of the symptoms of
+Nature--when his patient failed in any natural symptom he supplied the
+poison which caused it--and there you were!  She was extremely hopeful.
+Her father had clearly not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and
+she intended to provide the symptoms.  He was--she felt--out of touch
+with the times, which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating. In
+the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian--a grateful soul, so
+devoted to June for rescuing her that she was in danger of decease from
+overwork--stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him for his
+cure.  But they could not keep his eyebrows down; as, for example, when
+the Austrian woke him at eight o'clock just as he was going to sleep, or
+June took The Times away from him, because it was unnatural to read "that
+stuff" when he ought to be taking an interest in "life."  He never
+failed, indeed, to be astonished at her resource, especially in the
+evenings.  For his benefit, as she declared, though he suspected that she
+also got something out of it, she assembled the Age so far as it was
+satellite to genius; and with some solemnity it would move up and down
+the studio before him in the Fox-trot, and that more mental form of
+dancing--the One-step--which so pulled against the music, that Jolyon's
+eyebrows would be almost lost in his hair from wonder at the strain it
+must impose on the dancer's will-power.  Aware that, hung on the line in
+the Water Colour Society, he was a back number to those with any
+pretension to be called artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he
+could find, and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he had been
+raised. And when June brought some girl or young man up to him, he would
+rise humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and think: 'Dear
+me!  This is very dull for them!'  Having his father's perennial sympathy
+with Youth, he used to get very tired from entering into their points of
+view.  But it was all stimulating, and he never failed in admiration of
+his daughter's indomitable spirit.  Even genius itself attended these
+gatherings now and then, with its nose on one side; and June always
+introduced it to her father.  This, she felt, was exceptionally good for
+him, for genius was a natural symptom he had never had--fond as she was
+of him.
+
+Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered
+whence she got herself--her red-gold hair, now greyed into a special
+colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own rather
+folded and subtilised countenance, her little lithe figure, when he and
+most of the Forsytes were tall.  And he would dwell on the origin of
+species, and debate whether she might be Danish or Celtic.  Celtic, he
+thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs.  It
+was not too much to say that he preferred her to the Age with which she
+was surrounded, youthful though, for the greater part, it was.  She took,
+however, too much interest in his teeth, for he still had some of those
+natural symptoms.  Her dentist at once found "Staphylococcus aureus
+present in pure culture" (which might cause boils, of course), and wanted
+to take out all the teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of
+unnatural symptoms.  Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in the
+studio that evening he developed his objections.  He had never had any
+boils, and his own teeth would last his time.  Of course--June
+admitted--they would last his time if he didn't have them out!  But if he
+had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would be longer.
+His recalcitrance--she said--was a symptom of his whole attitude; he was
+taking it lying down.  He ought to be fighting. When was he going to see
+the man who had cured Paul Post?  Jolyon was very sorry, but the fact was
+he was not going to see him.  June chafed.  Pondridge--she said--the
+healer, was such a fine man, and he had such difficulty in making two
+ends meet, and getting his theories recognised.  It was just such
+indifference and prejudice as her father manifested which was keeping him
+back.  It would be so splendid for both of them!
+
+"I perceive," said Jolyon, "that you are trying to kill two birds with
+one stone."
+
+"To cure, you mean!" cried June.
+
+"My dear, it's the same thing."
+
+June protested.  It was unfair to say that without a trial.
+
+Jolyon thought he might not have the chance, of saying it after.
+
+"Dad!" cried June, "you're hopeless."
+
+"That," said Jolyon, "is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as long as
+possible.  I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child.  They are quiet at
+present."
+
+"That's not giving science a chance," cried June.  "You've no idea how
+devoted Pondridge is.  He puts his science before everything."
+
+"Just," replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he was
+reduced, "as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh?  Art for Art's sake
+--Science for the sake of Science.  I know those enthusiastic egomaniac
+gentry.  They vivisect you without blinking.  I'm enough of a Forsyte to
+give them the go-by, June."
+
+"Dad," said June, "if you only knew how old-fashioned that sounds! Nobody
+can afford to be half-hearted nowadays."
+
+"I'm afraid," murmured Jolyon, with his smile, "that's the only natural
+symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me.  We are born to be
+extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though, if you'll forgive my saying
+so, half the people nowadays who believe they're extreme are really very
+moderate.  I'm getting on as well as I can expect, and I must leave it at
+that."
+
+June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable character
+of her father's amiable obstinacy so far as his own freedom of action was
+concerned.
+
+How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain puzzled
+Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion.  After she had
+brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp discussion, during which
+he perceived to the full the fundamental opposition between her active
+temperament and his wife's passivity.  He even gathered that a little
+soreness still remained from that generation-old struggle between them
+over the body of Philip Bosinney, in which the passive had so signally
+triumphed over the active principle.
+
+According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the past from
+Jon.  Sheer opportunism, she called it.
+
+"Which," Jolyon put in mildly, "is the working principle of real life, my
+dear."
+
+"Oh!" cried June, "you don't really defend her for not telling Jon, Dad.
+If it were left to you, you would."
+
+"I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will be worse
+than if we told him."
+
+"Then why don't you tell him?  It's just sleeping dogs again."
+
+"My dear," said Jolyon, "I wouldn't for the world go against Irene's
+instinct.  He's her boy."
+
+"Yours too," cried June.
+
+"What is a man's instinct compared with a mother's?"
+
+"Well, I think it's very weak of you."
+
+"I dare say," said Jolyon, "I dare say."
+
+And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her brain.
+She could not bear sleeping dogs.  And there stirred in her a tortuous
+impulse to push the matter toward decision.  Jon ought to be told, so
+that either his feeling might be nipped in the bud, or, flowering in
+spite of the past, come to fruition.  And she determined to see Fleur,
+and judge for herself.  When June determined on anything, delicacy became
+a somewhat minor consideration.  After all, she was Soames' cousin, and
+they were both interested in pictures. She would go and tell him that he
+ought to buy a Paul Post, or perhaps a piece of sculpture by Boris
+Strumolowski, and of course she would say nothing to her father.  She
+went on the following Sunday, looking so determined that she had some
+difficulty in getting a cab at Reading station.  The river country was
+lovely in those days of her own month, and June ached at its loveliness.
+She who had passed through this life without knowing what union was had a
+love of natural beauty which was almost madness.  And when she came to
+that choice spot where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her
+cab, because, business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water and
+the woods.  She appeared at his front door, therefore, as a mere
+pedestrian, and sent in her card.  It was in June's character to know
+that when her nerves were fluttering she was doing something worth while.
+If one's nerves did not flutter, she was taking the line of least
+resistance, and knew that nobleness was not obliging her.  She was
+conducted to a drawing-room, which, though not in her style, showed every
+mark of fastidious elegance.  Thinking, 'Too much taste--too many
+knick-knacks,' she saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the figure of a
+girl coming in from the verandah.  Clothed in white, and holding some
+white roses in her hand, she had, reflected in that silvery-grey pool of
+glass, a vision-like appearance, as if a pretty ghost had come out of the
+green garden.
+
+"How do you do?" said June, turning round.  "I'm a cousin of your
+father's."
+
+"Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner's."
+
+"With my young stepbrother.  Is your father in?"
+
+"He will be directly.  He's only gone for a little walk."
+
+June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided chin.
+
+"Your name's Fleur, isn't it?  I've heard of you from Holly.  What do you
+think of Jon?"
+
+The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered
+calmly:
+
+"He's quite a nice boy."
+
+"Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+'She's cool,' thought June.
+
+And suddenly the girl said: "I wish you'd tell me why our families don't
+get on?"
+
+Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer, June
+was silent; whether because this girl was trying to get something out of
+her, or simply because what one would do theoretically is not always what
+one will do when it comes to the point.
+
+"You know," said the girl, "the surest way to make people find out the
+worst is to keep them ignorant.  My father's told me it was a quarrel
+about property.  But I don't believe it; we've both got heaps.  They
+wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that."
+
+June flushed.  The word applied to her grandfather and father offended
+her.
+
+"My grandfather," she said, "was very generous, and my father is, too;
+neither of them was in the least bourgeois."
+
+"Well, what was it then?" repeated the girl: Conscious that this young
+Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined to prevent
+her, and to get something for herself instead.
+
+"Why do you want to know?"
+
+The girl smelled at her roses.  "I only want to know because they won't
+tell me."
+
+"Well, it was about property, but there's more than one kind."
+
+"That makes it worse.  Now I really must know."
+
+June's small and resolute face quivered.  She was wearing a round cap,
+and her hair had fluffed out under it.  She looked quite young at that
+moment, rejuvenated by encounter.
+
+"You know," she said, "I saw you drop your handkerchief.  Is there
+anything between you and Jon?  Because, if so, you'd better drop that
+too."
+
+The girl grew paler, but she smiled.
+
+"If there were, that isn't the way to make me."
+
+At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.
+
+"I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have.  We may as well
+be frank."
+
+"Did you come down to tell him that?"
+
+June laughed.  "No; I came down to see you."
+
+"How delightful of you."
+
+This girl could fence.
+
+"I'm two and a half times your age," said June, "but I quite sympathize.
+It's horrid not to have one's own way."
+
+The girl smiled again.  "I really think you might tell me."
+
+How the child stuck to her point
+
+"It's not my secret.  But I'll see what I can do, because I think both
+you and Jon ought to be told.  And now I'll say good-bye."
+
+"Won't you wait and see Father?"
+
+June shook her head.  "How can I get over to the other side?"
+
+"I'll row you across."
+
+"Look!" said June impulsively, "next time you're in London, come and see
+me.  This is where I live.  I generally have young people in the evening.
+But I shouldn't tell your father that you're coming."
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's awfully pretty
+and well made.  I never thought Soames would have a daughter as  pretty
+as this.  She and Jon would make a lovely couple.
+
+The instinct to couple, starved within herself,  was always at work in
+June.  She stood watching  Fleur row back; the girl took her hand off a
+scull  to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between the meadows
+and the river, with an ache in her heart.  Youth to youth, like the
+dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them
+through and through.  Her  youth!  So long ago--when Phil and she--And
+since?  Nothing--no one had been quite what she had wanted.  And so she
+had missed it all.  But  what a coil was round those two young things, if
+they really were in love, as Holly would have it--as her father, and
+Irene, and Soames himself seemed to dread.  What a coil, and what a
+barrier!  And the itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what
+was overpast, which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one
+who ever believed that what one wanted was more important than what other
+people did not want.  From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer
+stillness, she watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the
+fishes rising; sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how
+she could force everybody to be happy.  Jon and Fleur!  Two little lame
+ducks--charming callow yellow little ducks!  A great pity!  Surely
+something could be done!  One must not take such situations lying down.
+She walked on, and reached a station, hot and cross.
+
+That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which made
+many people avoid her, she said to her father:
+
+"Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur.  I think she's very attractive.
+It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?"
+
+The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began crumbling his
+bread.
+
+"It's what you appear to be doing," he said.  "Do you realise whose
+daughter she is?"
+
+"Can't the dead past bury its dead?"
+
+Jolyon rose.
+
+"Certain things can never be buried."
+
+"I disagree," said June.  "It's that which stands in the way of all
+happiness and progress.  You don't understand the Age, Dad.  It's got no
+use for outgrown things.  Why do you think it matters so terribly that
+Jon should know about his mother?  Who pays any attention to that sort of
+thing now?  The marriage laws are just as they were when Soames and Irene
+couldn't get a divorce, and you had to come in. We've moved, and they
+haven't.  So nobody cares.  Marriage without a decent chance of relief is
+only a sort of slave-owning; people oughtn't to own each other.
+Everybody sees that now.  If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?"
+
+"It's not for me to disagree there," said Jolyon; "but that's all quite
+beside the mark.  This is a matter of human feeling."
+
+"Of course it is," cried June, "the human feeling of those two young
+things."
+
+"My dear," said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; "you're talking
+nonsense."
+
+"I'm not.  If they prove to be really fond of each other, why should they
+be made unhappy because of the past?"
+
+"You haven't lived that past.  I have--through the feelings of my wife;
+through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is devoted
+can."
+
+June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.
+
+"If," she said suddenly, "she were the daughter of Philip Bosinney, I
+could understand you better.  Irene loved him, she never loved Soames."
+
+Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman
+utters to her mule.  His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid
+no attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.
+
+"That shows how little you understand.  Neither I nor Jon, if I know him,
+would mind a love-past.  It's the brutality of a union without love.
+This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's mother as a
+negro-slave was owned.  You can't lay that ghost; don't try to, June!
+It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and blood of the man who
+possessed Jon's mother against her will.  It's no good mincing words; I
+want it clear once for all.  And now I mustn't talk any more, or I shall
+have to sit up with this all night."  And, putting his hand over his
+heart, Jolyon turned his back on his daughter and stood looking at the
+river Thames.
+
+June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her head
+into it, was seriously alarmed.  She came and slipped her arm through
+his.  Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because
+that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the
+obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him.  She rubbed her cheek
+against his shoulder, and said nothing.
+
+After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but
+pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine.  The peaceful beauty of the
+afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and
+poetic.  In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine
+drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of hay.  She watched the
+grass cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination--it
+looked so cool and fresh.  The click and swish blended with the rustle of
+the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true
+river song.  Alongside, in the deep green water, weeds, like yellow
+snakes, were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the
+farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails.  It was an
+afternoon to dream.  And she took out Jon's letters--not flowery
+effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a
+longing very agreeable to her, and all ending "Your devoted J."  Fleur
+was not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but
+what poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly
+in those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon.  They all
+belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water.  She enjoyed
+him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose.  The stars could
+persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of the map of
+Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy sparkle and
+promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon personified to her.
+
+Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his letters,
+followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with just so much
+water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey destroyers.  Fleur
+thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and pulled up to the
+landing-stage.  Crossing the lawn, she wondered whether she should tell
+her father of June's visit.  If he learned of it from the butler, he
+might think it odd if she did not.  It gave her, too, another chance to
+startle out of him the reason of the feud.  She went, therefore, up the
+road to meet him.
+
+Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
+Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with weak
+lungs.  Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part in local
+affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going up. He could
+not, however, remain indifferent to this new and dangerous scheme.  The
+site was not half a mile from his own house.  He was quite of opinion
+that the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but this was not the
+place.  It should be done farther away.  He took, indeed, an attitude
+common to all true Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other people
+was not his affair, and the State should do its business without
+prejudicing in any way the natural advantages which he had acquired or
+inherited.  Francie, the most free-spirited Forsyte of his generation
+(except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had once asked him in her malicious
+way: "Did you ever see the name Forsyte in a subscription list, Soames?"
+That was as it might be, but a Sanatorium would depreciate the
+neighbourhood, and he should certainly sign the petition which was being
+got up against it. Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw
+Fleur coming.
+
+She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time down here
+with her in this summer weather had been making him feel quite young;
+Annette was always running up to Town for one thing or another, so that
+he had Fleur to himself almost as much as he could wish.  To be sure,
+young Mont had formed a habit of appearing on his motor-cycle almost
+every other day.  Thank goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his
+half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a mountebank!  With a girl
+friend of Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth
+or so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music of
+the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a
+surprised shine on its expressive surface.  Annette, even, now and then
+passed gracefully up and down in the arms of one or other of the young
+men.  And Soames, coming to the drawing-room door, would lift his nose a
+little sideways, and watch them, waiting to catch a smile from Fleur;
+then move back to his chair by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The
+Times or some other collector's price list.  To his ever-anxious eyes
+Fleur showed no signs of remembering that caprice of hers.
+
+When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand within her
+arm.
+
+"Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad?  She couldn't wait! Guess!"
+
+"I never guess," said Soames uneasily.  "Who?"
+
+"Your cousin, June Forsyte."
+
+Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm.  "What did she want?"
+
+"I don't know.  But it was rather breaking through the feud, wasn't it?"
+
+"Feud?  What feud?"
+
+"The one that exists in your imagination, dear."
+
+Soames dropped her arm.  Was she mocking, or trying to draw him on?
+
+"I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture," he said at last.
+
+"I don't think so.  Perhaps it was just family affection."
+
+"She's only a first cousin once removed," muttered Soames.
+
+"And the daughter of your enemy."
+
+"What d'you mean by that?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was."
+
+"Enemy!" repeated Soames.  "It's ancient history.  I don't know where you
+get your notions."
+
+"From June Forsyte."
+
+It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew, or were
+on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.
+
+Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and tenacity.
+
+"If you know," he said coldly, "why do you plague me?"
+
+Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.
+
+"I don't want to plague you, darling.  As you say, why want to know more?
+Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery--Je m'en fiche, as
+Profond says?"
+
+"That chap!" said Soames profoundly.
+
+That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this
+summer--for he had not turned up again.  Ever since the Sunday when Fleur
+had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had thought of
+him a good deal, and always in connection with Annette, for no reason,
+except that she was looking handsomer than for some time past.  His
+possessive instinct, subtle, less formal, more elastic since the War,
+kept all misgiving underground.  As one looks on some American river,
+quiet and pleasant, knowing that an alligator perhaps is lying in the mud
+with his snout just raised and indistinguishable from a snag of wood--so
+Soames looked on the river of his own existence, subconscious of Monsieur
+Profond, refusing to see more than the suspicion of his snout.  He had at
+this epoch in his life practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy
+as his nature would permit.  His senses were at rest; his affections
+found all the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well
+known, his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a touch of
+liver now and again; he had not yet begun to worry seriously about what
+would happen after death, inclining to think that nothing would happen.
+He resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and to knock the gilt
+off by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would be, he felt
+instinctively, perverse and retrogressive.  Those two crumpled
+rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level
+away if he lay on them industriously.
+
+That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested
+Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands.  Her father came down to dinner
+without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.
+
+"I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and ran upstairs.  In the sachet
+where she sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--there were
+two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was buttoned, and
+contained something flat and hard.  By some childish impulse Fleur
+unbuttoned it.  There was a frame and in it a photograph of herself as a
+little girl.  She gazed at it, fascinated, as one is by one's own
+presentment.  It slipped under her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that
+another photograph was behind.  She pressed her own down further, and
+perceived a face, which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very
+good-looking, in a very old style of evening dress.  Slipping her own
+photograph up over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down.
+Only on the stairs did she identify that face.  Surely--surely Jon's
+mother!  The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a flurry
+of thought.  Why, of course!  Jon's father had married the woman her
+father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her, perhaps.  Then,
+afraid of showing by her manner that she had lighted on his secret, she
+refused to think further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief, entered
+the dining-room.
+
+"I chose the softest, Father."
+
+"H'm!" said Soames; "I only use those after a cold.  Never mind!"
+
+That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together; recalling
+the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop--a look strange
+and coldly intimate, a queer look.  He must have loved that woman very
+much to have kept her photograph all this time, in spite of having lost
+her.  Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind darted to his relations with
+her own mother.  Had he ever really loved her?  She thought not.  Jon was
+the son of the woman he had really loved.  Surely, then, he ought not to
+mind his daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used to.  And a sigh
+of sheer relief was caught in the folds of her nightgown slipping over
+her head.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MEETINGS
+
+Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts.  Jon, for one, had never
+really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain.  The face of
+the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock--it looked so
+wan and old.  His father's mask had been forced awry by the emotion of
+the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how much he must have felt
+their absence.  He summoned to his aid the thought: 'Well, I didn't want
+to go!'  It was out of date for Youth to defer to Age.  But Jon was by no
+means typically modern.  His father had always been "so jolly" to him,
+and to feel that one meant to begin again at once the conduct which his
+father had suffered six weeks' loneliness to cure was not agreeable.
+
+At the question, "Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike you?" his
+conscience pricked him badly.  The great Goya only existed because he had
+created a face which resembled Fleur's.
+
+On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction; but
+awoke full of anticipation.  It was only the fifth of July, and no
+meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth.  He was to have three days
+at home before going back to farm.  Somehow he must contrive to see her!
+
+In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for
+trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny.  On the second day,
+therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by
+ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face toward
+Piccadilly.  Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined Devonshire
+House.  It would be the merest chance that she should be at her Club.
+But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart, noticing the
+superiority of all other young men to himself.  They wore their clothes
+with such an air; they had assurance; they were old.  He was suddenly
+overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must have forgotten him.
+Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these weeks, he had mislaid that
+possibility.  The corners of his mouth drooped, his hands felt clammy.
+Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck of her smile-Fleur incomparable!
+It was an evil moment.  Jon, however, had a great idea that one must be
+able to face anything. And he braced himself with that dour refection in
+front of a bric-a-brac shop.  At this high-water mark of what was once
+the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except
+a grey top hat or two, and the sun.  Jon moved on, and turning the corner
+into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club, to
+which he had just been elected.
+
+"Hallo! young man!  Where are you off to?"
+
+Jon gushed.  "I've just been to my tailor's."
+
+Val looked him up and down.  "That's good!  I'm going in here to order
+some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch."
+
+Jon thanked him.  He might get news of her from Val!
+
+The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men, was
+seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's which they now
+entered.
+
+"Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with.
+Bless me!  Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from--let me see--the
+year Melton won the Derby.  One of my very best customers he was."  A
+faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face.  "Many's the tip he's given
+me, to be sure!  I suppose he took a couple of hundred of these every
+week, year in, year out, and never changed his cigarette.  Very affable
+gentleman, brought me a lot of custom.  I was sorry he met with that
+accident.  One misses an old customer like him."
+
+Val smiled.  His father's decease had closed an account which had been
+running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke puffed
+out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his father's
+face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in the only halo
+it had earned.  His father had his fame here, anyway--a man who smoked
+two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and run accounts for
+ever!  To his tobacconist a hero! Even that was some distinction to
+inherit!
+
+"I pay cash," he said; "how much?"
+
+"To his son, sir, and cash--ten and six.  I shall never forget Mr.
+Montague Dartie.  I've known him stand talkin' to me half an hour. We
+don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry.  The War was
+bad for manners, sir--it was bad for manners.  You were in it, I see."
+
+"No," said Val, tapping his knee, "I got this in the war before. Saved my
+life, I expect.  Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?"
+
+Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, "I don't smoke, you know," and saw the
+tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say "Good God!" or
+"Now's your chance, sir!"
+
+"That's right," said Val; "keep off it while you can.  You'll want it
+when you take a knock.  This is really the same tobacco, then?"
+
+"Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all.  Wonderful staying
+power--the British Empire, I always say."
+
+"Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it monthly.
+Come on, Jon."
+
+Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity.  Except to lunch now and then at
+the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London Club.  The
+Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could not, so long
+as George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his culinary acumen was
+almost the controlling force.  The Club had made a stand against the
+newly rich, and it had taken all George Forsyte's prestige, and praise of
+him as a "good sportsman," to bring in Prosper Profond.
+
+The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law entered the
+dining-room, and attracted by George's forefinger, sat down at their
+table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with solemn lips
+and an attractive shyness in his glance.  There was an air of privilege
+around that corner table, as though past masters were eating there.  Jon
+was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere. The waiter, lean in the chaps,
+pervaded with such free-masonical deference.  He seemed to hang on George
+Forsyte's lips, to watch the gloat in his eye with a kind of sympathy, to
+follow the movements of the heavy club-marked silver fondly.  His
+liveried arm and confidential voice alarmed Jon, they came so secretly
+over his shoulder.
+
+Except for George's "Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a deuced
+good judge of a cigar!" neither he nor the other past master took any
+notice of him, and he was grateful for this.  The talk was all about the
+breeding, points, and prices of horses, and he listened to it vaguely at
+first, wondering how it was possible to retain so much knowledge in a
+head.  He could not take his eyes off the dark past master--what he said
+was so deliberate and discouraging--such heavy, queer, smiled-out words.
+Jon was thinking of butterflies, when he heard him say:
+
+"I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses."
+
+"Old Soames!  He's too dry a file!"
+
+With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past master
+went on.
+
+"His daughter's an attractive small girl.  Mr. Soames Forsyde is a bit
+old-fashioned.  I want to see him have a pleasure some day." George
+Forsyte grinned.
+
+"Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as he looks.  He'll never show
+he's enjoying anything--they might try and take it from him. Old Soames!
+Once bit, twice shy!"
+
+"Well, Jon," said Val, hastily, "if you've finished, we'll go and have
+coffee."
+
+"Who were those?" Jon asked, on the stairs.  "I didn't quite---"
+
+"Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's and of my Uncle
+Soames.  He's always been here.  The other chap, Profond, is a queer
+fish.  I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you ask me!"
+
+Jon looked at him, startled.  "But that's awful," he said: "I mean--for
+Fleur."
+
+"Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very up-to-date."
+
+"Her mother!"
+
+"You're very green, Jon."
+
+Jon grew red.  "Mothers," he stammered angrily, "are different."
+
+"You're right," said Val suddenly; "but things aren't what they were when
+I was your age.  There's a 'To-morrow we die' feeling.  That's what old
+George meant about my Uncle Soames.  He doesn't mean to die to-morrow."
+
+Jon said, quickly: "What's the matter between him and my father?"
+
+"Stable secret, Jon.  Take my advice, and bottle up.  You'll do no good
+by knowing.  Have a liqueur?"
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+"I hate the way people keep things from one," he muttered, "and then
+sneer at one for being green."
+
+"Well, you can ask Holly.  If she won't tell you, you'll believe it's for
+your own good, I suppose."
+
+Jon got up.  "I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch."
+
+Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused.  The boy looked so
+upset.
+
+"All right!  See you on Friday."
+
+"I don't know," murmured Jon.
+
+And he did not.  This conspiracy of silence made him desperate.  It was
+humiliating to be treated like a child!  He retraced his moody steps to
+Stratton Street.  But he would go to her Club now, and find out the
+worst!  To his enquiry the reply was that Miss Forsyte was not in the
+Club. She might be in perhaps later.  She was often in on Monday--they
+could not say.  Jon said he would call again, and, crossing into the
+Green Park, flung himself down under a tree.  The sun was bright, and a
+breeze fluttered the leaves of the young lime-tree beneath which he lay;
+but his heart ached.  Such darkness seemed gathered round his happiness.
+He heard Big Ben chime "Three" above the traffic.  The sound moved
+something in him, and, taking out a piece of paper, he began to scribble
+on it with a pencil.  He had jotted a stanza, and was searching the grass
+for another verse, when something hard touched his shoulder-a green
+parasol.  There above him stood Fleur!
+
+"They told me you'd been, and were coming back.  So I thought you might
+be out here; and you are--it's rather wonderful!"
+
+"Oh, Fleur!  I thought you'd have forgotten me."
+
+"When I told you that I shouldn't!"
+
+Jon seized her arm.
+
+"It's too much luck!  Let's get away from this side."  He almost dragged
+her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to find some cover
+where they could sit and hold each other's hands.
+
+"Hasn't anybody cut in?" he said, gazing round at her lashes, in suspense
+above her cheeks.
+
+"There is a young idiot, but he doesn't count."
+
+Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.
+
+"You know I've had sunstroke; I didn't tell you."
+
+"Really!  Was it interesting?"
+
+"No.  Mother was an angel.  Has anything happened to you?"
+
+"Nothing.  Except that I think I've found out what's wrong between our
+families, Jon."
+
+His heart began beating very fast.
+
+"I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father got her
+instead."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me. Of
+course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him pretty mad,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+Jon thought for a minute.  "Not if she loved my father best."
+
+"But suppose they were engaged?"
+
+"If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I might go
+cracked, but I shouldn't grudge it you."
+
+"I should.  You mustn't ever do that with me, Jon.
+
+"My God!  Not much!"
+
+"I don't believe that he's ever really cared for my mother."
+
+Jon was silent.  Val's words--the two past masters in the Club!
+
+"You see, we don't know," went on Fleur; "it may have been a great shock.
+She may have behaved badly to him.  People do."
+
+"My mother wouldn't."
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders.  "I don't think we know much about our
+fathers and mothers.  We just see them in the light of the way they treat
+us; but they've treated other people, you know, before we were
+born-plenty, I expect.  You see, they're both old. Look at your father,
+with three separate families!"
+
+"Isn't there any place," cried Jon, "in all this beastly London where we
+can be alone?"
+
+"Only a taxi."
+
+"Let's get one, then."
+
+When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: "Are you going back to
+Robin Hill?  I should like to see where you live, Jon.  I'm staying with
+my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for dinner.  I
+wouldn't come to the house, of course."
+
+Jon gazed at her enraptured.
+
+"Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan't meet anybody.
+There's a train at four."
+
+The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured, official,
+commercial, or professional, like the working classes, still worked their
+seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth generation travelled
+down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class carriage, dusty and
+sun-warmed, of that too early train.  They travelled in blissful silence,
+holding each other's hands.
+
+At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two
+unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and
+honeysuckle.
+
+For Jon--sure of her now, and without separation before him--it was a
+miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along the
+river Thames.  It was love-in-a-mist--one of those illumined pages of
+Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they gave each
+other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and flowers and
+birds scrolled in among the text--a happy communing, without
+afterthought, which lasted thirty-seven minutes.  They reached the
+coppice at the milking hour.  Jon would not take her as far as the
+farmyard; only to where she could see the field leading up to the
+gardens, and the house beyond.  They turned in among the larches, and
+suddenly, at the winding of the path, came on Irene, sitting on an old
+log seat.
+
+There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves; to
+moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal dignity.
+This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his mother.  He
+became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate thing.  To have
+brought Fleur down openly--yes!  But to sneak her in like this!  Consumed
+with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his nature would permit.
+
+Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother's startled face was
+changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious.  It was she who uttered
+the first words:
+
+"I'm very glad to see you.  It was nice of Jon to think of bringing you
+down to us."
+
+"We weren't coming to the house," Jon blurted out.  "I just wanted Fleur
+to see where I lived."
+
+His mother said quietly:
+
+"Won't you come up and have tea?"
+
+Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard Fleur
+answer:
+
+"Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner.  I met Jon by accident,
+and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his home."
+
+How self-possessed she was!
+
+"Of course; but you must have tea.  We'll send you down to the station.
+My husband will enjoy seeing you."
+
+The expression of his mother's eyes, resting on him for a moment, cast
+Jon down level with the ground--a true worm.  Then she led on, and Fleur
+followed her.  He felt like a child, trailing after those two, who were
+talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the house up there beyond
+the trees and the grassy slope.  He watched the fencing of their eyes,
+taking each other in--the two beings he loved most in the world.
+
+He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered in
+advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that
+tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant; already
+he could feel the faint irony which would come into his voice and smile.
+
+"This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the house.
+Let's have tea at once--she has to catch a train.  Jon, tell them, dear,
+and telephone to the Dragon for a car."
+
+To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his mother
+had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up into the
+house.  Now he would not see Fleur alone again--not for a minute, and
+they had arranged no further meeting!  When he returned under cover of
+the maids and teapots, there was not a trace of awkwardness beneath the
+tree; it was all within himself, but not the less for that.  They were
+talking of the Gallery off Cork Street.
+
+"We back numbers," his father was saying, "are awfully anxious to find
+out why we can't appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must tell us."
+
+"It's supposed to be satiric, isn't it?" said Fleur.
+
+He saw his father's smile.
+
+"Satiric?  Oh! I think it's more than that.  What do you say, Jon?"
+
+"I don't know at all," stammered Jon.  His father's face had a sudden
+grimness.
+
+"The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals.  Off with their
+heads, they say--smash their idols!  And let's get back to-nothing! And,
+by Jove, they've done it!  Jon's a poet.  He'll be going in, too, and
+stamping on what's left of us.  Property, beauty, sentiment--all smoke.
+We mustn't own anything nowadays, not even our feelings. They stand in
+the way of--Nothing."
+
+Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father's words, behind
+which he felt a meaning that he could not reach.  He didn't want to stamp
+on anything!
+
+"Nothing's the god of to-day," continued Jolyon; "we're back where the
+Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism."
+
+"No, Dad," cried Jon suddenly, "we only want to live, and we don't know
+how, because of the Past--that's all!"
+
+"By George!" said Jolyon, "that's profound, Jon.  Is it your own? The
+Past!  Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath.  Let's have
+cigarettes."
+
+Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly, as if
+to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes.  He lighted his father's
+and Fleur's, then one for himself.  Had he taken the knock that Val had
+spoken of?  The smoke was blue when he had not puffed, grey when he had;
+he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense of equality it gave
+him.  He was glad no one said: "So you've begun!" He felt less young.
+
+Fleur looked at her watch, and rose.  His mother went with her into the
+house.  Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.
+
+"See her into the car, old man," said Jolyon; "and when she's gone, ask
+your mother to come back to me."
+
+Jon went.  He waited in the hall.  He saw her into the car.  There was no
+chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand.  He waited all
+that evening for something to be said to him.  Nothing was said.  Nothing
+might have happened.  He went up to bed, and in the mirror on his
+dressing-table met himself.  He did not speak, nor did the image; but
+both looked as if they thought the more.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN GREEN STREET
+
+Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous
+should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a remark
+of Fleur's: "He's like the hosts of Midian--he prowls and prowls around";
+to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: "What's the use of keepin'
+fit?" or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as
+it was now called.  Certain, that Annette was looking particularly
+handsome, and that Soames--had sold him a Gauguin and then torn up the
+cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself had said: "I didn't get that
+small picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde."
+
+However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's evergreen
+little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness which no one
+mistook for naiv ete, a word hardly applicable to Monsieur Prosper
+Profond.  Winifred still found him "amusing," and would write him little
+notes saying: "Come and have a 'jolly' with us"--it was breath of life to
+her to keep up with the phrases of the day.
+
+The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
+having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in
+it--which was unnatural.  The English type of disillusionment was
+familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable circles.
+It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got something out of
+it.  But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there was
+nothing in anything, was not English; and that which was not English one
+could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form.  It
+was like having the mood which the War had left, seated--dark, heavy,
+smiling, indifferent--in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that
+mood talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard.  It
+was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it--for the English character at
+large--"a bit too thick"--for if nothing was really worth getting
+excited about, there were always games, and one could make it so!  Even
+Winifred, ever a Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had
+out of such a mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be
+there. Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country
+which decently veiled such realities.
+
+When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to dinner
+that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred's little
+drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of seeing
+nothing in it.  And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with an air
+of seeing a fire which was not there.
+
+Monsieur Profond came from the window.  He was in full fig, with a white
+waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.
+
+"Well, Miss Forsyde," he said, "I'm awful pleased to see you.  Mr.
+Forsyde well?  I was sayin' to-day I want to see him have some pleasure.
+He worries."
+
+"You think so?" said Fleur shortly.
+
+"Worries," repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r's.
+
+Fleur spun round.  "Shall I tell you," she said, "what would give him
+pleasure?"  But the words, "To hear that you had cleared out," died at
+the expression on his face.  All his fine white teeth were showing.
+
+"I was hearin' at the Club to-day about his old trouble." Fleur opened
+her eyes.  "What do you mean?"
+
+Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his statement.
+
+"Before you were born," he said; "that small business."
+
+Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share in
+her father's worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush of nervous
+curiosity.  "Tell me what you heard."
+
+"Why!" murmured Monsieur Profond, "you know all that."
+
+"I expect I do.  But I should like to know that you haven't heard it all
+wrong."
+
+"His first wife," murmured Monsieur Profond.
+
+Choking back the words, "He was never married before," she said: "Well,
+what about her?"
+
+"Mr. George Forsyde was tellin' me about your father's first wife
+marryin' his cousin Jolyon afterward.  It was a small bit unpleasant, I
+should think.  I saw their boy--nice boy!"
+
+Fleur looked up.  Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical,
+before her.  That--the reason!  With the most heroic effort of her life
+so far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure.  She could not tell
+whether he had noticed.  And just then Winifred came in.
+
+"Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most amusing
+afternoon at the Babies' bazaar."
+
+"What babies?" said Fleur mechanically.
+
+"The 'Save the Babies.'  I got such a bargain, my dear.  A piece of old
+Armenian work--from before the Flood.  I want your opinion on it,
+Prosper."
+
+"Auntie," whispered Fleur suddenly.
+
+At the tone in the girl's voice Winifred closed in on her.'
+
+"What's the matter?  Aren't you well?"
+
+Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was practically
+out of hearing.
+
+"Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before.  Is it true
+that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte's father?"
+
+Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had Winifred
+felt more seriously embarrassed.  Her niece's face was so pale, her eyes
+so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.
+
+"Your father didn't wish you to hear," she said, with all the aplomb she
+could muster.  "These things will happen.  I've often told him he ought
+to let you know."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her
+shoulder--a firm little shoulder, nice and white!  She never could help
+an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who would have to
+be married, of course--though not to that boy Jon.
+
+"We've forgotten all about it years and years ago," she said comfortably.
+"Come and have dinner!"
+
+"No, Auntie.  I don't feel very well.  May I go upstairs?"
+
+"My dear!" murmured Winifred, concerned, "you're not taking this to
+heart?  Why, you haven't properly come out yet!  That boy's a child!"
+
+"What boy?  I've only got a headache.  But I can't stand that man
+to-night."
+
+"Well, well," said Winifred, "go and lie down.  I'll send you some
+bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond.  What business had he to
+gossip?  Though I must say I think it's much better you should know."
+
+Fleur smiled.  "Yes," she said, and slipped from the room.
+
+She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a
+guttered frightened feeling in her breast.  Never in her life as yet had
+she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what she had
+set her heart on.  The sensations of the afternoon had been full and
+poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of them had
+really made her head ache.  No wonder her father had hidden that
+photograph, so secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept it!  But
+could he hate Jon's mother and yet keep her photograph?  She pressed her
+hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly. Had they told
+Jon--had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell him?  Everything now
+turned on that!  She knew, they all knew, except--perhaps--Jon!
+
+She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard. Jon
+loved his mother.  If they had told him, what would he do?  She could not
+tell.  But if they had not told him, should she not--could she not get
+him for herself--get married to him, before he knew?  She searched her
+memories of Robin Hill.  His mother's face so passive--with its dark
+eyes and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile--baffled her; and
+his father's--kindly, sunken, ironic.  Instinctively she felt they would
+shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from hurting him--for of course
+it would hurt him awfully to know!
+
+Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew.  So long as
+neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still a
+chance--freedom to cover one's tracks, and get what her heart was set on.
+But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation.  Every one's hand was
+against her--every one's!  It was as Jon had said--he and she just wanted
+to live and the past was in their way, a past they hadn't shared in, and
+didn't understand!  Oh! What a shame!  And suddenly she thought of June.
+Would she help them?  For somehow June had left on her the impression
+that she would be sympathetic with their love, impatient of obstacle.
+Then, instinctively, she thought: 'I won't give anything away, though,
+even to her.  I daren't.  I mean to have Jon; against them all.'
+
+Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred's pet headache cachets.
+She swallowed both.  Then Winifred herself appeared.  Fleur opened her
+campaign with the words:
+
+"You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn't think I'm in love with that
+boy.  Why, I've hardly seen him!"
+
+Winifred, though experienced, was not "fine."  She accepted the remark
+with considerable relief.  Of course, it was not pleasant for the girl to
+hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to minimise the matter, a
+task for which she was eminently qualified, "raised" fashionably under a
+comfortable mother and a father whose nerves might not be shaken, and for
+many years the wife of Montague Dartie.  Her description was a
+masterpiece of understatement. Fleur's father's first wife had been very
+foolish.  There had been a young man who had got run over, and she had
+left Fleur's father. Then, years after, when it might all have
+come--right again, she had taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of
+course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce.  Nobody remembered
+anything of it now, except just the family.  And, perhaps, it had all
+turned out for the best; her father had Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had
+been quite happy, they said, and their boy was a nice boy.  "Val having
+Holly, too, is a sort of plaster, don't you know?"  With these soothing
+words, Winifred patted her niece's shoulder; thought: 'She's a nice,
+plump little thing!' and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite of
+his indiscretion, was very "amusing" this evening.
+
+For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under influence
+of bromide material and spiritual.  But then reality came back.  Her aunt
+had left out all that mattered--all the feeling, the hate, the love, the
+unforgivingness of passionate hearts.  She, who knew so little of life,
+and had touched only the fringe of love, was yet aware by instinct that
+words have as little relation to fact and feeling as coin to the bread it
+buys.  'Poor Father!' she thought. 'Poor me!  Poor Jon!  But I don't
+care, I mean to have him!'  From the window of her darkened room she saw
+"that man" issue from the door below and "prowl" away.  If he and her
+mother--how would that affect her chance?  Surely it must make her father
+cling to her more closely, so that he would consent in the end to
+anything she wanted, or become reconciled the sooner to what she did
+without his knowledge.
+
+She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with all her
+might flung it after that disappearing figure.  It fell short, but the
+action did her good.
+
+And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of petrol,
+not sweet.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
+
+Soames, coming up to the City, with the intention of calling in at Green
+Street at the end of his day and taking Fleur back home with him,
+suffered from rumination.  Sleeping partner that he was, he seldom
+visited the City now, but he still had a room of his own at Cuthcott,
+Kingson and Forsyte's, and one special clerk and a half assigned to the
+management of purely Forsyte affairs.  They were somewhat in flux just
+now--an auspicious moment for the disposal of house property.  And Soames
+was unloading the estates of his father and Uncle Roger, and to some
+extent of his Uncle Nicholas.  His shrewd and matter-of-course probity in
+all money concerns had made him something of an autocrat in connection
+with these trusts.  If Soames thought this or thought that, one had
+better save oneself the bother of thinking too.  He guaranteed, as it
+were, irresponsibility to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth
+generations.  His fellow trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas,
+his cousins-in-law Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely's husband,
+all trusted him; he signed first, and where he signed first they signed
+after, and nobody was a penny the worse.  Just now they were all a good
+many pennies the better, and Soames was beginning to see the close of
+certain trusts, except for distribution of the income from securities as
+gilt-edged as was compatible with the period.
+
+Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect
+backwater in London, he ruminated.  Money was extraordinarily tight; and
+morality extraordinarily loose!  The War had done it.  Banks were not
+lending; people breaking contracts all over the place.  There was a
+feeling in the air and a look on faces that he did not like.  The country
+seemed in for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies.  There was
+satisfaction in the thought that neither he nor his trusts had an
+investment which could be affected by anything less maniacal than
+national repudiation or a levy on capital.  If Soames had faith, it was
+in what he called "English common sense"--or the power to have things, if
+not one way then another.  He might--like his father James before
+him--say he didn't know what things were coming to, but he never in his
+heart believed they were.  If it rested with him, they wouldn't--and,
+after all, he was only an Englishman like any other, so quietly tenacious
+of what he had that he knew he would never really part with it without
+something more or less equivalent in exchange.  His mind was essentially
+equilibristic in material matters, and his way of putting the national
+situation difficult to refute in a world composed of human beings.  Take
+his own case, for example!  He was well off.  Did that do anybody harm?
+He did not eat ten meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much
+as, a poor man.  He spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no
+more water to speak of than the mechanic or the porter.  He certainly had
+pretty things about him, but they had given employment in the making, and
+somebody must use them.  He bought pictures, but Art must be encouraged.
+He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which money flowed,
+employing labour.  What was there objectionable in that?  In his charge
+money was in quicker and more useful flux than it would be in charge of
+the State and a lot of slow-fly money-sucking officials.  And as to what
+he saved each year--it was just as much in flux as what he didn't save,
+going into Water Board or Council Stocks, or something sound and useful.
+The State paid him no salary for being trustee of his own or other
+people's money he did all that for nothing.  Therein lay the whole case
+against nationalisation--owners of private property were unpaid, and yet
+had every incentive to quicken up the flux.  Under nationalisation--just
+the opposite!  In a country smarting from officialism he felt that he had
+a strong case.
+
+It particularly annoyed him, entering that backwater of perfect peace, to
+think that a lot of unscrupulous Trusts and Combinations had been
+cornering the market in goods of all kinds, and keeping prices at an
+artificial height.  Such abusers of the individualistic system were the
+ruffians who caused all the trouble, and it was some satisfaction to see
+them getting into a stew at fast lest the whole thing might come down
+with a run--and land them in the soup.
+
+The offices of Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte occupied the ground and
+first floors of a house on the right-hand side; and, ascending to his
+room, Soames thought: 'Time we had a coat of paint.'
+
+His old clerk Gradman was seated, where he always was, at a huge bureau
+with countless pigeonholes.  Half-the-clerk stood beside him, with a
+broker's note recording investment of the proceeds from sale of the
+Bryanston Square house, in Roger Forsyte's estate.  Soames took it, and
+said:
+
+"Vancouver City Stock.  H'm.  It's down today!"
+
+With a sort of grating ingratiation old Gradman answered him:
+
+"Ye-es; but everything's down, Mr. Soames."  And half-the-clerk withdrew.
+
+Soames skewered the document on to a number of other papers and hung up
+his hat.
+
+"I want to look at my Will and Marriage Settlement, Gradman."
+
+Old Gradman, moving to the limit of his swivel chair, drew out two drafts
+from the bottom lefthand drawer.  Recovering his body, he raised his
+grizzle-haired face, very red from stooping.
+
+"Copies, Sir."
+
+Soames took them.  It struck him suddenly how like Gradman was to the
+stout brindled yard dog they had been wont to keep on his chain at The
+Shelter, till one day Fleur had come and insisted it should be let loose,
+so that it had at once bitten the cook and been destroyed. If you let
+Gradman off his chain, would he bite the cook?
+
+Checking this frivolous fancy, Soames unfolded his Marriage Settlement.
+He had not looked at it for over eighteen years, not since he remade his
+Will when his father died and Fleur was born.  He wanted to see whether
+the words "during coverture" were in.  Yes, they were--odd expression,
+when you thought of it, and derived perhaps from horse-breeding!
+Interest on fifteen thousand pounds (which he paid her without deducting
+income tax) so long as she remained his wife, and afterward during
+widowhood "dum casta"--old-fashioned and rather pointed words, put in to
+insure the conduct of Fleur's mother.  His Will made it up to an annuity
+of a thousand under the same conditions.  All right!  He returned the
+copies to Gradman, who took them without looking up, swung the chair,
+restored the papers to their drawer, and went on casting up.
+
+"Gradman! I don't like the condition of the country; there are a lot of
+people about without any common sense.  I want to find a way by which I
+can safeguard Miss Fleur against anything which might arise."
+
+Gradman wrote the figure "2" on his blotting-paper.
+
+"Ye-es," he said; "there's a nahsty spirit."
+
+"The ordinary restraint against anticipation doesn't meet the case."
+
+"Nao," said Gradman.
+
+"Suppose those Labour fellows come in, or worse!  It's these people with
+fixed ideas who are the danger.  Look at Ireland!"
+
+"Ah!" said Gradman.
+
+"Suppose I were to make a settlement on her at once with myself as
+beneficiary for life, they couldn't take anything but the interest from
+me, unless of course they alter the law."
+
+Gradman moved his head and smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "they wouldn't do tha-at!"
+
+"I don't know," muttered Soames; "I don't trust them."
+
+"It'll take two years, sir, to be valid against death duties."
+
+Soames sniffed.  Two years!  He was only sixty-five!
+
+"That's not the point.  Draw a form of settlement that passes all my
+property to Miss Fleur's children in equal shares, with antecedent
+life-interests first to myself and then to her without power of
+anticipation, and add a clause that in the event of anything happening to
+divert her life-interest, that interest passes to the trustees, to apply
+for her benefit, in their absolute discretion."
+
+Gradman grated: "Rather extreme at your age, sir; you lose control."
+
+"That's my business," said Soames sharply.
+
+Gradman wrote on a piece of paper: "Life-interest--anticipation--divert
+interest--absolute discretion...." and said:
+
+"What trustees?  There's young Mr. Kingson; he's a nice steady young
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, he might do for one.  I must have three.  There isn't a Forsyte now
+who appeals to me."
+
+"Not young Mr. Nicholas?  He's at the Bar.  We've given 'im briefs."
+
+"He'll never set the Thames on fire," said Soames.
+
+A smile oozed out on Gradman's face, greasy from countless mutton-chops,
+the smile of a man who sits all day.
+
+"You can't expect it, at his age, Mr. Soames."
+
+"Why?  What is he?  Forty?"
+
+"Ye-es, quite a young fellow."
+
+"Well, put him in; but I want somebody who'll take a personal interest.
+There's no one that I can see."
+
+"What about Mr. Valerius, now he's come home?"
+
+"Val Dartie?  With that father?"
+
+"We-ell," murmured Gradman, "he's been dead seven years--the Statute runs
+against him."
+
+"No," said Soames.  "I don't like the connection."  He rose.  Gradman
+said suddenly:
+
+"If they were makin' a levy on capital, they could come on the trustees,
+sir.  So there you'd be just the same.  I'd think it over, if I were
+you."
+
+"That's true," said Soames.  "I will.  What have you done about that
+dilapidation notice in Vere Street?"
+
+"I 'aven't served it yet.  The party's very old.  She won't want to go
+out at her age."
+
+"I don't know.  This spirit of unrest touches every one."
+
+"Still, I'm lookin' at things broadly, sir.  She's eighty-one."
+
+"Better serve it," said Soames, "and see what she says.  Oh! and Mr.
+Timothy?  Is everything in order in case of--"
+
+"I've got the inventory of his estate all ready; had the furniture and
+pictures valued so that we know what reserves to put on.  I shall be
+sorry when he goes, though.  Dear me!  It is a time since I first saw Mr.
+Timothy!"
+
+"We can't live for ever," said Soames, taking down his hat.
+
+"Nao," said Gradman; "but it'll be a pity--the last of the old family!
+Shall I take up the matter of that nuisance in Old Compton Street?  Those
+organs--they're nahsty things."
+
+"Do.  I must call for Miss Fleur and catch the four o'clock. Good-day,
+Gradman."
+
+"Good-day, Mr. Soames.  I hope Miss Fleur--"
+
+"Well enough, but gads about too much."
+
+"Ye-es," grated Gradman; "she's young."
+
+Soames went out, musing: "Old Gradman!  If he were younger I'd put him in
+the trust.  There's nobody I can depend on to take a real interest."
+
+Leaving the bilious and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous peace
+of that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture!  Why can't
+they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-working
+Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which could
+provoke so unpatriotic a thought.  But there it was!  One never got a
+moment of real peace.  There was always something at the back of
+everything!  And he made his way toward Green Street.
+
+Two hours later by his watch, Thomas Gradman, stirring in his swivel
+chair, closed the last drawer of his bureau, and putting into his
+waistcoat pocket a bunch of keys so fat that they gave him a protuberance
+on the liver side, brushed his old top hat round with his sleeve, took
+his umbrella, and descended.  Thick, short, and buttoned closely into his
+old frock coat, he walked toward Covent Garden market.  He never missed
+that daily promenade to the Tube for Highgate, and seldom some critical
+transaction on the way in connection with vegetables and fruit.
+Generations might be born, and hats might change, wars be fought, and
+Forsytes fade away, but Thomas Gradman, faithful and grey, would take his
+daily walk and buy his daily vegetable.  Times were not what they were,
+and his son had lost a leg, and they never gave him those nice little
+plaited baskets to carry the stuff in now, and these Tubes were
+convenient things--still he mustn't complain; his health was good
+considering his time of life, and after fifty-four years in the Law he
+was getting a round eight hundred a year and a little worried of late,
+because it was mostly collector's commission on the rents, and with all
+this conversion of Forsyte property going on, it looked like drying up,
+and the price of living still so high; but it was no good worrying--" The
+good God made us all"--as he was in the habit of saying; still, house
+property in London--he didn't know what Mr. Roger or Mr. James would say
+if they could see it being sold like this--seemed to show a lack of
+faith; but Mr. Soames--he worried.  Life and lives in being and
+twenty-one years after--beyond that you couldn't go; still, he kept his
+health wonderfully--and Miss Fleur was a pretty little thing--she was;
+she'd marry; but lots of people had no children nowadays--he had had his
+first child at twenty-two; and Mr. Jolyon, married while he was at
+Cambridge, had his child the same year--gracious Peter!  That was back
+in '69, a long time before old Mr. Jolyon--fine judge of property--had
+taken his Will away from Mr. James--dear, yes!  Those were the days when
+they were buyin' property right and left, and none of this khaki and
+fallin' over one another to get out of things; and cucumbers at twopence;
+and a melon--the old melons, that made your mouth water!  Fifty years
+since he went into Mr. James' office, and Mr. James had said to him:
+"Now, Gradman, you're only a shaver--you pay attention, and you'll make
+your five hundred a year before you've done."  And he had, and feared
+God, and served the Forsytes, and kept a vegetable diet at night.  And,
+buying a copy of John Bull--not that he approved of it, an extravagant
+affair--he entered the Tube elevator with his mere brown-paper parcel,
+and was borne down into the bowels of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE
+
+On his way to Green Street it occurred to Soames that he ought to go into
+Dumetrius' in Suffolk Street about the possibility of the Bolderby Old
+Crome.  Almost worth while to have fought the war to have the Bolderby
+Old Crome, as it were, in flux!  Old Bolderby had died, his son and
+grandson had been killed--a cousin was coming into the estate, who meant
+to sell it, some said because of the condition of England, others said
+because he had asthma.
+
+If Dumetrius once got hold of it the price would become prohibitive; it
+was necessary for Soames to find out whether Dumetrius had got it, before
+he tried to get it himself.  He therefore confined himself to discussing
+with Dumetrius whether Monticellis would come again now that it was the
+fashion for a picture to be anything except a picture; and the future of
+Johns, with a side-slip into Buxton Knights.  It was only when leaving
+that he added: "So they're not selling the Bolderby Old Crome, after
+all?"  In sheer pride of racial superiority, as he had calculated would
+be the case, Dumetrius replied:
+
+"Oh! I shall get it, Mr. Forsyte, sir!"
+
+The flutter of his eyelid fortified Soames in a resolution to write
+direct to the new Bolderby, suggesting that the only dignified way of
+dealing with an Old Crome was to avoid dealers.  He therefore said,
+"Well, good-day!" and went, leaving Dumetrius the wiser.
+
+At Green Street he found that Fleur was out and would be all the evening;
+she was staying one more night in London.  He cabbed on dejectedly, and
+caught his train.
+
+He reached his house about six o'clock.  The air was heavy, midges
+biting, thunder about.  Taking his letters he went up to his
+dressing-room to cleanse himself of London.
+
+An uninteresting post.  A receipt, a bill for purchases on behalf of
+Fleur.  A circular about an exhibition of etchings.  A letter beginning:
+
+"SIR, "I feel it my duty..."
+
+That would be an appeal or something unpleasant.  He looked at once for
+the signature.  There was none! Incredulously he turned the page over and
+examined each corner.  Not being a public man, Soames had never yet had
+an anonymous letter, and his first impulse was to tear it up, as a
+dangerous thing; his second to read it, as a thing still more dangerous.
+
+"SIR, "I feel it my duty to inform you that having no interest in the
+matter your lady is carrying on with a foreigner--"
+
+Reaching that word Soames stopped mechanically and examined the postmark.
+So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in which the Post
+Office had wrapped it, there was something with a "sea" at the end and a
+"t" in it.  Chelsea?  No! Battersea?  Perhaps! He read on.
+
+"These foreigners are all the same.  Sack the lot.  This one meets your
+lady twice a week.  I know it of my own knowledge--and to see an
+Englishman put on goes against the grain.  You watch it and see if what I
+say isn't true.  I shouldn't meddle if it wasn't a dirty foreigner that's
+in it.  Yours obedient."
+
+The sensation with which Soames dropped the letter was similar to that he
+would have had entering his bedroom and finding it full of black-beetles.
+The meanness of anonymity gave a shuddering obscenity to the moment.  And
+the worst of it was that this shadow had been at the back of his mind
+ever since the Sunday evening when Fleur had pointed down at Prosper
+Profond strolling on the lawn, and said: "Prowling cat!"  Had he not in
+connection therewith, this very day, perused his Will and Marriage
+Settlement?  And now this anonymous ruffian, with nothing to gain,
+apparently, save the venting of his spite against foreigners, had
+wrenched it out of the obscurity in which he had hoped and wished it
+would remain.  To have such knowledge forced on him, at his time of life,
+about Fleur's mother I He picked the letter up from the carpet, tore it
+across, and then, when it hung together by just the fold at the back,
+stopped tearing, and reread it.  He was taking at that moment one of the
+decisive resolutions of his life.  He would not be forced into another
+scandal.  No!  However he decided to deal with this matter--and it
+required the most far-sighted and careful consideration he would do
+nothing that might injure Fleur. That resolution taken, his mind answered
+the helm again, and he made his ablutions.  His hands trembled as he
+dried them.  Scandal he would not have, but something must be done to
+stop this sort of thing!  He went into his wife's room and stood looking
+around him.  The idea of searching for anything which would incriminate,
+and entitle him to hold a menace over her, did not even come to him.
+There would be nothing--she was much too practical.  The idea of having
+her watched had been dismissed before it came--too well he remembered his
+previous experience of that.  No!  He had nothing but this torn-up letter
+from some anonymous ruffian, whose impudent intrusion into his private
+life he so violently resented.  It was repugnant to him to make use of
+it, but he might have to.  What a mercy Fleur was not at home to-night!
+A tap on the door broke up his painful cogitations.
+
+"Mr. Michael Mont, sir, is in the drawing-room.  Will you see him?"
+
+"No," said Soames; "yes.  I'll come down."
+
+Anything that would take his mind off for a few minutes!
+
+Michael Mont in flannels stood on the verandah smoking a cigarette. He
+threw it away as Soames came up, and ran his hand through his hair.
+
+Soames' feeling toward this young man was singular.  He was no doubt a
+rackety, irresponsible young fellow according to old standards, yet
+somehow likeable, with his extraordinarily cheerful way of blurting out
+his opinions.
+
+"Come in," he said; "have you had tea?"
+
+Mont came in.
+
+"I thought Fleur would have been back, sir; but I'm glad she isn't. The
+fact is, I--I'm fearfully gone on her; so fearfully gone that I thought
+you'd better know.  It's old-fashioned, of course, coming to fathers
+first, but I thought you'd forgive that.  I went to my own Dad, and he
+says if I settle down he'll see me through.  He rather cottons to the
+idea, in fact.  I told him about your Goya."
+
+"Oh!" said Soames, inexpressibly dry.  "He rather cottons?"
+
+"Yes, sir; do you?"
+
+Soames smiled faintly.
+
+"You see," resumed Mont, twiddling his straw hat, while his hair, ears,
+eyebrows, all seemed to stand up from excitement, "when you've been
+through the War you can't help being in a hurry."
+
+"To get married; and unmarried afterward," said Soames slowly.
+
+"Not from Fleur, sir.  Imagine, if you were me!"
+
+Soames cleared his throat.  That way of putting it was forcible enough.
+
+"Fleur's too young," he said.
+
+"Oh! no, sir.  We're awfully old nowadays.  My Dad seems to me a perfect
+babe; his thinking apparatus hasn't turned a hair.  But he's a Baronight,
+of course; that keeps him back."
+
+"Baronight," repeated Soames; "what may that be?"
+
+"Bart, sir.  I shall be a Bart some day.  But I shall live it down, you
+know."
+
+"Go away and live this down," said Soames.
+
+Young Mont said imploringly: "Oh! no, sir.  I simply must hang around, or
+I shouldn't have a dog's chance.  You'll let Fleur do what she likes, I
+suppose, anyway.  Madame passes me."
+
+"Indeed!" said Soames frigidly.
+
+"You don't really bar me, do you?" and the young man looked so doleful
+that Soames smiled.
+
+"You may think you're very old," he said; "but you strike me as extremely
+young.  To rattle ahead of everything is not a proof of maturity."
+
+"All right, sir; I give you our age.  But to show you I mean
+business--I've got a job."
+
+"Glad to hear it."
+
+"Joined a publisher; my governor is putting up the stakes."
+
+Soames put his hand over his mouth--he had so very nearly said: "God help
+the publisher!"  His grey eyes scrutinised the agitated young man.
+
+"I don't dislike you, Mr. Mont, but Fleur is everything to me:
+Everything--do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I know; but so she is to me."
+
+"That's as may be.  I'm glad you've told me, however.  And now I think
+there's nothing more to be said."
+
+"I know it rests with her, sir."
+
+"It will rest with her a long time, I hope."
+
+"You aren't cheering," said Mont suddenly.
+
+"No," said Soames, "my experience of life has not made me anxious to
+couple people in a hurry.  Good-night, Mr. Mont.  I shan't tell Fleur
+what you've said."
+
+"Oh!" murmured Mont blankly; "I really could knock my brains out for want
+of her.  She knows that perfectly well."
+
+"I dare say."  And Soames held out his hand.  A distracted squeeze, a
+heavy sigh, and soon after sounds from the young man's motor-cycle called
+up visions of flying dust and broken bones.
+
+'The younger generation!' he thought heavily, and went out on to the
+lawn.  The gardeners had been mowing, and there was still the smell of
+fresh-cut grass--the thundery air kept all scents close to earth. The sky
+was of a purplish hue--the poplars black.  Two or three boats passed on
+the river, scuttling, as it were, for shelter before the storm.  'Three
+days' fine weather,' thought Soames, 'and then a storm!'  Where was
+Annette?  With that chap, for all he knew--she was a young woman!
+Impressed with the queer charity of that thought, he entered the
+summerhouse and sat down.  The fact was--and he admitted it--Fleur was so
+much to him that his wife was very little--very little; French--had never
+been much more than a mistress, and he was getting indifferent to that
+side of things!  It was odd how, with all this ingrained care for
+moderation and secure investment, Soames ever put his emotional eggs into
+one basket.  First Irene--now Fleur.  He was dimly conscious of it,
+sitting there, conscious of its odd dangerousness.  It had brought him to
+wreck and scandal once, but now--now it should save him!  He cared so
+much for Fleur that he would have no further scandal.  If only he could
+get at that anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not to meddle and
+stir up mud at the bottom of water which he wished should remain
+stagnant!... A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain
+spattered on the thatch above him.  He remained indifferent, tracing a
+pattern with his finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table.
+Fleur's future! 'I want fair sailing for her,' he thought.  'Nothing else
+matters at my time of life.'  A lonely business--life!  What you had you
+never could keep to yourself!  As you warned one off, you let another in.
+One could make sure of nothing!  He reached up and pulled a red rambler
+rose from a cluster which blocked the window. Flowers grew and
+dropped--Nature was a queer thing!  The thunder rumbled and crashed,
+travelling east along a river, the paling flashes flicked his eyes; the
+poplar tops showed sharp and dense against the sky, a heavy shower
+rustled and rattled and veiled in the little house wherein he sat,
+indifferent, thinking.
+
+When the storm was over, he left his retreat and went down the wet path
+to the river bank.
+
+Two swans had come, sheltering in among the reeds.  He knew the birds
+well, and stood watching the dignity in the curve of those white necks
+and formidable snake-like heads.  'Not dignified--what I have to do!' he
+thought.  And yet it must be tackled, lest worse befell. Annette must be
+back by now from wherever she had gone, for it was nearly dinner-time,
+and as the moment for seeing her approached, the difficulty of knowing
+what to say and how to say it had increased.  A new and scaring thought
+occurred to him.  Suppose she wanted her liberty to marry this fellow!
+Well, if she did, she couldn't have it.  He had not married her for that.
+The image of Prosper Profond dawdled before him reassuringly.  Not a
+marrying man!  No, no!  Anger replaced that momentary scare.  'He had
+better not come my way,' he thought.  The mongrel represented---!  But
+what did Prosper Profond represent?  Nothing that mattered surely.  And
+yet something real enough in the world--unmorality let off its chain,
+disillusionment on the prowl!  That expression Annette had caught from
+him: "Je m'en fiche!"  A fatalistic chap!  A continental--a
+cosmopolitan--a product of the age!  If there were condemnation more
+complete, Soames felt that he did not know it.
+
+The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into some
+distance of their own.  One of them uttered a little hiss, wagged its
+tail, turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam away.  The other
+followed.  Their white bodies, their stately necks, passed out of his
+sight, and he went toward the house.
+
+Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he thought as he
+went up-stairs 'Handsome is as handsome does.'  Handsome! Except for
+remarks about the curtains in the drawing-room, and the storm, there was
+practically no conversation during a meal distinguished by exactitude of
+quantity and perfection of quality. Soames drank nothing.  He followed
+her into the drawing-room afterward, and found her smoking a cigarette on
+the sofa between the two French windows.  She was leaning back, almost
+upright, in a low black frock, with her knees crossed and her blue eyes
+half-closed; grey-blue smoke issued from her red, rather full lips, a
+fillet bound her chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk stockings, and
+shoes with very high heels showing off her instep.  A fine piece in any
+room!  Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep into the
+side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
+
+"I'm going to shut the window; the damp's lifting in."
+
+He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the cream-panelled
+wall close by.
+
+What was she thinking of?  He had never understood a woman in his
+life--except Fleur--and Fleur not always!  His heart beat fast.  But if
+he meant to do it, now was the moment.  Turning from the David Cox, he
+took out the torn letter.
+
+"I've had this."
+
+Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
+
+Soames handed her the letter.
+
+"It's torn, but you can read it."  And he turned back to the David Cox--a
+sea-piece, of good tone--but without movement enough.  'I wonder what
+that chap's doing at this moment?' he thought.  'I'll astonish him yet.'
+Out of the corner of his eye he saw Annette holding the letter rigidly;
+her eyes moved from side to side under her darkened lashes and frowning
+darkened eyes.  She dropped the letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and
+said:
+
+"Dirrty!"
+
+"I quite agree," said Soames; "degrading.  Is it true?"
+
+A tooth fastened on her red lower lip.  "And what if it were?"
+
+She was brazen!
+
+"Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, speak out!"
+
+"What is the good of talking?"
+
+Soames said icily: "So you admit it?"
+
+"I admit nothing.  You are a fool to ask.  A man like you should not ask.
+It is dangerous."
+
+Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, halting in front of her, "what you were when
+I married you?  Working at accounts in a restaurant."
+
+"Do you remember that I was not half your age?"
+
+Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to the
+David Cox.
+
+"I am not going to bandy words.  I require you to give up this
+--friendship.  I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur."
+
+"Ah!--Fleur!"
+
+"Yes," said Soames stubbornly; "Fleur.  She is your child as well as
+mine."
+
+"It is kind to admit that!"
+
+"Are you going to do what I say?"
+
+"I refuse to tell you."
+
+"Then I must make you."
+
+Annette smiled.
+
+"No, Soames," she said.  "You are helpless.  Do not say things that you
+will regret."
+
+Anger swelled the veins on his forehead.  He opened his mouth to vent
+that emotion, and could not.  Annette went on:
+
+"There shall be no more such letters, I promise you.  That is enough."
+
+Soames writhed.  He had a sense of being treated like a child by this
+woman who had deserved he did not know what.
+
+"When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had better
+be quiet about each other.  There are things one does not drag up into
+the light for people to laugh at.  You will be quiet, then; not for my
+sake for your own.  You are getting old; I am not, yet. You have made me
+ver-ry practical"
+
+Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked,
+repeated dully:
+
+"I require you to give up this friendship."
+
+"And if I do not?"
+
+"Then--then I will cut you out of my Will."
+
+Somehow it did not seem to meet the case.  Annette laughed.
+
+"You will live a long time, Soames."
+
+"You--you are a bad woman," said Soames suddenly.
+
+Annette shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I do not think so.  Living with you has killed things in me, it is true;
+but I am not a bad woman.  I am sensible--that is all.  And so will you
+be when you have thought it over."
+
+"I shall see this man," said Soames sullenly, "and warn him off."
+
+"Mon cher, you are funny.  You do not want me, you have as much of me as
+you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead.  I admit nothing, but I
+am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had better be quiet, I
+tell you.  I myself will make no scandal; none. Now, I am not saying any
+more, whatever you do."
+
+She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened it.
+Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings.  The thought
+of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a revelation of
+their relationship, startling to one little given to introspective
+philosophy.  Without saying another word he went out and up to the
+picture-gallery.  This came of marrying a Frenchwoman! And yet, without
+her there would have been no Fleur! She had served her purpose.
+
+'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing.  I don't even know that
+there's anything in it.'  The instinct of self-preservation warned him to
+batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air. Unless one
+believed there was something in a thing, there wasn't.
+
+That night he went into her room.  She received him in the most
+matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them.  And he
+returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace.  If one didn't
+choose to see, one needn't.  And he did not choose--in future he did not
+choose.  There was nothing to be gained by it--nothing! Opening the
+drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed photograph
+of Fleur.  When he had looked at it a little he slipped it down, and
+there was that other one--that old one of Irene. An owl hooted while he
+stood in his window gazing at it.  The owl hooted, the red climbing roses
+seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom.  God!
+That had been a different thing! Passion--Memory!  Dust!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+JUNE TAKES A HAND
+
+One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York, an
+egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June Forsyte's
+studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick.  On the evening of July 6,
+Boris Strumolowski--several of whose works were on show there because
+they were as yet too advanced to be on show anywhere else--had begun
+well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like silence which admirably
+suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned countenance framed in
+bright hair banged like a girl's.  June had known him three weeks, and he
+still seemed to her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of the
+future; a sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an
+unappreciative West.  Until that evening he had conversationally confined
+himself to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust he
+had just shaken from off his feet--a country, in his opinion, so
+barbarous in every way that he had sold practically nothing there, and
+become an object of suspicion to the police; a country, as he said,
+without a race of its own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity,
+without principles, traditions, taste, without--in a word--a soul.  He
+had left it for his own good, and come to the only other country where he
+could live well.  June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments,
+standing before his creations--frightening, but powerful and symbolic
+once they had been explained!  That he, haloed by bright hair like an
+early Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion of
+all else--the only sign of course by which real genius could be
+told--should still be a "lame duck" agitated her warm heart almost to the
+exclusion of Paul Post.  And she had begun to take steps to clear her
+Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces.  She had at
+once encountered trouble.  Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch had stung.
+With all the emphasis of a genius which she did not as yet deny them,
+they had demanded another six weeks at least of her Gallery.  The
+American stream, still flowing in, would soon be flowing out.  The
+American stream was their right, their only hope, their salvation--since
+nobody in this "beastly" country cared for Art.  June had yielded to the
+demonstration.  After all Boris would not mind their having the full
+benefit of an American stream, which he himself so violently despised.
+
+This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present, except
+Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy Portugal,
+editor of the Neo-Artist.  She had put it to him with that sudden
+confidence which continual contact with the neo-artistic world had never
+been able to dry up in her warm and generous nature.  He had not broken
+his Christ-like silence, however, for more than two minutes before she
+began to move her blue eyes from side to side, as a cat moves its tail.
+This--he said--was characteristic of England, the most selfish country in
+the world; the country which sucked the blood of other countries;
+destroyed the brains and hearts of Irishmen, Hindus, Egyptians, Boers,
+and Burmese, all the best races in the world; bullying, hypocritical
+England!  This was what he had expected, coming to, such a country, where
+the climate was all fog, and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to
+Art, and sunk in profiteering and the grossest materialism.  Conscious
+that Hannah Hobdey was murmuring, "Hear, hear!" and Jimmy Portugal
+sniggering, June grew crimson, and suddenly rapped out:
+
+"Then why did you ever come?  We didn't ask you."
+
+The remark was so singularly at variance with all she had led him to
+expect from her, that Strumolowski stretched out his hand and took a
+cigarette.
+
+"England never wants an idealist," he said.
+
+But in June something primitively English was thoroughly upset; old
+Jolyon's sense of justice had risen, as it were, from bed.  "You come and
+sponge on us," she said, "and then abuse us.  If you think that's playing
+the game, I don't."
+
+She now discovered that which others had discovered before her--the
+thickness of hide beneath which the sensibility of genius is sometimes
+veiled.  Strumolowski's young and ingenuous face became the incarnation
+of a sneer.
+
+"Sponge, one does not sponge, one takes what is owing--a tenth part of
+what is owing.  You will repent to say that, Miss Forsyte."
+
+"Oh, no," said June, "I shan't."
+
+"Ah!  We know very well, we artists--you take us to get what you can out
+of us.  I want nothing from you"--and he blew out a cloud of June's
+smoke.
+
+Decision rose in an icy puff from the turmoil of insulted shame within
+her.  "Very well, then, you can take your things away."
+
+And, almost in the same moment, she thought: 'Poor boy!  He's only got a
+garret, and probably not a taxi fare.  In front of these people, too;
+it's positively disgusting!'
+
+Young Strumolowski shook his head violently; his hair, thick, smooth,
+close as a golden plate, did not fall off.
+
+"I can live on nothing," he said shrilly; "I have often had to for the
+sake of my Art.  It is you bourgeois who force us to spend money."
+
+The words hit June like a pebble, in the ribs.  After all she had done
+for Art, all her identification with its troubles and lame ducks.  She
+was struggling for adequate words when the door was opened, and her
+Austrian murmured:
+
+"A young lady, gnadiges Fraulein."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the little meal-room."
+
+With a glance at Boris Strumolowski, at Hannah Hobdey, at Jimmy Portugal,
+June said nothing, and went out, devoid of equanimity. Entering the
+"little meal-room," she perceived the young lady to be Fleur--looking
+very pretty, if pale.  At this disenchanted moment a little lame duck of
+her own breed was welcome to June, so homoeopathic by instinct.
+
+The girl must have come, of course, because of Jon; or, if not, at least
+to get something out of her.  And June felt just then that to assist
+somebody was the only bearable thing.
+
+"So you've remembered to come," she said.
+
+"Yes.  What a jolly little duck of a house!  But please don't let me
+bother you, if you've got people."
+
+"Not at all," said June.  "I want to let them stew in their own juice for
+a bit.  Have you come about Jon?"
+
+"You said you thought we ought to be told.  Well, I've found out."
+
+"Oh!" said June blankly.  "Not nice, is it?"
+
+They were standing one on each side of the little bare table at which
+June took her meals.  A vase on it was full of Iceland poppies; the girl
+raised her hand and touched them with a gloved finger.  To her
+new-fangled dress, frilly about the hips and tight below the knees, June
+took a sudden liking--a charming colour, flax-blue.
+
+'She makes a picture,' thought June.  Her little room, with its
+whitewashed walls, its floor and hearth of old pink brick, its black
+paint, and latticed window athwart which the last of the sunlight was
+shining, had never looked so charming, set off by this young figure, with
+the creamy, slightly frowning face.  She remembered with sudden vividness
+how nice she herself had looked in those old days when her heart was set
+on Philip Bosinney, that dead lover, who had broken from her to destroy
+for ever Irene's allegiance to this girl's father.  Did Fleur know of
+that, too?
+
+"Well," she said, "what are you going to do?"
+
+It was some seconds before Fleur answered.
+
+"I don't want Jon to suffer.  I must see him once more to put an end to
+it."
+
+"You're going to put an end to it!"
+
+"What else is there to do?"
+
+The girl seemed to June, suddenly, intolerably spiritless.
+
+"I suppose you're right," she muttered.  "I know my father thinks so;
+but--I should never have done it myself.  I can't take things lying
+down."
+
+How poised and watchful that girl looked; how unemotional her voice
+sounded!
+
+"People will assume that I'm in love."
+
+"Well, aren't you?"
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders.  'I might have known it,' thought June;
+'she's Soames' daughter--fish!  And yet--he!'
+
+"What do you want me to do then?" she said with a sort of disgust.
+
+"Could I see Jon here to-morrow on his way down to Holly's?  He'd come if
+you sent him a line to-night.  And perhaps afterward you'd let them know
+quietly at Robin Hill that it's all over, and that they needn't tell Jon
+about his mother."
+
+"All right!" said June abruptly.  "I'll write now, and you can post it.
+Half-past two tomorrow.  I shan't be in, myself."
+
+She sat down at the tiny bureau which filled one corner.  When she looked
+round with the finished note Fleur was still touching the poppies with
+her gloved finger.
+
+June licked a stamp.  "Well, here it is.  If you're not in love, of
+course, there's no more to be said.  Jon's lucky."
+
+Fleur took the note.  "Thanks awfully!"
+
+'Cold-blooded little baggage!'  thought June.  Jon, son of her father, to
+love, and not to be loved by the daughter of--Soames!  It was
+humiliating!
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+Fleur nodded; her frills shook and trembled as she swayed toward the
+door.
+
+"Good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye!...  Little piece of fashion!" muttered June, closing the door.
+"That family!"  And she marched back toward her studio.  Boris
+Strumolowski had regained his Christ-like silence and Jimmy Portugal was
+damning everybody, except the group in whose behalf he ran the
+Neo-Artist.  Among the condemned were Eric Cobbley, and several other
+"lame-duck" genii who at one time or another had held first place in the
+repertoire of June's aid and adoration.  She experienced a sense of
+futility and disgust, and went to the window to let the river-wind blow
+those squeaky words away.
+
+But when at length Jimmy Portugal had finished, and gone with Hannah
+Hobdey, she sat down and mothered young Strumolowski for half an hour,
+promising him a month, at least, of the American stream; so that he went
+away with his halo in perfect order.  'In spite of all,' June thought,
+'Boris is wonderful'
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
+
+To know that your hand is against every one's is--for some natures--to
+experience a sense of moral release.  Fleur felt no remorse when she left
+June's house.  Reading condemnatory resentment in her little kinswoman's
+blue eyes-she was glad that she had fooled her, despising June because
+that elderly idealist had not seen what she was after.
+
+End it, forsooth!  She would soon show them all that she was only just
+beginning.  And she smiled to herself on the top of the bus which carried
+her back to Mayfair.  But the smile died, squeezed out by spasms of
+anticipation and anxiety.  Would she be able to manage Jon?  She had
+taken the bit between her teeth, but could she make him take it too?  She
+knew the truth and the real danger of delay--he knew neither; therein lay
+all the difference in the world.
+
+'Suppose I tell him,' she thought; 'wouldn't it really be safer?' This
+hideous luck had no right to spoil their love; he must see that! They
+could not let it!  People always accepted an accomplished fact in time!
+From that piece of philosophy--profound enough at her age--she passed to
+another consideration less philosophic.  If she persuaded Jon to a quick
+and secret marriage, and he found out afterward that she had known the
+truth.  What then?  Jon hated subterfuge.  Again, then, would it not be
+better to tell him?  But the memory of his mother's face kept intruding
+on that impulse. Fleur was afraid.  His mother had power over him; more
+power perhaps than she herself.  Who could tell?  It was too great a
+risk. Deep-sunk in these instinctive calculations she was carried on past
+Green Street as far as the Ritz Hotel.  She got down there, and walked
+back on the Green Park side.  The storm had washed every tree; they still
+dripped.  Heavy drops fell on to her frills, and to avoid them she
+crossed over under the eyes of the Iseeum Club.  Chancing to look up she
+saw Monsieur Profond with a tall stout man in the bay window. Turning
+into Green Street she heard her name called, and saw "that prowler"
+coming up.  He took off his hat--a glossy "bowler" such as she
+particularly detested.
+
+"Good evenin'!  Miss Forsyde.  Isn't there a small thing I can do for
+you?"
+
+"Yes, pass by on the other side."
+
+"I say!  Why do you dislike me?"
+
+"Do I?"
+
+"It looks like it."
+
+"Well, then, because you make me feel life isn't worth living."
+
+Monsieur Profond smiled.
+
+"Look here, Miss Forsyde, don't worry.  It'll be all right.  Nothing
+lasts."
+
+"Things do last," cried Fleur; "with me anyhow--especially likes and
+dislikes."
+
+"Well, that makes me a bit un'appy."
+
+"I should have thought nothing could ever make you happy or unhappy."
+
+"I don't like to annoy other people.  I'm goin' on my yacht."
+
+Fleur looked at him, startled.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Small voyage to the South Seas or somewhere," said Monsieur Profond.
+
+Fleur suffered relief and a sense of insult.  Clearly he meant to convey
+that he was breaking with her mother.  How dared he have anything to
+break, and yet how dared he break it?
+
+"Good-night, Miss Forsyde!  Remember me to Mrs. Dartie.  I'm not so bad
+really.  Good-night!"  Fleur left him standing there with his hat raised.
+Stealing a look round, she saw him stroll--immaculate and heavy--back
+toward his Club.
+
+'He can't even love with conviction,' she thought.  'What will Mother
+do?'
+
+Her dreams that night were endless and uneasy; she rose heavy and
+unrested, and went at once to the study of Whitaker's Almanac.  A Forsyte
+is instinctively aware that facts are the real crux of any situation.
+She might conquer Jon's prejudice, but without exact machinery to
+complete their desperate resolve, nothing would happen. From the
+invaluable tome she learned that they must each be twenty-one; or some
+one's consent would be necessary, which of course was unobtainable; then
+she became lost in directions concerning licenses, certificates, notices,
+districts, coming finally to the word "perjury."   But that was nonsense!
+Who would really mind their giving wrong ages in order to be married for
+love!  She ate hardly any breakfast, and went back to Whitaker.  The more
+she studied the less sure she became; till, idly turning the pages, she
+came to Scotland.  People could be married there without any of this
+nonsense.  She had only to go and stay there twenty-one days, then Jon
+could come, and in front of two people they could declare themselves
+married.  And what was more--they would be!  It was far the best way; and
+at once she ran over her schoolfellows.  There was Mary Lambe who lived
+in Edinburgh and was "quite a sport!"
+
+She had a brother too.  She could stay with Mary Lambe, who with her
+brother would serve for witnesses.  She well knew that some girls would
+think all this unnecessary, and that all she and Jon need do was to go
+away together for a weekend and then say to their people: "We are married
+by Nature, we must now be married by Law."  But Fleur was Forsyte enough
+to feel such a proceeding dubious, and to dread her father's face when he
+heard of it.  Besides, she did not believe that Jon would do it; he had
+an opinion of her such as she could not bear to diminish.  No!  Mary
+Lambe was preferable, and it was just the time of year to go to Scotland.
+More at ease now she packed, avoided her aunt, and took a bus to
+Chiswick.  She was too early, and went on to Kew Gardens.  She found no
+peace among its flower-beds, labelled trees, and broad green spaces, and
+having lunched off anchovy-paste sandwiches and coffee, returned to
+Chiswick and rang June's bell.  The Austrian admitted her to the "little
+meal-room." Now that she knew what she and Jon were up against, her
+longing for him had increased tenfold, as if he were a toy with sharp
+edges or dangerous paint such as they had tried to take from her as a
+child. If she could not have her way, and get Jon for good and all, she
+felt like dying of privation.  By hook or crook she must and would get
+him!  A round dim mirror of very old glass hung over the pink brick
+hearth.  She stood looking at herself reflected in it, pale, and rather
+dark under the eyes; little shudders kept passing through her nerves.
+Then she heard the bell ring, and, stealing to the window, saw him
+standing on the doorstep smoothing his hair and lips, as if he too were
+trying to subdue the fluttering of his nerves.
+
+She was sitting on one of the two rush-seated chairs, with her back to
+the door, when he came in, and she said at once--
+
+"Sit down, Jon, I want to talk seriously."
+
+Jon sat on the table by her side, and without looking at him she went on:
+
+"If you don't want to lose me, we must get married."
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+"Why?  Is there anything new?"
+
+"No, but I felt it at Robin Hill, and among my people."
+
+"But--" stammered Jon, "at Robin Hill--it was all smooth--and they've
+said nothing to me."
+
+"But they mean to stop us.  Your mother's face was enough.  And my
+father's."
+
+"Have you seen him since?"
+
+Fleur nodded.  What mattered a few supplementary lies?
+
+"But," said Jon eagerly, "I can't see how they can feel like that after
+all these years."
+
+Fleur looked up at him.
+
+"Perhaps you don't love me enough." "Not love you enough!  Why--!"
+
+"Then make sure of me."
+
+"Without telling them?"
+
+"Not till after."
+
+Jon was silent.  How much older he looked than on that day, barely two
+months ago, when she first saw him--quite two years older!
+
+"It would hurt Mother awfully," he said.
+
+Fleur drew her hand away.
+
+"You've got to choose."
+
+Jon slid off the table on to his knees.
+
+"But why not tell them?  They can't really stop us, Fleur!"
+
+"They can!  I tell you, they can."
+
+"How?"
+
+"We're utterly dependent--by putting money pressure, and all sorts of
+other pressure.  I'm not patient, Jon."
+
+"But it's deceiving them."
+
+Fleur got up.
+
+"You can't really love me, or you wouldn't hesitate.  'He either fears
+his fate too much!'"
+
+Lifting his hands to her waist, Jon forced her to sit down again. She
+hurried on:
+
+"I've planned it all out.  We've only to go to Scotland.  When we're
+married they'll soon come round.  People always come round to facts.
+Don't you see, Jon?"
+
+"But to hurt them so awfully!"
+
+So he would rather hurt her than those people of his!  "All right, then;
+let me go!"
+
+Jon got up and put his back against the door.
+
+"I expect you're right," he said slowly; "but I want to think it over."
+
+She could see that he was seething with feelings he wanted to express;
+but she did not mean to help him.  She hated herself at this moment and
+almost hated him.  Why had she to do all the work to secure their love?
+It wasn't fair.  And then she saw his eyes, adoring and distressed.
+
+"Don't look like that!  I only don't want to lose you, Jon."
+
+"You can't lose me so long as you want me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can."
+
+Jon put his hands on her shoulders.
+
+"Fleur, do you know anything you haven't told me?"
+
+It was the point-blank question she had dreaded.  She looked straight at
+him, and answered: "No."  She had burnt her boats; but what did it
+matter, if she got him?  He would forgive her.  And throwing her arms
+round his neck, she kissed him on the lips.  She was winning!  She felt
+it in the beating of his heart against her, in the closing of his eyes.
+"I want to make sure!  I want to make sure!" she whispered.  "Promise!"
+
+Jon did not answer.  His face had the stillness of extreme trouble. At
+last he said:
+
+"It's like hitting them.  I must think a little, Fleur.  I really must."
+
+Fleur slipped out of his arms.
+
+"Oh! Very well!" And suddenly she burst into tears of disappointment,
+shame, and overstrain.  Followed five minutes of acute misery.  Jon's
+remorse and tenderness knew no bounds; but he did not promise. Despite
+her will to cry, "Very well, then, if you don't love me enough-goodbye!"
+she dared not.  From birth accustomed to her own way, this check from one
+so young, so tender, so devoted, baffled and surprised her.  She wanted
+to push him away from her, to try what anger and coldness would do, and
+again she dared not.  The knowledge that she was scheming to rush him
+blindfold into the irrevocable weakened everything--weakened the
+sincerity of pique, and the sincerity of passion; even her kisses had not
+the lure she wished for them.  That stormy little meeting ended
+inconclusively.
+
+"Will you some tea, gnadiges Fraulein?"
+
+Pushing Jon from her, she cried out:
+
+"No-no, thank you!  I'm just going."
+
+And before he could prevent her she was gone.
+
+She went stealthily, mopping her gushed, stained cheeks, frightened,
+angry, very miserable.  She had stirred Jon up so fearfully, yet nothing
+definite was promised or arranged!  But the more uncertain and hazardous
+the future, the more "the will to have" worked its tentacles into the
+flesh of her heart--like some burrowing tick!
+
+No one was at Green Street.  Winifred had gone with Imogen to see a play
+which some said was allegorical, and others "very exciting, don't you
+know."  It was because of what others said that Winifred and Imogen had
+gone.  Fleur went on to Paddington.  Through the carriage the air from
+the brick-kilns of West Drayton and the late hayfields fanned her still
+gushed cheeks.  Flowers had seemed to be had for the picking; now they
+were all thorned and prickled.  But the golden flower within the crown of
+spikes seemed to her tenacious spirit all the fairer and more desirable.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE FAT IN THE FIRE
+
+On reaching home Fleur found an atmosphere so peculiar that it penetrated
+even the perplexed aura of her own private life.  Her mother was
+inaccessibly entrenched in a brown study; her father contemplating fate
+in the vinery.  Neither of them had a word to throw to a dog.  'Is it
+because of me?' thought Fleur.  'Or because of Profond?'  To her mother
+she said:
+
+"What's the matter with Father?"
+
+Her mother answered with a shrug of her shoulders.
+
+To her father:
+
+"What's the matter with Mother?"
+
+Her father answered:
+
+"Matter?  What should be the matter?" and gave her a sharp look.
+
+"By the way," murmured Fleur, "Monsieur Profond is going a 'small' voyage
+on his yacht, to the South Seas."
+
+Soames examined a branch on which no grapes were growing.
+
+"This vine's a failure," he said.  "I've had young Mont here.  He asked
+me something about you."
+
+"Oh! How do you like him, Father?"
+
+"He--he's a product--like all these young people."
+
+"What were you at his age, dear?"
+
+Soames smiled grimly.
+
+"We went to work, and didn't play about--flying and motoring, and making
+love."
+
+"Didn't you ever make love?"
+
+She avoided looking at him while she said that, but she saw him well
+enough.  His pale face had reddened, his eyebrows, where darkness was
+still mingled with the grey, had come close together.
+
+"I had no time or inclination to philander."
+
+"Perhaps you had a grand passion."
+
+Soames looked at her intently.
+
+"Yes--if you want to know--and much good it did me."  He moved away,
+along by the hot-water pipes.  Fleur tiptoed silently after him.
+
+"Tell me about it, Father!"
+
+Soames became very still.
+
+"What should you want to know about such things, at your age?"
+
+"Is she alive?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And married?" Yes."
+
+"It's Jon Forsyte's mother, isn't it?  And she was your wife first."
+
+It was said in a flash of intuition.  Surely his opposition came from his
+anxiety that she should not know of that old wound to his pride. But she
+was startled.  To see some one so old and calm wince as if struck, to
+hear so sharp a note of pain in his voice!
+
+"Who told you that?  If your aunt!  I can't bear the affair talked of."
+
+"But, darling," said Fleur, softly, "it's so long ago."
+
+"Long ago or not, I...."
+
+Fleur stood stroking his arm.
+
+"I've tried to forget," he said suddenly; "I don't wish to be reminded."
+And then, as if venting some long and secret irritation, he added: "In
+these days people don't understand.  Grand passion, indeed!  No one knows
+what it is."
+
+"I do," said Fleur, almost in a whisper.
+
+Soames, who had turned his back on her, spun round.
+
+"What are you talking of--a child like you!"
+
+"Perhaps I've inherited it, Father."
+
+"What?"
+
+"For her son, you see."
+
+He was pale as a sheet, and she knew that she was as bad.  They stood
+staring at each other in the steamy heat, redolent of the mushy scent of
+earth, of potted geranium, and of vines coming along fast.
+
+"This is crazy," said Soames at last, between dry lips.
+
+Scarcely moving her own, she murmured:
+
+"Don't be angry, Father.  I can't help it."
+
+But she could see he wasn't angry; only scared, deeply scared.
+
+"I thought that foolishness," he stammered, "was all forgotten."
+
+"Oh, no!  It's ten times what it was."
+
+Soames kicked at the hot-water pipe.  The hapless movement touched her,
+who had no fear of her father--none.
+
+"Dearest!" she said.  "What must be, must, you know."
+
+"Must!" repeated Soames.  "You don't know what you're talking of. Has
+that boy been told?"
+
+The blood rushed into her cheeks.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+He had turned from her again, and, with one shoulder a little raised,
+stood staring fixedly at a joint in the pipes.
+
+"It's most distasteful to me," he said suddenly; "nothing could be more
+so.  Son of that fellow!  It's--it's--perverse!"
+
+She had noted, almost unconsciously, that he did not say "son of that
+woman," and again her intuition began working.
+
+Did the ghost of that grand passion linger in some corner of his heart?
+
+She slipped her hand under his arm.
+
+"Jon's father is quite ill and old; I saw him."
+
+"You--?"
+
+"Yes, I went there with Jon; I saw them both."
+
+"Well, and what did they say to you?"
+
+"Nothing.  They were very polite."
+
+"They would be."  He resumed his contemplation of the pipe-joint, and
+then said suddenly:
+
+"I must think this over--I'll speak to you again to-night."
+
+She knew this was final for the moment, and stole away, leaving him still
+looking at the pipe-joint.  She wandered into the fruit-garden, among the
+raspberry and currant bushes, without impetus to pick and eat.  Two
+months ago--she was light-hearted!  Even two days ago--light-hearted,
+before Prosper Profond told her.  Now she felt tangled in a web-of
+passions, vested rights, oppressions and revolts, the ties of love and
+hate.  At this dark moment of discouragement there seemed, even to her
+hold-fast nature, no way out.  How deal with it--how sway and bend
+things to her will, and get her heart's desire? And, suddenly, round the
+corner of the high box hedge, she came plump on her mother, walking
+swiftly, with an open letter in her hand.  Her bosom was heaving, her
+eyes dilated, her cheeks flushed.  Instantly Fleur thought: 'The yacht!
+Poor Mother!'
+
+Annette gave her a wide startled look, and said:
+
+"J'ai la migraine."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, Mother."
+
+"Oh, yes! you and your father--sorry!"
+
+"But, Mother--I am.  I know what it feels like."
+
+Annette's startled eyes grew wide, till the whites showed above them.
+
+"Poor innocent!" she said.
+
+Her mother--so self-possessed, and commonsensical--to look and speak like
+this!  It was all frightening!  Her father, her mother, herself! And only
+two months back they had seemed to have everything they wanted in this
+world.
+
+Annette crumpled the letter in her hand.  Fleur knew that she must ignore
+the sight.
+
+"Can't I do anything for your head, Mother?"
+
+Annette shook that head and walked on, swaying her hips.
+
+'It's cruel,' thought Fleur, 'and I was glad!  That man!  What do men
+come prowling for, disturbing everything!  I suppose he's tired of her.
+What business has he to be tired of my mother?  What business!' And at
+that thought, so natural and so peculiar, she uttered a little choked
+laugh.
+
+She ought, of course, to be delighted, but what was there to be delighted
+at?  Her father didn't really care!  Her mother did, perhaps?  She
+entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree. A breeze sighed in
+the higher boughs; the sky seen through their green was very blue and
+very white in cloud--those heavy white clouds almost always present in
+river landscape.  Bees, sheltering out of the wind, hummed softly, and
+over the lush grass fell the thick shade from those fruit-trees planted
+by her father five-and-twenty, years ago.  Birds were almost silent, the
+cuckoos had ceased to sing, but wood-pigeons were cooing.  The breath and
+drone and cooing of high summer were not for long a sedative to her
+excited nerves.  Crouched over her knees she began to scheme.  Her father
+must be made to back her up.  Why should he mind so long as she was
+happy?  She had not lived for nearly nineteen years without knowing that
+her future was all he really cared about.  She had, then, only to
+convince him that her future could not be happy without Jon.  He thought
+it a mad fancy.  How foolish the old were, thinking they could tell what
+the young felt!  Had not he confessed that he--when young--had loved with
+a grand passion?  He ought to understand!  'He piles up his money for
+me,' she thought; 'but what's the use, if I'm not going to be happy?'
+Money, and all it bought, did not bring happiness.  Love only brought
+that.  The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard, which gave it such a moony
+look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour.  'They oughtn't
+to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if they didn't mean me to have my
+hour, and be happy while it lasts.'  Nothing real stood in the way, like
+poverty, or disease--sentiment only, a ghost from the unhappy past!  Jon
+was right.  They wouldn't let you live, these old people!  They made
+mistakes, committed crimes, and wanted their children to go on paying!
+The breeze died away; midges began to bite.  She got up, plucked a piece
+of honeysuckle, and went in.
+
+It was hot that night.  Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale low
+frocks.  The dinner flowers were pale.  Fleur was struck with the pale
+look of everything; her father's face, her mother's shoulders; the pale
+panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-shade, even the
+soup was pale.  There was not one spot of colour in the room, not even
+wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it. What was not pale was
+black--her father's clothes, the butler's clothes, her retriever
+stretched out exhausted in the window, the curtains black with a cream
+pattern.  A moth came in, and that was pale.  And silent was that
+half-mourning dinner in the heat.
+
+Her father called her back as she was following her mother out.
+
+She sat down beside him at the table, and, unpinning the pale
+honeysuckle, put it to her nose.
+
+"I've been thinking," he said.
+
+"Yes, dear?"
+
+"It's extremely painful for me to talk, but there's no help for it. I
+don't know if you understand how much you are to me I've never spoken of
+it, I didn't think it necessary; but--but you're everything.  Your
+mother--" he paused, staring at his finger-bowl of Venetian glass.
+
+"Yes?"'
+
+"I've only you to look to.  I've never had--never wanted anything else,
+since you were born."
+
+"I know," Fleur murmured.
+
+Soames moistened his lips.
+
+"You may think this a matter I can smooth over and arrange for you.
+You're mistaken.  I'm helpless."
+
+Fleur did not speak.
+
+"Quite apart from my own feelings," went on Soames with more resolution,
+"those two are not amenable to anything I can say.  They--they hate me,
+as people always hate those whom they have injured." "But he--Jon--"
+
+"He's their flesh and blood, her only child.  Probably he means to her
+what you mean to me.  It's a deadlock."
+
+"No," cried Fleur, "no, Father!"
+
+Soames leaned back, the image of pale patience, as if resolved on the
+betrayal of no emotion.
+
+"Listen!" he said.  "You're putting the feelings of two months--two
+months--against the feelings of thirty-five years!  What chance do you
+think you have?  Two months--your very first love affair, a matter of
+half a dozen meetings, a few walks and talks, a few kisses--against,
+against what you can't imagine, what no one could who hasn't been through
+it.  Come, be reasonable, Fleur! It's midsummer madness!"
+
+Fleur tore the honeysuckle into little, slow bits.
+
+"The madness is in letting the past spoil it all.
+
+"What do we care about the past?  It's our lives, not yours."
+
+Soames raised his hand to his forehead, where suddenly she saw moisture
+shining.
+
+"Whose child are you?" he said.  "Whose child is he?  The present is
+linked with the past, the future with both.  There's no getting away from
+that."
+
+She had never heard philosophy pass those lips before.  Impressed even in
+her agitation, she leaned her elbows on the table, her chin on her hands.
+
+"But, Father, consider it practically.  We want each other.  There's ever
+so much money, and nothing whatever in the way but sentiment. Let's bury
+the past, Father."
+
+His answer was a sigh.
+
+"Besides," said Fleur gently, "you can't prevent us."
+
+"I don't suppose," said Soames, "that if left to myself I should try to
+prevent you; I must put up with things, I know, to keep your affection.
+But it's not I who control this matter.  That's what I want you to
+realise before it's too late.  If you go on thinking you can get your way
+and encourage this feeling, the blow will be much heavier when you find
+you can't."
+
+"Oh!" cried Fleur, "help me, Father; you can help me, you know."
+
+Soames made a startled movement of negation.  "I?" he said bitterly.
+"Help?  I am the impediment--the just cause and impediment--isn't that
+the jargon?  You have my blood in your veins."
+
+He rose.
+
+"Well, the fat's in the fire.  If you persist in your wilfulness you'll
+have yourself to blame.  Come!  Don't be foolish, my child--my only
+child!"
+
+Fleur laid her forehead against his shoulder.
+
+All was in such turmoil within her.  But no good to show it!  No good at
+all!  She broke away from him, and went out into the twilight,
+distraught, but unconvinced.  All was indeterminate and vague within her,
+like the shapes and shadows in the garden, except--her will to have.  A
+poplar pierced up into the dark-blue sky and touched a white star there.
+The dew wetted her shoes, and chilled her bare shoulders.  She went down
+to the river bank, and stood gazing at a moonstreak on the darkening
+water.  Suddenly she smelled tobacco smoke, and a white figure emerged as
+if created by the moon.  It was young Mont in flannels, standing in his
+boat.  She heard the tiny hiss of his cigarette extinguished in the
+water.
+
+"Fleur," came his voice, "don't be hard on a poor devil!  I've been
+waiting hours."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"Come in my boat!"
+
+"Not I."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I'm not a water-nymph."
+
+"Haven't you any romance in you?  Don't be modern, Fleur!"
+
+He appeared on the path within a yard of her.
+
+"Go away!"
+
+"Fleur, I love you.  Fleur!"
+
+Fleur uttered a short laugh.
+
+"Come again," she said, "when I haven't got my wish."
+
+"What is your wish?"
+
+"Ask another."
+
+"Fleur," said Mont, and his voice sounded strange, "don't mock me! Even
+vivisected dogs are worth decent treatment before they're cut up for
+good."
+
+Fleur shook her head; but her lips were trembling.
+
+"Well, you shouldn't make me jump.  Give me a cigarette."
+
+Mont gave her one, lighted it, and another for himself.
+
+"I don't want to talk rot," he said, "but please imagine all the rot that
+all the lovers that ever were have talked, and all my special rot thrown
+in."
+
+"Thank you, I have imagined it.  Good-night!"  They stood for a moment
+facing each other in the shadow of an acacia-tree with very moonlit
+blossoms, and the smoke from their cigarettes mingled in the air between
+them.
+
+"Also ran: 'Michael Mont'?" he said.  Fleur turned abruptly toward the
+house.  On the lawn she stopped to look back.  Michael Mont was whirling
+his arms above him; she could see them dashing at his head; then waving
+at the moonlit blossoms of the acacia.  His voice just reached her.
+"Jolly-jolly!"  Fleur shook herself.  She couldn't help him, she had too
+much trouble of her own!  On the verandah she stopped very suddenly
+again.  Her mother was sitting in the drawing-room at her writing bureau,
+quite alone.  There was nothing remarkable in the expression of her face
+except its utter immobility. But she looked desolate!  Fleur went
+upstairs.  At the door of her room she paused.  She could hear her father
+walking up and down, up and down the picture-gallery.
+
+'Yes,' she thought, jolly!  Oh, Jon!'
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+DECISION
+
+When Fleur left him Jon stared at the Austrian.  She was a thin woman
+with a dark face and the concerned expression of one who has watched
+every little good that life once had slip from her, one by one. "No tea?"
+she said.
+
+Susceptible to the disappointment in her voice, Jon murmured:
+
+"No, really; thanks."
+
+"A lil cup--it ready.  A lil cup and cigarette."
+
+Fleur was gone!  Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him!  And
+with a heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, and said:
+
+"Well--thank you!"
+
+She brought in a little pot of tea with two little cups, and a silver box
+of cigarettes on a little tray.
+
+"Sugar?  Miss Forsyte has much sugar--she buy my sugar, my friend's sugar
+also.  Miss Forsyte is a veree kind lady.  I am happy to serve her.  You
+her brother?"
+
+"Yes," said Jon, beginning to puff the second cigarette of his life.
+
+"Very young brother," said the Austrian, with a little anxious smile,
+which reminded him of the wag of a dog's tail.
+
+"May I give you some?" he said.  "And won't you sit down, please?"
+
+The Austrian shook her head.
+
+"Your father a very nice old man--the most nice old man I ever see. Miss
+Forsyte tell me all about him.  Is he better?"
+
+Her words fell on Jon like a reproach.  "Oh Yes, I think he's all right."
+
+"I like to see him again," said the Austrian, putting a hand on her
+heart; "he have veree kind heart."
+
+"Yes," said Jon.  And again her words seemed to him a reproach.
+
+"He never give no trouble to no one, and smile so gentle."
+
+"Yes, doesn't he?"
+
+"He look at Miss Forsyte so funny sometimes.  I tell him all my story; he
+so sympatisch.  Your mother--she nice and well?"
+
+"Yes, very."
+
+"He have her photograph on his dressing-table.  Veree beautiful"
+
+Jon gulped down his tea.  This woman, with her concerned face and her
+reminding words, was like the first and second murderers.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "I must go now.  May--may I leave this with you?"
+
+He put a ten-shilling note on the tray with a doubting hand and gained
+the door.  He heard the Austrian gasp, and hurried out.  He had just time
+to catch his train, and all the way to Victoria looked at every face that
+passed, as lovers will, hoping against hope.  On reaching Worthing he put
+his luggage into the local train, and set out across the Downs for
+Wansdon, trying to walk off his aching irresolution.  So long as he went
+full bat, he could enjoy the beauty of those green slopes, stopping now
+and again to sprawl on the grass, admire the perfection of a wild rose or
+listen to a lark's song.  But the war of motives within him was but
+postponed--the longing for Fleur, and the hatred of deception.  He came
+to the old chalk-pit above Wansdon with his mind no more made up than
+when he started.  To see both sides of a question vigorously was at once
+Jon's strength and weakness.  He tramped in, just as the first
+dinner-bell rang. His things had already been brought up.  He had a
+hurried bath and came down to find Holly alone--Val had gone to Town and
+would not be back till the last train.
+
+Since Val's advice to him to ask his sister what was the matter between
+the two families, so much had happened--Fleur's disclosure in the Green
+Park, her visit to Robin Hill, to-day's meeting--that there seemed
+nothing to ask.  He talked of Spain, his sunstroke, Val's horses, their
+father's health.  Holly startled him by saying that she thought their
+father not at all well.  She had been twice to Robin Hill for the
+week-end.  He had seemed fearfully languid, sometimes even in pain, but
+had always refused to talk about himself.
+
+"He's awfully dear and unselfish--don't you think, Jon?"
+
+Feeling far from dear and unselfish himself, Jon answered: "Rather!"
+
+"I think, he's been a simply perfect father, so long as I can remember."
+
+"Yes," answered Jon, very subdued.
+
+"He's never interfered, and he's always seemed to understand.  I shall
+never forget his letting me go to South Africa in the Boer War when I was
+in love with Val."
+
+"That was before he married Mother, wasn't it?" said Jon suddenly.
+
+"Yes.  Why?"
+
+"Oh! nothing.  Only, wasn't she engaged to Fleur's father first?"
+
+Holly put down the spoon she was using, and raised her eyes.  Her stare
+was circumspect.  What did the boy know?  Enough to make it better to
+tell him?  She could not decide.  He looked strained and worried,
+altogether older, but that might be the sunstroke.
+
+"There was something," she said.  "Of course we were out there, and got
+no news of anything."  She could not take the risk.
+
+It was not her secret.  Besides, she was in the dark about his feelings
+now.  Before Spain she had made sure he was in love; but boys were boys;
+that was seven weeks ago, and all Spain between.
+
+She saw that he knew she was putting him off, and added:
+
+"Have you heard anything of Fleur?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+His face told her, then, more than the most elaborate explanations. So he
+had not forgotten!
+
+She said very quietly: "Fleur is awfully attractive, Jon, but you
+know--Val and I don't really like her very much."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"We think she's got rather a 'having' nature."
+
+"'Having'?  I don't know what you mean.  She--she--" he pushed his
+dessert plate away, got up, and went to the window.
+
+Holly, too, got up, and put her arm round his waist.
+
+"Don't be angry, Jon dear.  We can't all see people in the same light,
+can we?  You know, I believe each of us only has about one or two people
+who can see the best that's in us, and bring it out.  For you I think
+it's your mother.  I once saw her looking at a letter of yours; it was
+wonderful to see her face.  I think she's the most beautiful woman I ever
+saw--Age doesn't seem to touch her."
+
+Jon's face softened; then again became tense.  Everybody--everybody was
+against him and Fleur!  It all strengthened the appeal of her words:
+"Make sure of me--marry me, Jon!"
+
+Here, where he had passed that wonderful week with her--the tug of her
+enchantment, the ache in his heart increased with every minute that she
+was not there to make the room, the garden, the very air magical.  Would
+he ever be able to live down here, not seeing her? And he closed up
+utterly, going early to bed.  It would not make him healthy, wealthy, and
+wise, but it closeted him with memory of Fleur in her fancy frock.  He
+heard Val's arrival--the Ford discharging cargo, then the stillness of
+the summer night stole back--with only the bleating of very distant
+sheep, and a night-Jar's harsh purring. He leaned far out.  Cold
+moon--warm air--the Downs like silver! Small wings, a stream bubbling,
+the rambler roses!  God--how empty all of it without her!  In the Bible
+it was written: Thou shalt leave father and mother and cleave to--Fleur!
+
+Let him have pluck, and go and tell them!  They couldn't stop him
+marrying her--they wouldn't want to stop him when they knew how he felt.
+Yes!  He would go! Bold and open--Fleur was wrong!
+
+The night-jar ceased, the sheep were silent; the only sound in the
+darkness was the bubbling of the stream.  And Jon in his bed slept, freed
+from the worst of life's evils--indecision.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
+
+On the day of the cancelled meeting at the National Gallery began the
+second anniversary of the resurrection of England's pride and glory--or,
+more shortly, the top hat.  "Lord's"--that festival which the War had
+driven from the field--raised its light and dark blue flags for the
+second time, displaying almost every feature of a glorious past.  Here,
+in the luncheon interval, were all species of female and one species of
+male hat, protecting the multiple types of face associated with "the
+classes."  The observing Forsyte might discern in the free or
+unconsidered seats a certain number of the squash-hatted, but they hardly
+ventured on the grass; the old school--or schools--could still rejoice
+that the proletariat was not yet paying the necessary half-crown.  Here
+was still a close borough, the only one left on a large scale--for the
+papers were about to estimate the attendance at ten thousand.  And the
+ten thousand, all animated by one hope, were asking each other one
+question: "Where are you lunching?"  Something wonderfully uplifting and
+reassuring in that query and the sight of so many people like themselves
+voicing it! What reserve power in the British realm--enough pigeons,
+lobsters, lamb, salmon mayonnaise, strawberries, and bottles of champagne
+to feed the lot!  No miracle in prospect--no case of seven loaves and a
+few fishes--faith rested on surer foundations.  Six thousand top hats,
+four thousand parasols would be doffed and furled, ten thousand mouths
+all speaking the same English would be filled.  There was life in the old
+dog yet!  Tradition!  And again Tradition!  How strong and how elastic!
+Wars might rage, taxation prey, Trades Unions take toll, and Europe
+perish of starvation; but the ten thousand would be fed; and, within
+their ring fence, stroll upon green turf, wear their top hats, and
+meet--themselves.  The heart was sound, the pulse still regular.  E-ton!
+E-ton!  Har-r-o-o-o-w!
+
+Among the many Forsytes, present on a hunting-ground theirs, by personal
+prescriptive right, or proxy, was Soames with his wife and daughter.  He
+had not been at either school, he took no interest in cricket, but he
+wanted Fleur to show her frock, and he wanted to wear his top hat parade
+it again in peace and plenty among his peers.  He walked sedately with
+Fleur between him and Annette.  No women equalled them, so far as he
+could see.  They could walk, and hold themselves up; there was substance
+in their good looks; the modern woman had no build, no chest, no
+anything!  He remembered suddenly with what intoxication of pride he had
+walked round with Irene in the first years of his first marriage.  And
+how they used to lunch on the drag which his mother would make his father
+have, because it was so "chic"--all drags and carriages in those days,
+not these lumbering great Stands!  And how consistently Montague Dartie
+had drunk too much.  He supposed that people drank too much still, but
+there was not the scope for it there used to be.  He remembered George
+Forsyte--whose brothers Roger and Eustace had been at Harrow and Eton
+--towering up on the top of the drag waving a light-blue flag with one
+hand and a dark-blue flag with the other, and shouting "Etroow-Harrton!"
+Just when everybody was silent, like the buffoon he had always been; and
+Eustace got up to the nines below, too dandified to wear any colour or
+take any notice.  H'm!  Old days, and Irene in grey silk shot with palest
+green.  He looked, sideways, at Fleur's face.  Rather colourless-no
+light, no eagerness!  That love affair was preying on her--a bad
+business!  He looked beyond, at his wife's face, rather more touched up
+than usual, a little disdainful--not that she had any business to
+disdain, so far as he could see.  She was taking Profond's defection with
+curious quietude; or was his "small" voyage just a blind?  If so, he
+should refuse to see it! Having promenaded round the pitch and in front
+of the pavilion, they sought Winifred's table in the Bedouin Club tent.
+This Club--a new "cock and hen"--had been founded in the interests of
+travel, and of a gentleman with an old Scottish name, whose father had
+somewhat strangely been called Levi.  Winifred had joined, not because
+she had travelled, but because instinct told her that a Club with such a
+name and such a founder was bound to go far; if one didn't join at once
+one might never have the chance.  Its tent, with a text from the Koran on
+an orange ground, and a small green camel embroidered over the entrance,
+was the most striking on the ground.  Outside it they found Jack Cardigan
+in a dark blue tie (he had once played for Harrow), batting with a
+Malacca cane to show how that fellow ought to have hit that ball.  He
+piloted them in.  Assembled in Winifred's corner were Imogen, Benedict
+with his young wife, Val Dartie without Holly, Maud and her husband, and,
+after Soames and his two were seated, one empty place.
+
+"I'm expecting Prosper," said Winifred, "but he's so busy with his
+yacht."
+
+Soames stole a glance.  No movement in his wife's face!  Whether that
+fellow were coming or not, she evidently knew all about it.  It did not
+escape him that Fleur, too, looked at her mother.  If Annette didn't
+respect his feelings, she might think of Fleur's!  The conversation, very
+desultory, was syncopated by Jack Cardigan talking about "mid-off."  He
+cited all the "great mid-offs" from the beginning of time, as if they had
+been a definite racial entity in the composition of the British people.
+Soames had finished his lobster, and was beginning on pigeon-pie, when he
+heard the words, "I'm a small bit late, Mrs. Dartie," and saw that there
+was no longer any empty place.  That fellow was sitting between Annette
+and Imogen. Soames ate steadily on, with an occasional word to Maud and
+Winifred. Conversation buzzed around him.  He heard the voice of Profond
+say:
+
+"I think you're mistaken, Mrs. Forsyde; I'll--I'll bet Miss Forsyde
+agrees with me."
+
+"In what?" came Fleur's clear voice across the table.
+
+"I was sayin', young gurls are much the same as they always were
+--there's very small difference."
+
+"Do you know so much about them?"
+
+That sharp reply caught the ears of all, and Soames moved uneasily on his
+thin green chair.
+
+"Well, I don't know, I think they want their own small way, and I think
+they always did."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Oh, but--Prosper," Winifred interjected comfortably, "the girls in the
+streets--the girls  who've been in munitions, the little flappers in  the
+shops; their manners now really quite hit you in the eye."
+
+At the word "hit" Jack Cardigan stopped his disquisition; and in the
+silence Monsieur Profond  said:
+
+"It was inside before, now it's outside; that's  all."
+
+"But their morals!" cried Imogen.
+
+"Just as moral as they ever were, Mrs. Cardigan, but they've got more
+opportunity."
+
+The saying, so cryptically cynical, received a  little laugh from Imogen,
+a slight opening of Jack Cardigan's mouth, and a creak from Soames'
+chair.
+
+Winifred said: "That's too bad, Prosper."
+
+"What do you say, Mrs. Forsyde; don't you think human nature's always the
+same?"
+
+Soames subdued a sudden longing to get up and kick the fellow.  He heard
+his wife reply:
+
+"Human nature is not the same in England as anywhere else."  That was her
+confounded mockery!
+
+"Well, I don't know much about this small country"--'No, thank God!'
+thought Soames--"but I should say the pot was boilin' under the lid
+everywhere.  We all want pleasure, and we always did."
+
+Damn the fellow!  His cynicism was--was outrageous!
+
+When lunch was over they broke up into couples for the digestive
+promenade.  Too proud to notice, Soames knew perfectly that Annette and
+that fellow had gone prowling round together.  Fleur was with Val; she
+had chosen him, no doubt, because he knew that boy.  He himself had
+Winifred for partner.  They walked in the bright, circling stream, a
+little flushed and sated, for some minutes, till Winifred sighed:
+
+"I wish we were back forty years, old boy!"
+
+Before the eyes of her spirit an interminable procession of her own
+"Lord's" frocks was passing, paid for with the money of her father, to
+save a recurrent crisis.  "It's been very amusing, after all. Sometimes I
+even wish Monty was back.  What do you think of people nowadays, Soames?"
+
+"Precious little style.  The thing began to go to pieces with bicycles
+and motor-cars; the War has finished it."
+
+"I wonder what's coming?" said Winifred in a voice dreamy from
+pigeon-pie.  "I'm not at all sure we shan't go back to crinolines and
+pegtops.  Look at that dress!"
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+"There's money, but no faith in things.  We don't lay by for the future.
+These youngsters--it's all a short life and a merry one with them."
+
+"There's a hat!" said Winifred.  "I don't know--when you come to think of
+the people killed and all that in the War, it's rather wonderful, I
+think.  There's no other country--Prosper says the rest are all bankrupt,
+except America; and of course her men always took their style in dress
+from us."
+
+"Is that chap," said Soames, "really going to the South Seas?"
+
+"Oh! one never knows where Prosper's going!"
+
+"He's a sign of the times," muttered Soames, "if you like."
+
+Winifred's hand gripped his arm.
+
+"Don't turn your head," she said in a low voice, "but look to your right
+in the front row of the Stand."
+
+Soames looked as best he could under that limitation.  A man in a grey
+top hat, grey-bearded, with thin brown, folded cheeks, and a certain
+elegance of posture, sat there with a woman in a lawn-coloured frock,
+whose dark eyes were fixed on himself.  Soames looked quickly at his
+feet.  How funnily feet moved, one after the other like that!  Winifred's
+voice said in his ear:
+
+"Jolyon looks very ill; but he always had style.  She doesn't change
+--except her hair."
+
+"Why did you tell Fleur about that business?"
+
+"I didn't; she picked it up.  I always knew she would."
+
+"Well, it's a mess.  She's set her heart upon their boy."
+
+"The little wretch," murmured Winifred.  "She tried to take me in about
+that.  What shall you do, Soames?"
+
+"Be guided by events."
+
+They moved on, silent, in the almost solid crowd.
+
+"Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate.  Only
+that's so old-fashioned.  Look! there are George and Eustace!"
+
+George Forsyte's lofty bulk had halted before them.
+
+"Hallo, Soames!" he said.  "Just met Profond and your wife.  You'll catch
+'em if you put on pace.  Did you ever go to see old Timothy?"
+
+Soames nodded, and the streams forced them apart.
+
+"I always liked old George," said Winifred.  "He's so droll."
+
+"I never did," said Soames.  "Where's your seat?  I shall go to mine.
+Fleur may be back there."
+
+Having seen Winifred to her seat, he regained his own, conscious of
+small, white, distant figures running, the click of the bat, the cheers
+and counter-cheers.  No Fleur, and no Annette!  You could expect nothing
+of women nowadays!  They had the vote.  They were "emancipated," and much
+good it was doing them!  So Winifred would go back, would she, and put up
+with Dartie all over again?  To have the past once more--to be sitting
+here as he had sat in '83 and '84, before he was certain that his
+marriage with Irene had gone all wrong, before her antagonism had become
+so glaring that with the best will in the world he could not overlook it.
+The sight of her with that fellow had brought all memory back.  Even now
+he could not understand why she had been so impracticable.  She could
+love other men; she had it in her!  To himself, the one person she ought
+to have loved, she had chosen to refuse her heart.  It seemed to him,
+fantastically, as he looked back, that all this modern relaxation of
+marriage--though its forms and laws were the same as when he married
+her--that all this modern looseness had come out of her revolt; it seemed
+to him, fantastically, that she had started it, till all decent ownership
+of anything had gone, or was on the point of going. All came from her!
+And now--a pretty state of things!  Homes!  How could you have them
+without mutual ownership?  Not that he had ever had a real home!  But had
+that been his fault?  He had done his best. And his rewards were--those
+two sitting in that Stand, and this affair of Fleur's!
+
+And overcome by loneliness he thought: 'Shan't wait any longer!  They
+must find their own way back to the hotel--if they mean to come!' Hailing
+a cab outside the ground, he said:
+
+"Drive me to the Bayswater Road."  His old aunts had never failed him.
+To them he had meant an ever-welcome visitor.  Though they were gone,
+there, still, was Timothy!
+
+Smither was standing in the open doorway.
+
+"Mr. Soames!  I was just taking the air.  Cook will be so pleased."
+
+"How is Mr. Timothy?"
+
+"Not himself at all these last few days, sir; he's been talking a great
+deal.  Only this morning he was saying: 'My brother James, he's getting
+old.'  His mind wanders, Mr. Soames, and then he will talk of them.  He
+troubles about their investments.  The other day he said: 'There's my
+brother Jolyon won't look at Consols'--he seemed quite down about it.
+Come in, Mr. Soames, come in!  It's such a pleasant change!"
+
+"Well," said Soames, "just for a few minutes."
+
+"No," murmured Smither in the hall, where the air had the singular
+freshness of the outside day, "we haven't been very satisfied with him,
+not all this week.  He's always been one to leave a titbit to the end;
+but ever since Monday he's been eating it first.  If you notice a dog,
+Mr. Soames, at its dinner, it eats the meat first. We've always thought
+it such a good sign of Mr. Timothy at his age to leave it to the last,
+but now he seems to have lost all his self-control; and, of course, it
+makes him leave the rest.  The doctor doesn't make anything of it,
+but"--Smither shook her head--"he seems to think he's got to eat it
+first, in case he shouldn't get to it. That and his talking makes us
+anxious."
+
+"Has he said anything important?"
+
+"I shouldn't like to say that, Mr. Soames; but he's turned against his
+Will.  He gets quite pettish--and after having had it out every morning
+for years, it does seem funny.  He said the other day: 'They want my
+money.'  It gave me such a turn, because, as I said to him, nobody wants
+his money, I'm sure.  And it does seem a pity he should be thinking about
+money at his time of life.  I took my courage in my 'ands.  'You know,
+Mr. Timothy,' I said, 'my dear mistress'--that's Miss Forsyte, Mr.
+Soames, Miss Ann that trained me--'she never thought about money,' I
+said, 'it was all character with her.'  He looked at me, I can't tell you
+how funny, and he said quite dry: 'Nobody wants my character.'  Think of
+his saying a thing like that! But sometimes he'll say something as sharp
+and sensible as anything."
+
+Soames, who had been staring at an old print by the hat-rack, thinking,
+'That's got value!'  murmured: "I'll go up and see him, Smither."
+
+"Cook's with him," answered Smither above her corsets; "she will be
+pleased to see you."
+
+He mounted slowly, with the thought: 'Shan't care to live to be that
+age.'
+
+On the second floor, he paused, and tapped.  The door was opened, and he
+saw the round homely face of a woman about sixty.
+
+"Mr. Soames!" she said: "Why!  Mr. Soames!"
+
+Soames nodded.  "All right, Cook!" and entered.
+
+Timothy was propped up in bed, with his hands joined before his chest,
+and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where a fly was standing upside down.
+Soames stood at the foot of the bed, facing him.
+
+"Uncle Timothy," he said, raising his voice.  "Uncle Timothy!"
+
+Timothy's eyes left the fly, and levelled themselves on his visitor.
+Soames could see his pale tongue passing over his darkish lips.
+
+"Uncle Timothy," he said again, "is there anything I can do for you? Is
+there anything you'd like to say?"
+
+"Ha!" said Timothy.
+
+"I've come to look you up and see that everything's all right."
+
+Timothy nodded.  He seemed trying to get used to the apparition before
+him.
+
+"Have you got everything you want?"
+
+"No," said Timothy.
+
+"Can I get you anything?"
+
+"No," said Timothy.
+
+"I'm Soames, you know; your nephew, Soames Forsyte.  Your brother James'
+son."
+
+Timothy nodded.
+
+"I shall be delighted to do anything I can for you."
+
+Timothy beckoned.  Soames went close to him:
+
+"You--" said Timothy in a voice which seemed to have outlived tone, "you
+tell them all from me--you tell them all--" and his finger tapped on
+Soames' arm, "to hold on--hold on--Consols are goin' up," and he nodded
+thrice.
+
+"All right!" said Soames; "I will."
+
+"Yes," said Timothy, and, fixing his eyes again on the ceiling, he added:
+"That fly!"
+
+Strangely moved, Soames looked at the Cook's pleasant fattish face, all
+little puckers from staring at fires.
+
+"That'll do him a world of good, sir," she said.
+
+A mutter came from Timothy, but he was clearly speaking to himself, and
+Soames went out with the cook.
+
+"I wish I could make you a pink cream, Mr. Soames, like in old days; you
+did so relish them.  Good-bye, sir; it has been a pleasure."
+
+"Take care of him, Cook, he is old."
+
+And, shaking her crumpled hand, he went down-stairs.  Smither was still
+taking the air in the doorway.
+
+"What do you think of him, Mr. Soames?"
+
+"H'm!" Soames murmured: "He's lost touch."
+
+"Yes," said Smither, "I was afraid you'd think that coming fresh out of
+the world to see him like."
+
+"Smither," said Soames, "we're all indebted to you."
+
+"Oh, no, Mr. Soames, don't say that!  It's a pleasure--he's such a
+wonderful man."
+
+"Well, good-bye!" said Soames, and got into his taxi.
+
+'Going up!' he thought; 'going up!'
+
+Reaching the hotel at Knightsbridge he went to their sitting-room, and
+rang for tea.  Neither of them were in.  And again that sense of
+loneliness came over him.  These hotels.  What monstrous great places
+they were now!  He could remember when there was nothing bigger than
+Long's or Brown's, Morley's or the Tavistock, and the heads that were
+shaken over the Langham and the Grand.  Hotels and Clubs--Clubs and
+Hotels; no end to them now!  And Soames, who had just been watching at
+Lord's a miracle of tradition and continuity, fell into reverie over the
+changes in that London where he had been born five-and-sixty years
+before.  Whether Consols were going up or not, London had become a
+terrific property.  No such property in the world, unless it were New
+York!  There was a lot of hysteria in the papers nowadays; but any one
+who, like himself, could remember London sixty years ago, and see it now,
+realised the fecundity and elasticity of wealth. They had only to keep
+their heads, and go at it steadily.  Why! he remembered cobblestones, and
+stinking straw on the floor of your cab. And old Timothy--what could he
+not have told them, if he had kept his memory!  Things were unsettled,
+people in a funk or in a hurry, but here were London and the Thames, and
+out there the British Empire, and the ends of the earth.  "Consols are
+goin' up!"  He should n't be a bit surprised.  It was the breed that
+counted.  And all that was bull-dogged in Soames stared for a moment out
+of his grey eyes, till diverted by the print of a Victorian picture on
+the walls.  The hotel had bought three dozen of that little lot!  The old
+hunting or "Rake's Progress" prints in the old inns were worth looking
+at--but this sentimental stuff--well, Victorianism had gone!  "Tell them
+to hold on!" old Timothy had said.  But to what were they to hold on in
+this modern welter of the "democratic principle"?  Why, even privacy was
+threatened!  And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames pushed
+back his teacup and went to the window.  Fancy owning no more of Nature
+than the crowd out there owned of the flowers and trees and waters of
+Hyde Park!  No, no! Private possession underlay everything worth having.
+The world had slipped its sanity a bit, as dogs now and again at full
+moon slipped theirs and went off for a night's rabbiting; but the world,
+like the dog, knew where its bread was buttered and its bed warm, and
+would come back sure enough to the only home worth having--to private
+ownership.  The world was in its second childhood for the moment, like
+old Timothy--eating its titbit first!
+
+He heard a sound behind him, and saw that his wife and daughter had come
+in.
+
+"So you're back!" he said.
+
+Fleur did not answer; she stood for a moment looking at him and her
+mother, then passed into her bedroom.  Annette poured herself out a cup
+of tea.
+
+"I am going to Paris, to my mother, Soames."  "Oh! To your mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For how long?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"And when are you going?"
+
+"On Monday."
+
+Was she really going to her mother?  Odd, how indifferent he felt! Odd,
+how clearly she had perceived the indifference he would feel so long as
+there was no scandal.  And suddenly between her and himself he saw
+distinctly the face he had seen that afternoon--Irene's.
+
+"Will you want money?"
+
+"Thank you; I have enough."
+
+"Very well.  Let us know when you are coming back."
+
+Annette put down the cake she was fingering, and, looking up through
+darkened lashes, said:
+
+"Shall I give Maman any message?"
+
+"My regards."
+
+Annette stretched herself, her hands on her waist, and said in French:
+
+"What luck that you have never loved me, Soames!"  Then rising, she too
+left the room.  Soames was glad she had spoken it in French--it seemed to
+require no dealing with.  Again that other face--pale, dark-eyed,
+beautiful still!  And there stirred far down within him the ghost of
+warmth, as from sparks lingering beneath a mound of flaky ash.  And Fleur
+infatuated with her boy!  Queer chance!  Yet, was there such a thing as
+chance?  A man went down a street, a brick fell on his head.  Ah! that
+was chance, no doubt.  But this! "Inherited," his girl had said.
+She--she was "holding on"!
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+I
+OLD JOLYON WALKS
+
+Twofold impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast "Let's go up
+to Lord's!"
+
+"Wanted"--something to abate the anxiety in which those two had lived
+during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down.  "Wanted"--too,
+that which might assuage the pangs of memory in one who knew he might
+lose them any day!
+
+Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had become an Eton boy, for old Jolyon's
+whim had been that he should be canonised at the greatest possible
+expense.  Year after year he had gone to Lord's from Stanhope Gate with a
+father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed without
+polish in the game of cricket.  Old Jolyon would speak quite openly of
+swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and young Jolyon with
+the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest his sire should be
+overheard.  Only in this supreme matter of cricket he had been nervous,
+for his father--in Crimean whiskers then--had ever impressed him as the
+beau ideal.  Though never canonised himself, Old Jolyon's natural
+fastidiousness and balance had saved him from the errors of the vulgar.
+How delicious, after howling in a top hat and a sweltering heat, to go
+home with his father in a hansom cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the
+"Disunion" Club, to dine off white bait, cutlets, and a tart, and go--two
+"swells," old and young, in lavender kid gloves--to the opera or play.
+And on Sunday, when the match was over, and his top hat duly broken, down
+with his father in a special hansom to the "Crown and Sceptre," and the
+terrace above the river--the golden sixties when the world was simple,
+dandies glamorous, Democracy not born, and the books of Whyte Melville
+coming thick and fast.
+
+A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-buttonholed with
+corn-flowers--by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at a
+trifle less expense--again Jolyon had experienced the heat and
+counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the strawberry
+beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making the most
+heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up.  Those two
+days each year he and his son had been alone together in the world, one
+on each side--and Democracy just born!
+
+And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of
+light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and
+train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground.  There, beside her in a
+lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game, and
+felt the old thrill stir within him.
+
+When Soames passed, the day was spoiled.  Irene's face was distorted by
+compression of the lips.  No good to go on sitting here with Soames or
+perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals.  And he
+said:
+
+"Well, dear, if you've had enough--let's go!"
+
+That evening Jolyon felt exhausted.  Not wanting her to see him thus, he
+waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study.  He
+opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear
+her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair, closed
+his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather.  Like that
+passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata--so had been his life with her, a
+divine third movement.  And now this business of Jon's--this bad
+business!  Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it
+were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his
+father in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went,
+and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting,
+he saw his father, black-coated, with. knees crossed, glasses balanced
+between thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep eyes
+looking up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his own,
+seeming to speak.  "Are you facing it, Jo?  It's for you to decide.
+She's only a woman!"  Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how
+all the Victorian Age came up with it!  And his answer "No, I've funked
+it--funked hurting her and Jon and myself.  I've got a heart; I've funked
+it."  But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept
+at it; "It's your wife, your son; your past.  Tackle it, my boy!"  Was it
+a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living on
+within him?  And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old
+saturated leather.  Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put the
+whole thing down in black and white!  And suddenly he breathed with
+difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen.
+He got up and went out into the air.  The stars were very bright.  He
+passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through the
+window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with
+lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself she
+seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands idle.
+Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her breast.  'It's
+Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of her--it's
+natural!'
+
+And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
+
+Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task.  He wrote with
+difficulty and many erasures.
+"MY DEAREST BOY,
+
+"You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders to
+give themselves away to their young.  Especially when--like your mother
+and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but
+young--their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must confess.
+I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly--people in real
+life very seldom are, I believe--but most persons would say we had, and
+at all events our conduct, righteous or not, has found us out.  The truth
+is, my dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make known to
+you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future.  Many,
+very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she was only
+twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an
+unhappy marriage--no, not with me, Jon.  Without money of her own, and
+with only a stepmother--closely related to Jezebel--she was very unhappy
+in her home life. It was Fleur's father that she married, my cousin
+Soames Forsyte.  He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him
+justice was deeply in love with her.  Within a week she knew the fearful
+mistake she had made.  It was not his fault; it was her error of
+judgment--her misfortune."
+
+So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject
+carried him away.
+
+"Jon, I want to explain to you if I can--and it's very hard--how it is
+that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about. You will
+of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how could she ever have
+married him?'  You would be right if it were not for one or two rather
+terrible considerations.  From this initial mistake of hers all the
+subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and so I must make it
+clear to you if I can.  You see, Jon, in those days and even to this
+day--indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can
+well be otherwise--most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of
+life.  Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it.
+That's the crux.  It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal
+knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble.
+In a vast number of marriages-and your mother's was one--girls are not
+and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they
+do not know until after that act of union which makes the reality of
+marriage. Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements
+and strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's was
+one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such attraction as
+there was.  There is nothing more tragic in a woman's life than such a
+revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer. Coarse-grained and unthinking
+people are apt to laugh at such a mistake, and say, 'What a fuss about
+nothing!'  Narrow and self-righteous people, only capable of judging the
+lives of others by their own, are apt to condemn those who make this
+tragic error, to condemn them for life to the dungeons they have made for
+themselves. You know the expression: 'She has made her bed, she must lie
+on it!' It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or
+lady in the best sense of those words; and I can use no stronger
+condemnation.  I have not been what is called a moral man, but I wish to
+use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly of ties
+or contracts into which you enter.  Heaven forbid!  But with the
+experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the
+victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands to
+help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
+understanding to know what they are doing.  But they haven't!  Let them
+go!  They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them. I have
+had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a position to
+judge your mother, and you are very young, without experience of what
+life is.  To go on with the story.  After three years of effort to subdue
+her shrinking--I was going to say her loathing and it's not too strong a
+word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing under such circumstances--three
+years of what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother's,
+Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fell in love with her.  He was
+the architect of this very house that we live in now, he was building it
+for her and Fleur's father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in place
+of the one she inhabited with him in London.  Perhaps that fact played
+some part in what came of it.  But in any case she, too, fell in love
+with him.  I know it's not necessary to explain to you that one does not
+precisely choose with whom one will fall in love.  It comes. Very well!
+It came.  I can imagine--though she never said much to me about it--the
+struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she was brought up
+strictly and was not light in her ideas--not at all. However, this was an
+overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass that they loved in deed as well
+as in thought.  Then came a fearful tragedy.  I must tell you of it
+because if I don't you will never understand the real situation that you
+have now to face.  The man whom she had married--Soames Forsyte, the
+father of Fleur one night, at the height of her passion for this young
+man, forcibly reasserted his rights over her.  The next day she met her
+lover and told him of it.  Whether he committed suicide or whether he was
+accidentally run over in his distraction, we never knew; but so it was.
+Think of your mother as she was that evening when she heard of his death.
+I happened to see her.  Your grandfather sent me to help her if I could.
+I only just saw her, before the door was shut against me by her husband.
+But I have never forgotten her face, I can see it now. I was not in love
+with her then, not for twelve years after, but I have never for gotten.
+My dear boy--it is not easy to write like this.  But you see, I must.
+Your mother is wrapped up in you, utterly, devotedly.  I don't wish to
+write harshly of Soames Forsyte. I don't think harshly of him.  I have
+long been sorry for him; perhaps I was sorry even then.  As the world
+judges she was in error, he within his rights.  He loved her--in his way.
+She was his property.  That is the view he holds of life--of human
+feelings and hearts--property.  It's not his fault--so was he born.  To
+me it is a view that has always been abhorrent--so was I born!  Knowing
+you as I do, I feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you.  Let me
+go on with the story.  Your mother fled from his house that night; for
+twelve years she lived quietly alone without companionship of any sort,
+until in 1899 her husband--you see, he was still her husband, for he did
+not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right to divorce
+him--became conscious, it seems, of the want of children, and commenced a
+long attempt to induce her to go back to him and give him a child.  I was
+her trustee then, under your Grandfather's Will, and I watched this going
+on.  While watching, I became attached to her, devotedly attached.  His
+pressure increased, till one day she came to me here and practically put
+herself under my protection.  Her husband, who was kept informed of all
+her movements, attempted to force us apart by bringing a divorce suit, or
+possibly he really meant it, I don't know; but anyway our names were
+publicly joined. That decided us, and we became united in fact.  She was
+divorced, married me, and you were born.  We have lived in perfect
+happiness, at least I have, and I believe your mother also.  Soames, soon
+after the divorce, married Fleur's mother, and she was born.  That is the
+story, Jon.  I have told it you, because by the affection which we see
+you have formed for this man's daughter you are blindly moving toward
+what must utterly destroy your mother's happiness, if not your own.  I
+don't wish to speak of myself, because at my age there's no use supposing
+I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I should suffer
+would be mainly on her account, and on yours.  But what I want you to
+realise is that feelings of horror and aversion such as those can never
+be buried or forgotten. They are alive in her to-day. Only yesterday at
+Lord's we happened to see Soames Forsyte.  Her face, if you had seen it,
+would have convinced you.  The idea that you should marry his daughter is
+a nightmare to her, Jon.  I have nothing to say against Fleur save that
+she is his daughter.  But your children, if you married her, would be the
+grandchildren of Soames, as much as of your mother, of a man who once
+owned your mother as a man might own a slave.  Think what that would
+mean.  By such a marriage you enter the camp which held your mother
+prisoner and wherein she ate her heart out.  You are just on the
+threshold of life, you have only known this girl two months, and however
+deeply you think you love her, I appeal to you to break it off at once.
+Don't give your mother this rankling pain and humiliation during the rest
+of her life.  Young though she will always seem to me, she is
+fifty-seven.  Except for us two she has no one in the world.  She will
+soon have only you.  Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away. Don't put
+this cloud and barrier between you.  Don't break her heart! Bless you, my
+dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this letter must bring
+you--we tried to spare it you, but Spain--it seems---was no good.
+
+"Ever your devoted father
+"JOLYON FORSYTE."
+
+Having finished his confession, Jolyon sat with a thin cheek on his hand,
+re-reading.  There were things in it which hurt him so much, when he
+thought of Jon reading them, that he nearly tore the letter up.  To speak
+of such things at all to a boy--his own boy--to speak of them in relation
+to his own wife and the boy's own mother, seemed dreadful to the
+reticence of his Forsyte soul.  And yet without speaking of them how make
+Jon understand the reality, the deep cleavage, the ineffaceable scar?
+Without them, how justify this stiffing of the boy's love?  He might just
+as well not write at all!
+
+He folded the confession, and put it in his pocket.  It was--thank
+Heaven!--Saturday; he had till Sunday evening to think it over; for even
+if posted now it could not reach Jon till Monday.  He felt a curious
+relief at this delay, and at the fact that, whether sent or not, it was
+written.
+
+In the rose garden, which had taken the place of the old fernery, he
+could see Irene snipping and pruning, with a little basket on her arm.
+She was never idle, it seemed to him, and he envied her now that he
+himself was idle nearly all his time.  He went down to her. She held up a
+stained glove and smiled.  A piece of lace tied under her chin concealed
+her hair, and her oval face with its still dark brows looked very young.
+
+"The green-fly are awful this year, and yet it's cold.  You look tired,
+Jolyon."
+
+Jolyon took the confession from his pocket.  "I've been writing this. I
+think you ought to see it?"
+
+"To Jon?"  Her whole face had changed, in that instant, becoming almost
+haggard.
+
+"Yes; the murder's out."
+
+He gave it to her, and walked away among the roses.  Presently, seeing
+that she had finished reading and was standing quite still with the
+sheets of the letter against her skirt, he came back to her.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"It's wonderfully put.  I don't see how it could be put better. Thank
+you, dear."
+
+"Is there anything you would like left out?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No; he must know all, if he's to understand."
+
+"That's what I thought, but--I hate it!"
+
+He had the feeling that he hated it more than she--to him sex was so much
+easier to mention between man and woman than between man and man; and she
+had always been more natural and frank, not deeply secretive like his
+Forsyte self.
+
+"I wonder if he will understand, even now, Jolyon?  He's so young; and he
+shrinks from the physical."
+
+"He gets that shrinking from my father, he was as fastidious as a girl in
+all such matters.  Would it be better to rewrite the whole thing, and
+just say you hated Soames?"
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+"Hate's only a word.  It conveys nothing.  No, better as it is."
+
+"Very well.  It shall go to-morrow."
+
+She raised her face to his, and in sight of the big house's many
+creepered windows, he kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CONFESSION
+
+Late that same afternoon, Jolyon had a nap in the old armchair. Face down
+on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and just before he
+fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall we ever really like
+the French?  Will they ever really like us!'  He himself had always liked
+the French, feeling at home with their wit, their taste, their cooking.
+Irene and he had paid many visits to France before the War, when Jon had
+been at his private school.  His romance with her had begun in Paris--his
+last and most enduring romance.  But the French--no Englishman could like
+them who could not see them in some sort with the detached aesthetic eye!
+And with that melancholy conclusion he had nodded off.
+
+When he woke he saw Jon standing between him and the window.  The boy had
+evidently come in from the garden and was waiting for him to wake.
+Jolyon smiled, still half asleep.  How nice the chap looked--sensitive,
+affectionate, straight!  Then his heart gave a nasty jump; and a quaking
+sensation overcame him.  Jon!  That confession!  He controlled himself
+with an effort.  "Why, Jon, where did you spring from?"
+
+Jon bent over and kissed his forehead.
+
+Only then he noticed the look on the boy's face.
+
+"I came home to tell you something, Dad."
+
+With all his might Jolyon tried to get the better of the jumping,
+gurgling sensations within his chest.
+
+"Well, sit down, old man.  Have you seen your mother?"
+
+"No."  The boy's flushed look gave place to pallor; he sat down on the
+arm of the old chair, as, in old days, Jolyon himself used to sit beside
+his own father, installed in its recesses.  Right up to the time of the
+rupture in their relations he had been wont to perch there--had he now
+reached such a moment with his own son?  All his life he had hated scenes
+like poison, avoided rows, gone on his own way quietly and let others go
+on theirs.  But now--it seemed--at the very end of things, he had a scene
+before him more painful than any he had avoided.  He drew a visor down
+over his emotion, and waited for his son to speak.
+
+"Father," said Jon slowly, "Fleur and I are engaged."
+
+'Exactly!' thought Jolyon, breathing with difficulty.
+
+"I know that you and Mother don't like the idea.  Fleur says that Mother
+was engaged to her father before you married her.  Of course I don't know
+what happened, but it must be ages ago.  I'm devoted to her, Dad, and she
+says she is to me."
+
+Jolyon uttered a queer sound, half laugh, half groan.
+
+"You are nineteen, Jon, and I am seventy-two.  How are we to understand
+each other in a matter like this, eh?"
+
+"You love Mother, Dad; you must know what we feel.  It isn't fair to us
+to let old things spoil our happiness, is it?"
+
+Brought face to face with his confession, Jolyon resolved to do without
+it if by any means he could.  He laid his hand on the boy's arm.
+
+"Look, Jon! I might put you off with talk about your both being too young
+and not knowing your own minds, and all that, but you wouldn't listen,
+besides, it doesn't meet the case--Youth, unfortunately, cures itself.
+You talk lightly about 'old things like that,' knowing nothing--as you
+say truly--of what happened.  Now, have I ever given you reason to doubt
+my love for you, or my word?"
+
+At a less anxious moment he might have been amused by the conflict his
+words aroused--the boy's eager clasp, to reassure him on these points,
+the dread on his face of what that reassurance would bring forth; but he
+could only feel grateful for the squeeze.
+
+"Very well, you can believe what I tell you.  If you don't give up this
+love affair, you will make Mother wretched to the end of her days.
+Believe me, my dear, the past, whatever it was, can't be buried--it can't
+indeed."
+
+Jon got off the arm of the chair.
+
+'The girl'--thought Jolyon--'there she goes--starting up before him
+--life itself--eager, pretty, loving!'
+
+"I can't, Father; how can I--just because you say that?  Of course, I
+can't!"
+
+"Jon, if you knew the story you would give this up without hesitation;
+you would have to!  Can't you believe me?"
+
+"How can you tell what I should think?  Father, I love her better than
+anything in the world."
+
+Jolyon's face twitched, and he said with painful slowness:
+
+"Better than your mother, Jon?"
+
+From the boy's face, and his clenched fists Jolyon realised the stress
+and struggle he was going through.
+
+"I don't know," he burst out, "I don't know!  But to give Fleur up for
+nothing--for something I don't understand, for something that I don't
+believe can really matter half so much, will make me--make me"
+
+"Make you feel us unjust, put a barrier--yes.  But that's better than
+going on with this."
+
+"I can't.  Fleur loves me, and I love her.  You want me to trust you; why
+don't you trust me, Father?  We wouldn't want to know anything--we
+wouldn't let it make any difference.  It'll only make us both love you
+and Mother all the more."
+
+Jolyon put his hand into his breast pocket, but brought it out again
+empty, and sat, clucking his tongue against his teeth.
+
+"Think what your mother's been to you, Jon!  She has nothing but you; I
+shan't last much longer."
+
+"Why not?  It isn't fair to--Why not?"
+
+"Well," said Jolyon, rather coldly, "because the doctors tell me I
+shan't; that's all."
+
+"Oh, Dad!" cried Jon, and burst into tears.
+
+This downbreak of his son, whom he had not seen cry since he was ten,
+moved Jolyon terribly.  He recognised to the full how fearfully soft the
+boy's heart was, how much he would suffer in this business, and in life
+generally.  And he reached out his hand helplessly--not wishing, indeed
+not daring to get up.
+
+"Dear man," he said, "don't--or you'll make me!"
+
+Jon smothered down his paroxysm, and stood with face averted, very still.
+
+'What now?' thought Jolyon.  'What can I say to move him?'
+
+"By the way, don't speak of that to Mother," he said; "she has enough to
+frighten her with this affair of yours.  I know how you feel. But, Jon,
+you know her and me well enough to be sure we wouldn't wish to spoil your
+happiness lightly.  Why, my dear boy, we don't care for anything but your
+happiness--at least, with me it's just yours and Mother's and with her
+just yours.  It's all the future for you both that's at stake."
+
+Jon turned.  His face was deadly pale; his eyes, deep in his head, seemed
+to burn.
+
+"What is it?  What is it?  Don't keep me like this!"
+
+Jolyon, who knew that he was beaten, thrust his hand again into his
+breast pocket, and sat for a full minute, breathing with difficulty, his
+eyes closed.  The thought passed through his mind: 'I've had a good long
+innings--some pretty bitter moments--this is the worst!' Then he brought
+his hand out with the letter, and said with a sort of fatigue: "Well,
+Jon, if you hadn't come to-day, I was going to send you this.  I wanted
+to spare you--I wanted to spare your mother and myself, but I see it's no
+good.  Read it, and I think I'll go into the garden."  He reached forward
+to get up.
+
+Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, "No, I'll go"; and was gone.
+
+Jolyon sank back in his chair.  A blue-bottle chose that moment to come
+buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely, better than
+nothing....  Where had the boy gone to read his letter? The wretched
+letter--the wretched story!  A cruel business--cruel to her--to
+Soames--to those two children--to himself!...  His heart thumped and
+pained him.  Life--its loves--its work--its beauty--its aching, and--its
+end!  A good time; a fine time in spite of all; until--you regretted that
+you had ever been born.  Life--it wore you down, yet did not make you
+want to die--that was the cunning evil! Mistake to have a heart!  Again
+the blue-bottle came buzzing--bringing in all the heat and hum and scent
+of summer--yes, even the scent--as of ripe fruits, dried grasses, sappy
+shrubs, and the vanilla breath of cows.  And out there somewhere in the
+fragrance Jon would be reading that letter, turning and twisting its
+pages in his trouble, his bewilderment and trouble--breaking his heart
+about it! The thought made Jolyon acutely miserable.  Jon was such a
+tender-hearted chap, affectionate to his bones, and conscientious,
+too--it was so unfair, so damned unfair!  He remembered Irene saying to
+him once: "Never was any one born more loving and lovable than Jon." Poor
+little Jon!  His world gone up the spout, all of a summer afternoon!
+Youth took things so hard!  And stirred, tormented by that vision of
+Youth taking things hard, Jolyon got out of his chair, and went to the
+window.  The boy was nowhere visible.  And he passed out.  If one could
+take any help to him now--one must!
+
+He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden--no Jon! Nor
+where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to swell and colour.
+He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral, into the meadow.  Where
+had the boy got to?  Had he rushed down to the coppice--his old
+hunting-ground?  Jolyon crossed the rows of hay. They would cock it on
+Monday and be carrying the day after, if rain held off.  Often they had
+crossed this field together--hand in hand, when Jon was a little chap.
+Dash it!  The golden age was over by the time one was ten!  He came to
+the pond, where flies and gnats were dancing over a bright reedy surface;
+and on into the coppice.  It was cool there, fragrant of larches.  Still
+no Jon!  He called.  No answer!  On the log seat he sat down, nervous,
+anxious, forgetting his own physical sensations.  He had been wrong to
+let the boy get away with that letter; he ought to have kept him under
+his eye from the start!  Greatly troubled, he got up to retrace his
+steps.  At the farm-buildings he called again, and looked into the dark
+cow-house.  There in the cool, and the scent of vanilla and ammonia, away
+from flies, the three Alderneys were chewing the quiet cud; just milked,
+waiting for evening, to be turned out again into the lower field.  One
+turned a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon could see the slobber on its
+grey lower lip.  He saw everything with passionate clearness, in the
+agitation of his nerves--all that in his time he had adored and tried to
+paint--wonder of light and shade and colour.  No wonder the legend put
+Christ into a manger--what more devotional than the eyes and moon-white
+horns of a chewing cow in the warm dusk!  He called again.  No answer!
+And he hurried away out of the coppice, past the pond, up the hill.
+Oddly ironical--now he came to think of it--if Jon had taken the gruel of
+his discovery down in the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those
+old days had made the plunge of acknowledging their love.  Where he
+himself, on the log seat the Sunday morning he came back from Paris, had
+realised to the full that Irene had become the world to him.  That would
+have been the place for Irony to tear the veil from before the eyes of
+Irene's boy!  But he was not here!  Where had he got to?  One must find
+the poor chap!
+
+A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all the beauty
+of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening shadows, of the blue,
+and the white clouds, the scent of the hay, and the cooing of the
+pigeons; and the flower shapes standing tall.  He came to the rosery, and
+the beauty of the roses in that sudden sunlight seemed to him unearthly.
+"Rose, you Spaniard!"  Wonderful three words!  There she had stood by
+that bush of dark red roses; had stood to read and decide that Jon must
+know it all!  He knew all now!  Had she chosen wrong?  He bent and
+sniffed a rose, its petals brushed his nose and trembling lips; nothing
+so soft as a rose-leaf's velvet, except her neck--Irene!  On across the
+lawn he went, up the slope, to the oak-tree.  Its top alone was
+glistening, for the sudden sun was away over the house; the lower shade
+was thick, blessedly cool--he was greatly overheated.  He paused a minute
+with his hand on the rope of the swing--Jolly, Holly--Jon!  The old
+swing!  And suddenly, he felt horribly--deadly ill.  'I've over done it!'
+he thought: 'by Jove! I've overdone it--after all!'  He staggered up
+toward the terrace, dragged himself up the steps, and fell against the
+wall of the house.  He leaned there gasping, his face buried in the
+honey-suckle that he and she had taken such trouble with that it might
+sweeten the air which drifted in.  Its fragrance mingled with awful pain.
+'My love!' he thought; 'the boy!'  And with a great effort he tottered in
+through the long window, and sank into old Jolyon's chair.  The book was
+there, a pencil in it; he caught it up, scribbled a word on the open
+page....  His hand dropped....  So it was like this--was it?...
+
+There was a great wrench; and darkness....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IRENE
+
+When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along the
+terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and confusion. Leaning
+against the creepered wall he tore open the letter.  It was long--very
+long!  This added to his fear, and he began reading.  When he came to the
+words: "It was Fleur's father that she married," everything seemed to
+spin before him.  He was close to a window, and entering by it, he
+passed, through music-room and hall, up to his bedroom.  Dipping his face
+in cold water, he sat on his bed, and went on reading, dropping each
+finished page on the bed beside him.  His father's writing was easy to
+read--he knew it so well, though he had never had a letter from him one
+quarter so long.  He read with a dull feeling--imagination only half at
+work.  He best grasped, on that first reading, the pain his father must
+have had in writing such a letter.  He let the last sheet fall, and in a
+sort of mental, moral helplessness began to read the first again.  It all
+seemed to him disgusting--dead and disgusting.  Then, suddenly, a hot
+wave of horrified emotion tingled through him.  He buried his face in his
+hands.  His mother!  Fleur's father!  He took up the letter again, and
+read on mechanically.  And again came the feeling that it was all dead
+and disgusting; his own love so different!  This letter said his
+mother--and her father!  An awful letter!
+
+Property!  Could there be men who looked on women as their property?
+Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him--red,
+stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent faces;
+hundreds, thousands of them!  How could he know what men who had such
+faces thought and did?  He held his head in his hands and groaned.  His
+mother!  He caught up the letter and read on again: "horror and
+aversion-alive in her to-day....  your children.... grandchildren....  of
+a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave...."  He got
+up from his bed.  This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his
+love and Fleur's, was true, or his father could never have written it.
+'Why didn't they tell me the first thing,' he thought, 'the day I first
+saw Fleur?  They knew I'd seen her.  They were afraid,
+and--now--I've--got it!'  Overcome by misery too acute for thought or
+reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the room and sat down on the
+floor.  He sat there, like some unhappy little animal.  There was comfort
+in dusk, and the floor--as if he were back in those days when he played
+his battles sprawling all over it.  He sat there huddled, his hair
+ruffled, his hands clasped round his knees, for how long he did not know.
+He was wrenched from his blank wretchedness by the sound of the door
+opening from his mother's room.  The blinds were down over the windows of
+his room, shut up in his absence, and from where he sat he could only
+hear a rustle, her footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her
+standing before his dressing-table.  She had something in her hand. He
+hardly breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go away.  He saw her
+touch things on the table as if they had some virtue in them, then face
+the window-grey from head to foot like a ghost.  The least turn of her
+head, and she must see him!  Her lips moved: "Oh! Jon!"  She was speaking
+to herself; the tone of her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her
+hand a little photograph.  She held it toward the light, looking at
+it--very small.  He knew it--one of himself as a tiny boy, which she
+always kept in her bag.  His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had
+heard it, she turned her eyes and saw him.  At the gasp she gave, and the
+movement of her hands pressing the photograph against her breast, he
+said:
+
+"Yes, it's me."
+
+She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him, her
+hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the sheets of the letter
+which had slipped to the floor.  She saw them, and her hands grasped the
+edge of the bed.  She sat very upright, her dark eyes fixed on him.  At
+last she spoke.
+
+"Well, Jon, you know, I see."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You've seen Father?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a long silence, till she said:
+
+"Oh! my darling!"
+
+"It's all right."  The emotions in him were so, violent and so mixed that
+he dared not move--resentment, despair, and yet a strange yearning for
+the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+There was another long silence, then she got up.  She stood a moment,
+very still, made a little movement with her hand, and said: "My darling
+boy, my most darling boy, don't think of me--think of yourself," and,
+passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her room.
+
+Jon turned--curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog--into the
+corner made by the two walls.
+
+He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him.  It came
+from the terrace below.  He got up, scared.  Again came the cry: "Jon!"
+His mother was calling!  He ran out and down the stairs, through the
+empty dining-room into the study.  She was kneeling before the old
+armchair, and his father was lying back quite white, his head on his
+breast, one of his hands resting on an open book, with a pencil clutched
+in it--more strangely still than anything he had ever seen.  She looked
+round wildly, and said:
+
+"Oh! Jon--he's dead--he's dead!"
+
+Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where he
+had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead.  Icy cold! How
+could--how could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago--!  His mother's arms
+were round the knees; pressing her breast against them. "Why--why wasn't
+I with him?" he heard her whisper.  Then he saw the tottering word
+"Irene" pencilled on the open page, and broke down himself.  It was his
+first sight of human death, and its unutterable stillness blotted from
+him all other emotion; all else, then, was but preliminary to this!  All
+love and life, and joy, anxiety, and sorrow, all movement, light and
+beauty, but a beginning to this terrible white stillness.  It made a
+dreadful mark on him; all seemed suddenly little, futile, short.  He
+mastered himself at last, got up, and raised her.
+
+"Mother! don't cry--Mother!"
+
+Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother was
+lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a white
+sheet.  He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had never
+looked angry--always whimsical, and kind.  "To be kind and keep your end
+up--there's nothing else in it," he had once heard his father say.  How
+wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy!  He understood now that
+his father had known for a long time past that this would come
+suddenly--known, and not said a word.  He gazed with an awed and
+passionate reverence.  The loneliness of it--just to spare his mother and
+himself!  His own trouble seemed small while he was looking at that face.
+The word scribbled on the page!  The farewell word!  Now his mother had
+no one but himself!  He went up close to the dead face--not changed at
+all, and yet completely changed.  He had heard his father say once that
+he did not believe in consciousness surviving death, or that if it did it
+might be just survival till the natural age limit of the body had been
+reached--the natural term of its inherent vitality; so that if the body
+were broken by accident, excess, violent disease, consciousness might
+still persist till, in the course of Nature uninterfered with, it would
+naturally have faded out.  It had struck him because he had never heard
+any one else suggest it.  When the heart failed like this--surely it was
+not quite natural!  Perhaps his father's consciousness was in the room
+with him.  Above the bed hung a picture of his father's father.  Perhaps
+his consciousness, too, was still alive; and his brother's--his
+half-brother, who had died in the Transvaal.  Were they all gathered
+round this bed?  Jon kissed the forehead, and stole back to his own room.
+The door between it and his mother's was ajar; she had evidently been
+in--everything was ready for him, even some biscuits and hot milk, and
+the letter no longer on the floor.  He ate and drank, watching the last
+light fade. He did not try to see into the future--just stared at the
+dark branches of the oak-tree, level with his window, and felt as if life
+had stopped.  Once in the night, turning in his heavy sleep, he was
+conscious of something white and still, beside his bed, and started up.
+
+His mother's voice said:
+
+"It's only I, Jon dear!"  Her hand pressed his forehead gently back; her
+white figure disappeared.
+
+Alone!  He fell heavily asleep again, and dreamed he saw his mother's
+name crawling on his bed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SOAMES COGITATES
+
+The announcement in The Times of his cousin Jolyon's death affected
+Soames quite simply.  So that chap was gone!  There had never been a time
+in their two lives when love had not been lost between them. That
+quick-blooded sentiment hatred had run its course long since in Soames'
+heart, and he had refused to allow any recrudescence, but he considered
+this early decease a piece of poetic justice.  For twenty years the
+fellow had enjoyed the reversion of his wife and house, and--he was dead!
+The obituary notice, which appeared a little later, paid Jolyon--he
+thought--too much attention.  It spoke of that "diligent and agreeable
+painter whose work we have come to look on as typical of the best
+late-Victorian water-colour art."  Soames, who had almost mechanically
+preferred Mole, Morpin, and Caswell Baye, and had always sniffed quite
+audibly when he came to one of his cousin's on the line, turned The Times
+with a crackle.
+
+He had to go up to Town that morning on Forsyte affairs, and was fully
+conscious of Gradman's glance sidelong over his spectacles. The old clerk
+had about him an aura of regretful congratulation.  He smelled, as it
+were, of old days.  One could almost hear him thinking: "Mr. Jolyon,
+ye-es--just my age, and gone--dear, dear!  I dare say she feels it.  She
+was a mice-lookin' woman.  Flesh is flesh!  They've given 'im a notice in
+the papers.  Fancy!"  His atmosphere in fact caused Soames to handle
+certain leases and conversions with exceptional swiftness.
+
+"About that settlement on Miss Fleur, Mr. Soames?"
+
+"I've thought better of that," answered Soames shortly.
+
+"Ah!  I'm glad of that.  I thought you were a little hasty.  The times do
+change."
+
+How this death would affect Fleur had begun to trouble Soames.  He was
+not certain that she knew of it--she seldom looked at the paper, never at
+the births, marriages, and deaths.
+
+He pressed matters on, and made his way to Green Street for lunch.
+Winifred was almost doleful.  Jack Cardigan had broken a splashboard, so
+far as one could make out, and would not be "fit" for some time. She
+could not get used to the idea.
+
+"Did Profond ever get off?" he said suddenly.
+
+"He got off," replied Winifred, "but where--I don't know."
+
+Yes, there it was--impossible to tell anything!  Not that he wanted to
+know.  Letters from Annette were coming from Dieppe, where she and her
+mother were staying.
+
+"You saw that fellow's death, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes," said Winifred.  "I'm sorry for--for his children.  He was very
+amiable."  Soames uttered a rather queer sound.  A suspicion of the old
+deep truth--that men were judged in this world rather by what they were
+than by what they did--crept and knocked resentfully at the back doors of
+his mind.
+
+"I know there was a superstition to that effect," he muttered.
+
+"One must do him justice now he's dead."
+
+"I should like to have done him justice before," said Soames; "but I
+never had the chance.  Have you got a 'Baronetage' here?"
+
+"Yes; in that bottom row."
+
+Soames took out a fat red book, and ran over the leaves.
+
+"Mont-Sir Lawrence, 9th Bt., cr. 1620, e. s. of Geoffrey, 8th Bt., and
+Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt., of Muskham Hall, Shrops:
+marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq., of Condaford Grange,
+co. Oxon; 1 son, heir Michael Conway, b. 1895, 2 daurs. Residence:
+Lippinghall Manor, Folwell, Bucks.  Clubs: Snooks': Coffee House:
+Aeroplane.  See BidIicott."
+
+"H'm!" he said.  "Did you ever know a publisher?"
+
+"Uncle Timothy."
+
+"Alive, I mean."
+
+"Monty knew one at his Club.  He brought him here to dinner once. Monty
+was always thinking of writing a book, you know, about how to make money
+on the turf.  He tried to interest that man."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He put him on to a horse--for the Two Thousand.  We didn't see him
+again.  He was rather smart, if I remember."
+
+"Did it win?"
+
+"No; it ran last, I think.  You know Monty really was quite clever in his
+way."
+
+"Was he?" said Soames.  "Can you see any connection between a sucking
+baronet and publishing?"
+
+"People do all sorts of things nowadays," replied Winifred.  "The great
+stunt seems not to be idle--so different from our time.  To do nothing
+was the thing then.  But I suppose it'll come again."
+
+"This young Mont that I'm speaking of is very sweet on Fleur.  If it
+would put an end to that other affair I might encourage it."
+
+"Has he got style?" asked Winifred.
+
+"He's no beauty; pleasant enough, with some scattered brains. There's a
+good deal of land, I believe.  He seems genuinely attached. But I don't
+know."
+
+"No," murmured Winifred; "it's--very difficult.  I always found it best
+to do nothing.  It is such a bore about Jack; now we shan't get away till
+after Bank Holiday.  Well, the people are always amusing, I shall go into
+the Park and watch them."
+
+"If I were you," said Soames, "I should have a country cottage, and be
+out of the way of holidays and strikes when you want."
+
+"The country bores me," answered Winifred, "and I found the railway
+strike quite exciting."
+
+Winifred had always been noted for sang-froid.
+
+Soames took his leave.  All the way down to Reading he debated whether he
+should tell Fleur of that boy's father's death.  It did not alter the
+situation except that he would be independent now, and only have his
+mother's opposition to encounter.  He would come into a lot of money, no
+doubt, and perhaps the house--the house built for Irene and himself--the
+house whose architect had wrought his domestic ruin.  His
+daughter--mistress of that house!  That would be poetic justice!  Soames
+uttered a little mirthless laugh.  He had designed that house to
+re-establish his failing union, meant it for the seat of his descendants,
+if he could have induced Irene to give him one! Her son and Fleur!  Their
+children would be, in some sort, offspring of the union between himself
+and her!
+
+The theatricality in that thought was repulsive to his sober sense. And
+yet--it would be the easiest and wealthiest way out of the impasse, now
+that Jolyon was gone.  The juncture of two Forsyte fortunes had a kind of
+conservative charm.  And she--Irene-would be linked to him once more.
+Nonsense!  Absurd!  He put the notion from his head.
+
+On arriving home he heard the click of billiard-balls, and through the
+window saw young Mont sprawling over the table.  Fleur, with her cue
+akimbo, was watching with a smile.  How pretty she looked!  No wonder
+that young fellow was out of his mind about her.  A title--land!  There
+was little enough in land, these days; perhaps less in a title.  The old
+Forsytes had always had a kind of contempt for titles, rather remote and
+artificial things--not worth the money they cost, and having to do with
+the Court.  They had all had that feeling in differing measure--Soames
+remembered.  Swithin, indeed, in his most expansive days had once
+attended a Levee.  He had come away saying he shouldn't go again--"all
+that small fry."  It was suspected that he had looked too big in
+knee-breeches.  Soames remembered how his own mother had wished to be
+presented because of the fashionable nature of the performance, and how
+his father had put his foot down with unwonted decision.  What did she
+want with that peacocking--wasting time and money; there was nothing in
+it!
+
+The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the chief power
+in the State, a feeling that their own world was good enough and a little
+better than any other because it was their world, had kept the old
+Forsytes singularly free of "flummery," as Nicholas had been wont to call
+it when he had the gout.  Soames' generation, more self-conscious and
+ironical, had been saved by a sense of Swithin in knee-breeches.  While
+the third and the fourth generation, as it seemed to him, laughed at
+everything.
+
+However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a title
+and estate--a thing one couldn't help.  He entered quietly, as Mont
+missed his shot.  He noted the young man's eyes, fixed on Fleur bending
+over in her turn; and the adoration in them almost touched him.
+
+She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand, and shook
+her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
+
+"I shall never do it."
+
+"'Nothing venture.'"
+
+"All right."  The cue struck, the ball rolled.  "There!"
+
+"Bad luck!  Never mind!"
+
+Then they saw him, and Soames said:
+
+"I'll mark for you."
+
+He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and tired,
+furtively studying those two young faces.  When the game was over Mont
+came up to him.
+
+"I've started in, sir.  Rum game, business, isn't it?  I suppose you saw
+a lot of human nature as a solicitor."
+
+"I did."
+
+"Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the wrong tack
+in offering less than they can afford to give; they ought to offer more,
+and work backward."
+
+Soames raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Suppose the more is accepted?"
+
+"That doesn't matter a little bit," said Mont; "it's much more paying to
+abate a price than to increase it.  For instance, say we offer an author
+good terms--he naturally takes them.  Then we go into it, find we can't
+publish at a decent profit and tell him so.  He's got confidence in us
+because we've been generous to him, and he comes down like a lamb, and
+bears us no malice.  But if we offer him poor terms at the start, he
+doesn't take them, so we have to advance them to get him, and he thinks
+us damned screws into the bargain.
+
+"Try buying pictures on that system," said Soames; "an offer accepted is
+a contract--haven't you learned that?"
+
+Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the window.
+
+"No," he said, "I wish I had.  Then there's another thing.  Always let a
+man off a bargain if he wants to be let off."
+
+"As advertisement?" said Soames dryly.
+
+"Of course it is; but I meant on principle."
+
+"Does your firm work on those lines?"
+
+"Not yet," said Mont, "but it'll come."
+
+"And they will go."
+
+"No, really, sir.  I'm making any number of observations, and they all
+confirm my theory.  Human nature is consistently underrated in business,
+people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure and profit by that.
+Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and open, but that's easy if you
+feel it.  The more human and generous you are the better chance you've
+got in business."
+
+Soames rose.
+
+"Are you a partner?"
+
+"Not for six months, yet."
+
+"The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire."
+
+Mont laughed.
+
+"You'll see," he said.  "There's going to be a big change.  The
+possessive principle has got its shutters up."
+
+"What?" said Soames.
+
+"The house is to let!  Good-bye, sir; I'm off now."
+
+Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the squeeze
+it received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as he passed out.
+Then she came from the window, trailing her finger along the mahogany
+edge of the billiard-table.  Watching her, Soames knew that she was going
+to ask him something.  Her finger felt round the last pocket, and she
+looked up.
+
+"Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?"
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+"You haven't seen, then?" he said.  "His father died just a week ago
+to-day."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to apprehend
+what this would mean.
+
+"Poor Jon!  Why didn't you tell me, Father?"
+
+"I never know!" said Soames slowly; "you don't confide in me."
+
+"I would, if you'd help me, dear."
+
+"Perhaps I shall."
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.  "Oh! darling--when one wants a thing fearfully,
+one doesn't think of other people.  Don't be angry with me."
+
+Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
+
+"I'm cogitating," he said.  What on earth had made him use a word like
+that!  "Has young Mont been bothering you again?"
+
+Fleur smiled.  "Oh! Michael!  He's always bothering; but he's such a good
+sort--I don't mind him."
+
+"Well," said Soames, "I'm tired; I shall go and have a nap before
+dinner."
+
+He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there, and
+closed his eyes.  A terrible responsibility this girl of his--whose
+mother was--ah! what was she?  A terrible responsibility!  Help her--how
+could he help her?  He could not alter the fact that he was her father.
+Or that Irene--!  What was it young Mont had said--some nonsense about
+the possessive instinct--shutters up--To let?  Silly!
+
+The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and roses,
+closed on his senses, drowsing them.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE FIXED IDEA
+
+"The fixed idea," which has outrun more constables than any other form of
+human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when it takes the
+avid guise of love.  To hedges and ditches, and doors, to humans without
+ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the contents sucking their
+fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from this fast malady--the fixed
+idea of love pays no attention.  It runs with eyes turned inward to its
+own light, oblivious of all other stars.  Those with the fixed ideas that
+human happiness depends on their art, on vivisecting dogs, on hating
+foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers, on making wheels
+go round, on preventing their neighbours from being divorced, on
+conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox and
+superiority to everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania--all are
+unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession of
+some her or him.  And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the
+scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and whose
+business is pleasure, she was--as Winifred would have said in the latest
+fashion of speech--"honest to God" indifferent to it all. She wished and
+wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies above the river or the
+Green Park when she went to Town.  She even kept Jon's letters, covered
+with pink silk, on her heart, than which in days when corsets were so
+low, sentiment so despised, and chests so out of fashion, there could,
+perhaps, have been no greater proof of the fixity of her idea.
+
+After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received his
+answer three days later on her return from a river picnic.  It was his
+first letter since their meeting at June's.  She opened it with
+misgiving, and read it with dismay.
+
+"Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past.  I won't tell it
+you--I think you knew when we met at June's.  She says you did. If you
+did, Fleur, you ought to have told me.  I expect you only heard your
+father's side of it.  I have heard my mother's.  It's dreadful.  Now that
+she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt her more.  Of course, I long for
+you all day, but I don't believe now that we shall ever come
+together--there's something too strong pulling us apart."
+
+So!  Her deception had found her out.  But Jon--she felt--had forgiven
+that.  It was what he said of his mother which caused the guttering in
+her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
+
+Her first impulse was to reply--her second, not to reply.  These impulses
+were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while desperation
+grew within her.  She was not her father's child for nothing.  The
+tenacity which had at once made and undone Soames was her backbone, too,
+frilled and embroidered by French grace and quickness.  Instinctively she
+conjugated the verb "to have" always with the pronoun "I."  She
+concealed, however, all signs of her growing desperation, and pursued
+such river pleasures as the winds and rain of a disagreeable July
+permitted, as if she had no care in the world; nor did any "sucking
+baronet" ever neglect the business of a publisher more consistently than
+her attendant spirit, Michael Mont.
+
+To Soames she was a puzzle.  He was almost deceived by this careless
+gaiety.  Almost--because he did not fail to mark her eyes often fixed on
+nothing, and the film of light shining from her bedroom window late at
+night.  What was she thinking and brooding over into small hours when she
+ought to have been asleep?  But he dared not ask what was in her mind;
+and, since that one little talk in the billiard-room, she said nothing to
+him.
+
+In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred invited
+them to lunch and to go afterward to "a most amusing little play, 'The
+Beggar's Opera'" and would they bring a man to make four? Soames, whose
+attitude toward theatres was to go to nothing, accepted, because Fleur's
+attitude was to go to everything.  They motored up, taking Michael Mont,
+who, being in his seventh heaven, was found by Winifred "very amusing."
+"The Beggar's Opera" puzzled Soames.  The people were very unpleasant,
+the whole thing very cynical.  Winifred was "intrigued"--by the dresses.
+The music, too, did not displease her.  At the Opera, the night before,
+she had arrived too early for the Russian Ballet, and found the stage
+occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or apoplectic from terror lest
+by some dreadful inadvertence they might drop into a tune. Michael Mont
+was enraptured with the whole thing.  And all three wondered what Fleur
+was thinking of it.  But Fleur was not thinking of it.  Her fixed idea
+stood on the stage and sang with Polly Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced
+with Jenny Diver, postured with Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and cuddled
+with Macheath.  Her lips might smile, her hands applaud, but the comic
+old masterpiece made no more impression on her than if it had been
+pathetic, like a modern "Revue."  When they embarked in the car to
+return, she ached because Jon was not sitting next her instead of Michael
+Mont.  When, at some jolt, the young man's arm touched hers as if by
+accident, she only thought: 'If that were Jon's arm!'  When his cheerful
+voice, tempered by her proximity, murmured above the sound of the car's
+progress, she smiled and answered, thinking: 'If that were Jon's voice!'
+and when once he said, "Fleur, you look a perfect angel in that dress!"
+she answered, "Oh, do you like it?" thinking, 'If only Jon could see it!'
+
+During this drive she took a resolution.  She would go to Robin Hill and
+see him--alone; she would take the car, without word beforehand to him or
+to her father.  It was nine days since his letter, and she could wait no
+longer.  On Monday she would go!  The decision made her well disposed
+toward young Mont.  With something to look forward to she could afford to
+tolerate and respond.  He might stay to dinner; propose to her as usual;
+dance with her, press her hand, sigh--do what he liked.  He was only a
+nuisance when he interfered with her fixed idea.  She was even sorry for
+him so far as it was possible to be sorry for anybody but herself just
+now.  At dinner he seemed to talk more wildly than usual about what he
+called "the death of the close borough"--she paid little attention, but
+her father seemed paying a good deal, with the smile on his face which
+meant opposition, if not anger.
+
+"The younger generation doesn't think as you do, sir; does it, Fleur?"
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders--the younger generation was just Jon, and
+she did not know what he was thinking.
+
+"Young people will think as I do when they're my age, Mr. Mont. Human
+nature doesn't change."
+
+"I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the times. The
+pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that's going out."
+
+"Indeed!  To mind one's own business is not a form of thought, Mr. Mont,
+it's an instinct."
+
+Yes, when Jon was the business!
+
+"But what is one's business, sir?  That's the point.  Everybody's
+business is going to be one's business.  Isn't it, Fleur?"
+
+Fleur only smiled.
+
+"If not," added young Mont, "there'll be blood."
+
+"People have talked like that from time immemorial"
+
+"But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?"
+
+"I should say increasing among those who have none."
+
+"Well, look at me!  I'm heir to an entailed estate.  I don't want the
+thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow."
+
+"You're not married, and you don't know what you're talking about."
+
+Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.
+
+"Do you really mean that marriage--?" he began.
+
+"Society is built on marriage," came from between her father's close
+lips; "marriage and its consequences.  Do you want to do away with it?"
+
+Young Mont made a distracted gesture.  Silence brooded over the dinner
+table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest--a pheasant
+proper--under the electric light in an alabaster globe.  And outside, the
+river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and sweet scents.
+
+'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DESPERATE
+
+The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty
+to the only Jolyon Forsyte left.  The necessary forms and ceremonies
+--the reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of
+the legacies--were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet
+of age.  Jolyon was cremated.  By his special wish no one attended
+that ceremony, or wore black for him.  The succession of his
+property, controlled to some extent by old Jolyon's Will, left his
+widow in possession of Robin Hill, with two thousand five hundred
+pounds a year for life.  Apart from this the two Wills worked
+together in some complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon's
+three children should have an equal share in their grandfather's and
+father's property in the future as in the present, save only that
+Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his capital when he
+was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the spirit of
+theirs, in order that their children might have the body after them.
+If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he outlived
+them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was
+considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of income
+tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he
+died.  All this was nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother.
+It was June who did everything needful for one who had left his
+affairs in perfect order.  When she had gone, and those two were
+alone again in the great house, alone with death drawing them
+together, and love driving them apart, Jon passed very painful days
+secretly disgusted and disappointed with himself.  His mother would
+look at him with such a patient sadness which yet had in it an
+instinctive pride, as if she were reserving her defence.  If she
+smiled he was angry that his answering smile should be so grudging
+and unnatural.  He did not judge or condemn her; that was all too
+remote--indeed, the idea of doing so had never come to him.  No! he
+was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have what he wanted be
+cause of her.  There was one alleviation--much to do in connection
+with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted to
+June, though she had offered to undertake it.  Both Jon and his
+mother had felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings
+and unfinished matter, away with her, the work would encounter such
+icy blasts from Paul Post and other frequenters of her studio, that
+it would soon be frozen out even of her warm heart.  On its
+old-fashioned plane and of its kind the work was good, and they could not
+bear the thought of its subjection to ridicule.  A one-man exhibition
+of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had
+loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together.
+Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father.  The
+quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into
+something really individual was disclosed by these researches.  There
+was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth
+and reach of vision.  Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached
+very high--but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious,
+and complete.  And, remembering his father's utter absence of "side"
+or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always
+spoken of his own efforts, ever calling himself "an amateur," Jon
+could not help feeling that he had never really known his father.  To
+ take himself seriously, yet never bore others by letting them know
+that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle.  There was
+something in this which appealed to the boy, and made him heartily
+endorse his mother's comment: "He had true refinement; he couldn't
+help thinking of others, whatever he did.  And when he took a
+resolution which went counter, he did it with the minimum of
+defiance--not like the Age, is it?  Twice in his life he had to go
+against everything; and yet it never made him bitter."  Jon saw tears
+running down her face, which she at once turned away from him.  She
+was so quiet about her loss that sometimes he had thought she didn't
+feel it much.  Now, as he looked at her, he felt how far he fell
+short of the reserve power and dignity in both his father and his
+mother.  And, stealing up to her, he put his arm round her waist.
+She kissed him swiftly, but with a sort of passion, and went out of
+the room.
+
+The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once been
+Holly's schoolroom, devoted to her silkworms, dried lavender, music, and
+other forms of instruction.  Now, at the end of July, despite its
+northern and eastern aspects, a warm and slumberous air came in between
+the long-faded lilac linen curtains.  To redeem a little the departed
+glory, as of a field that is golden and gone, clinging to a room which
+its master has left, Irene had placed on the paint-stained table a bowl
+of red roses.  This, and Jolyon's favourite cat, who still clung to the
+deserted habitat, were the pleasant spots in that dishevelled, sad
+workroom.  Jon, at the north window, sniffing air mysteriously scented
+with warm strawberries, heard a car drive up. The lawyers again about
+some nonsense!  Why did that scent so make one ache?  And where did it
+come from--there were no strawberry beds on this side of the house.
+Instinctively he took a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, and
+wrote down some broken words.  A warmth began spreading in his chest; he
+rubbed the palms of his hands together.  Presently he had jotted this:
+
+"If I could make a little song A little song to soothe my heart! I'd make
+it all of little things The plash of water, rub of wings, The puffing-off
+of dandies crown, The hiss of raindrop spilling down, The purr of cat,
+the trill of bird, And ev'ry whispering I've heard From willy wind in
+leaves and grass, And all the distant drones that pass. A song as tender
+and as light As flower, or butterfly in flight; And when I saw it
+opening, I'd let it fly and sing!"
+
+He was still muttering it over to himself at the window, when he heard
+his name called, and, turning round, saw Fleur.  At that amazing
+apparition, he made at first no movement and no sound, while her clear
+vivid glance ravished his heart.  Then he went forward to the table,
+saying, "How nice of you to come!" and saw her flinch as if he had thrown
+something at her.
+
+"I asked for you," she said, "and they showed me up here.  But I can go
+away again."
+
+Jon clutched the paint-stained table.  Her face and figure in its frilly
+frock photographed itself with such startling vividness upon his eyes,
+that if she had sunk through the floor he must still have seen her.
+
+"I know I told you a lie, Jon.  But I told it out of love."
+
+"Yes, oh! yes! That's nothing!"
+
+"I didn't answer your letter.  What was the use--there wasn't anything to
+answer.  I wanted to see you instead."  She held out both her hands, and
+Jon grasped them across the table.  He tried to say something, but all
+his attention was given to trying not to hurt her hands.  His own felt so
+hard and hers so soft.  She said almost defiantly:
+
+"That old story--was it so very dreadful?"
+
+"Yes."  In his voice, too, there was a note of defiance.
+
+She dragged her hands away.  "I didn't think in these days boys were tied
+to their mothers' apron-strings."
+
+Jon's chin went up as if he had been struck.
+
+"Oh! I didn't mean it, Jon.  What a horrible thing to say!"  Swiftly she
+came close to him.  "Jon, dear; I didn't mean it."
+
+"All right."
+
+She had put her two hands on his shoulder, and her forehead down on them;
+the brim of her hat touched his neck, and he felt it quivering. But, in a
+sort of paralysis, he made no response.  She let go of his shoulder and
+drew away.
+
+"Well, I'll go, if you don't want me.  But I never thought you'd have
+given me up."
+
+"I haven't," cried Jon, coming suddenly to life.  "I can't.  I'll try
+again."
+
+Her eyes gleamed, she swayed toward him.  "Jon--I love you!  Don't give
+me up!  If you do, I don't know what--I feel so desperate.  What does it
+matter--all that past-compared with this?"
+
+She clung to him.  He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips.  But while
+he kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down on the floor
+of his bedroom--his father's white dead face--his mother kneeling before
+it.  Fleur's whispered, "Make her!  Promise! Oh! Jon, try!" seemed
+childish in his ear.  He felt curiously old.
+
+"I promise!" he muttered.  "Only, you don't understand."
+
+"She wants to spoil our lives, just because--"
+
+"Yes, of what?"
+
+Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer.  Her arms
+tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even while he
+yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the letter.  Fleur did
+not know, she did not understand--she misjudged his mother; she came from
+the enemy's camp!  So lovely, and he loved her so--yet, even in her
+embrace, he could not help the memory of Holly's words: "I think she has
+a 'having' nature," and his mother's "My darling boy, don't think of
+me--think of yourself!"
+
+When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on his eyes,
+her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon leaned in the
+window, listening to the car bearing her away.  Still the scent as of
+warm strawberries, still the little summer sounds that should make his
+song; still all the promise of youth and happiness in sighing, floating,
+fluttering July--and his heart torn; yearning strong in him; hope high in
+him yet with its eyes cast down, as if ashamed.  The miserable task
+before him!  If Fleur was desperate, so was he--watching the poplars
+swaying, the white clouds passing, the sunlight on the grass.
+
+He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till his
+mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling that she knew what
+he was waiting to say.  She kissed him and went up-stairs, and still he
+lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that unreality of
+colouring which steals along and stains a summer night. And he would have
+given anything to be back again in the past--barely three months back; or
+away forward, years, in the future.  The present with this dark cruelty
+of a decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible.  He realised now
+so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had at first; as if the
+story in that letter had been a poisonous germ producing a kind of fever
+of partisanship, so that he really felt there were two camps, his
+mother's and his--Fleur's and her father's.  It might be a dead thing,
+that old tragic ownership and enmity, but dead things were poisonous till
+time had cleaned them away.  Even his love felt tainted, less illusioned,
+more of the earth, and with a treacherous lurking doubt lest Fleur, like
+her father, might want to own; not articulate, just a stealing haunt,
+horribly unworthy, which crept in and about the ardour of his memories,
+touched with its tarnishing breath the vividness and grace of that
+charmed face and figure--a doubt, not real enough to convince him of its
+presence, just real enough to deflower a perfect faith. And perfect
+faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was essential.  He still had Youth's
+eagerness to give with both hands, to take with neither--to give
+lovingly to one who had his own impulsive generosity.  Surely she had!
+He got up from the window-seat and roamed in the big grey ghostly room,
+whose walls were hung with silvered canvas.  This house his father said
+in that death-bed letter--had been built for his mother to live in--with
+Fleur's father!  He put out his hand in the half-dark, as if to grasp the
+shadowy hand of the dead.  He clenched, trying to feel the thin vanished
+fingers of his father; to squeeze them, and reassure him that he--he was
+on his father's side.  Tears, prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry
+and hot.  He went back to the window.  It was warmer, not so eerie, more
+comforting outside, where the moon hung golden, three days off full; the
+freedom of the night was comforting.  If only Fleur and he had met on
+some desert island without a past--and Nature for their house!  Jon had
+still his high regard for desert islands, where breadfruit grew, and the
+water was blue above the coral.  The night was deep, was free--there was
+enticement in it; a lure, a promise, a refuge from entanglement, and
+love!  Milksop tied to his mother's...! His cheeks burned.  He shut the
+window, drew curtains over it, switched off the lighted sconce, and went
+up-stairs.
+
+The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother, still in
+her evening gown, was standing at the window.  She turned and said:
+
+"Sit down, Jon; let's talk."  She sat down on the window-seat, Jon on his
+bed.  She had her profile turned to him, and the beauty and grace of her
+figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose, the neck, the strange
+and as it were remote refinement of her, moved him.  His mother never
+belonged to her surroundings.  She came into them from somewhere--as it
+were!  What was she going to say to him, who had in his heart such things
+to say to her?
+
+"I know Fleur came to-day.  I'm not surprised."  It was as though she had
+added: "She is her father's daughter!"  And Jon's heart hardened. Irene
+went on quietly:
+
+"I have Father's letter.  I picked it up that night and kept it. Would
+you like it back, dear?"
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+"I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you.  It didn't quite do
+justice to my criminality."
+
+"Mother!" burst from Jon's lips.
+
+"He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's father
+without love I did a dreadful thing.  An unhappy marriage, Jon, can play
+such havoc with other lives besides one's own.  You are fearfully young,
+my darling, and fearfully loving.  Do you think you can possibly be happy
+with this girl?"
+
+Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
+
+"Yes; oh! yes--if you could be."
+
+Irene smiled.
+
+"Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love.  If yours
+were another case like mine, Jon--where the deepest things are stifled;
+the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!"
+
+"Why should it, Mother?  You think she must be like her father, but she's
+not.  I've seen him."
+
+Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something wavered; there
+was such irony and experience in that smile.
+
+"You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker."
+
+That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again!  He said with
+vehemence:
+
+"She isn't--she isn't.  It's only because I can't bear to make you
+unhappy, Mother, now that Father--"  He thrust his fists against his
+forehead.
+
+Irene got up.
+
+"I told you that night, dear, not to mind me.  I meant it.  Think of
+yourself and your own happiness!  I can stand what's left--I've brought
+it on myself."
+
+Again the word "Mother!" burst from Jon's lips.
+
+She came over to him and put her hands over his.
+
+"Do you feel your head, darling?"
+
+Jon shook it.  What he felt was in his chest--a sort of tearing asunder
+of the tissue there, by the two loves.
+
+"I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do.  You won't lose
+anything."  She smoothed his hair gently, and walked away.
+
+He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay, stifling his
+breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+EMBASSY
+
+Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been out in
+the car since two.  Three hours!  Where had she gone?  Up to London
+without a word to him?  He had never become quite reconciled with cars.
+He had embraced them in principle--like the born empiricist, or Forsyte,
+that he was--adopting each symptom of progress as it came along with:
+"Well, we couldn't do without them now."  But in fact he found them
+tearing, great, smelly things. Obliged by Annette to have one--a Rollhard
+with pearl-grey cushions, electric light, little mirrors, trays for the
+ashes of cigarettes, flower vases--all smelling of petrol and
+stephanotis--he regarded it much as he used to regard his brother-in-law,
+Montague Dartie.  The thing typified all that was fast, insecure, and
+subcutaneously oily in modern life.  As modern life became faster,
+looser, younger, Soames was becoming older, slower, tighter, more and
+more in thought and language like his father James before him.  He was
+almost aware of it himself.  Pace and progress pleased him less and less;
+there was an ostentation, too, about a car which he considered
+provocative in the prevailing mood of Labour.  On one occasion that
+fellow Sims had driven over the only vested interest of a working man.
+Soames had not forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many
+people would have stopped to put up with it.  He had been sorry for the
+dog, and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that ruffian
+hadn't been so outrageous.  With four hours fast becoming five, and still
+no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had experienced in person and
+by proxy balled within him, and sinking sensations troubled the pit of
+his stomach.  At seven he telephoned to Winifred by trunk call.  No!
+Fleur had not been to Green Street.  Then where was she?  Visions of his
+beloved daughter rolled up in her pretty frills, all blood and
+dust-stained, in some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him.  He went
+to her room and spied among her things. She had taken nothing--no
+dressing-case, no Jewellery.  And this, a relief in one sense, increased
+his fears of an accident.  Terrible to be helpless when his loved one was
+missing, especially when he couldn't bear fuss or publicity of any kind!
+What should he do if she were not back by nightfall?
+
+At a quarter to eight he heard the car.  A great weight lifted from off
+his heart; he hurried down.  She was getting out--pale and tired-looking,
+but nothing wrong.  He met her in the hall.
+
+"You've frightened me.  Where have you been?"
+
+"To Robin Hill.  I'm sorry, dear.  I had to go; I'll tell you afterward."
+And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
+
+Soames waited in the drawing-room.  To Robin Hill!  What did that
+portend?
+
+It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner--consecrated to the
+susceptibilities of the butler.  The agony of nerves Soames had been
+through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his power to condemn
+what she had done, or resist what she was going to do; he waited in a
+relaxed stupor for her revelation.  Life was a queer business.  There he
+was at sixty-five and no more in command of things than if he had not
+spent forty years in building up security-always something one couldn't
+get on terms with!  In the pocket of his dinner-jacket was a letter from
+Annette.  She was coming back in a fortnight.  He knew nothing of what
+she had been doing out there. And he was glad that he did not.  Her
+absence had been a relief.  Out of sight was out of mind!  And now she
+was coming back.  Another worry!  And the Bolderby Old Crome was
+gone--Dumetrius had got it--all because that anonymous letter had put it
+out of his thoughts.  He furtively remarked the strained look on his
+daughter's face, as if she too were gazing at a picture that she couldn't
+buy.  He almost wished the War back.  Worries didn't seem, then, quite so
+worrying. From the caress in her voice, the look on her face, he became
+certain that she wanted something from him, uncertain whether it would be
+wise of him to give it her.  He pushed his savoury away uneaten, and even
+joined her in a cigarette.
+
+After dinner she set the electric piano-player going.  And he augured the
+worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his knee, and put her
+hand on his.
+
+"Darling, be nice to me.  I had to see Jon--he wrote to me.  He's going
+to try what he can do with his mother.  But I've been thinking. It's
+really in your hands, Father.  If you'd persuade her that it doesn't mean
+renewing the past in any way!  That I shall stay yours, and Jon will stay
+hers; that you need never see him or her, and she need never see you or
+me!  Only you could persuade her, dear, because only you could promise.
+One can't promise for other people.  Surely it wouldn't be too awkward
+for you to see her just this once now that Jon's father is dead?"
+
+"Too awkward?" Soames repeated.  "The whole thing's preposterous."
+
+"You know," said Fleur, without looking up, "you wouldn't mind seeing
+her, really."
+
+Soames was silent.  Her words had expressed a truth too deep for him to
+admit.  She slipped her fingers between his own--hot, slim, eager, they
+clung there.  This child of his would corkscrew her way into a brick
+wall!
+
+"What am I to do if you won't, Father?" she said very softly.
+
+"I'll do anything for your happiness," said Soanies; "but this isn't for
+your happiness."
+
+"Oh! it is; it is!"
+
+"It'll only stir things up," he said grimly.
+
+"But they are stirred up.  The thing is to quiet them.  To make her feel
+that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with yours or hers.
+You can do it, Father, I know you can."
+
+"You know a great deal, then," was Soames' glum answer.
+
+"If you will, Jon and I will wait a year--two years if you like."
+
+"It seems to me," murmured Soames, "that you care nothing about what I
+feel."
+
+Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.
+
+"I do, darling.  But you wouldn't like me to be awfully miserable."
+
+How she wheedled to get her ends!  And trying with all his might to think
+she really cared for him--he was not sure--not sure.  All she cared for
+was this boy!  Why should he help her to get this boy, who was killing
+her affection for himself?  Why should he?  By the laws of the Forsytes
+it was foolish!  There was nothing to be had out of it--nothing!  To give
+her to that boy!  To pass her into the enemy's camp, under the influence
+of the woman who had injured him so deeply! Slowly--inevitably--he would
+lose this flower of his life!  And suddenly he was conscious that his
+hand was wet.  His heart gave a little painful jump.  He couldn't bear
+her to cry.  He put his other hand quickly over hers, and a tear dropped
+on that, too.  He couldn't go on like this!  "Well, well," he said, "I'll
+think it over, and do what I can.  Come, come!"  If she must have it for
+her happiness--she must; he couldn't refuse to help her.  And lest she
+should begin to thank him he got out of his chair and went up to the
+piano-player--making that noise!  It ran down, as he reached it, with a
+faint buzz. That musical box of his nursery days: "The Harmonious
+Blacksmith," "Glorious Port"--the thing had always made him miserable
+when his mother set it going on Sunday afternoons.  Here it was
+again--the same thing, only larger, more expensive, and now it played
+"The Wild, Wild Women," and "The Policeman's Holiday," and he was no
+longer in black velvet with a sky blue collar.  'Profond's right,' he
+thought, 'there's nothing in it!  We're all progressing to the grave!'
+And with that surprising mental comment he walked out.
+
+He did not see Fleur again that night.  But, at breakfast, her eyes
+followed him about with an appeal he could not escape--not that he
+intended to try.  No!  He had made up his mind to the nerve-racking
+business.  He would go to Robin Hill--to that house of memories. Pleasant
+memory--the last!  Of going down to keep that boy's father and Irene
+apart by threatening divorce.  He had often thought, since, that it had
+clinched their union.  And, now, he was going to clinch the union of that
+boy with his girl.  'I don't know what I've done,' he thought, 'to have
+such things thrust on me!'  He went up by train and down by train, and
+from the station walked by the long rising lane, still very much as he
+remembered it over thirty years ago. Funny--so near London!  Some one
+evidently was holding on to the land there.  This speculation soothed
+him, moving between the high hedges slowly, so as not to get overheated,
+though the day was chill enough. After all was said and done there was
+something real about land, it didn't shift.  Land, and good pictures!
+The values might fluctuate a bit, but on the whole they were always going
+up--worth holding on to, in a world where there was such a lot of
+unreality, cheap building, changing fashions, such a "Here to-day and
+gone to-morrow" spirit. The French were right, perhaps, with their
+peasant proprietorship, though he had no opinion of the French.  One's
+bit of land! Something solid in it!  He had heard peasant proprietors
+described as a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont call his father a
+pigheaded Morning Poster--disrespectful young devil.  Well, there were
+worse things than being pig-headed or reading the Morning Post.  There
+was Profond and his tribe, and all these Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed
+politicians and 'wild, wild women'!  A lot of worse things!  And suddenly
+Soames became conscious of feeling weak, and hot, and shaky. Sheer nerves
+at the meeting before him!  As Aunt Juley might have said--quoting
+"Superior Dosset"--his nerves were "in a proper fautigue."  He could see
+the house now among its trees, the house he had watched being built,
+intending it for himself and this woman, who, by such strange fate, had
+lived in it with another after all! He began to think of Dumetrius, Local
+Loans, and other forms of investment.  He could not afford to meet her
+with his nerves all shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgment for
+her on earth as it was in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified,
+meeting lawless beauty, incarnate.  His dignity demanded impassivity
+during this embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she had
+behaved herself, would have been brother and sister.  That wretched tune,
+"The Wild, Wild Women," kept running in his head, perversely, for tunes
+did not run there as a rule.  Passing the poplars in front of the house,
+he thought: 'How they've grown; I had them planted!' A maid answered his
+ring.
+
+"Will you say--Mr. Forsyte, on a very special matter."
+
+If she realised who he was, quite probably she would not see him. 'By
+George!' he thought, hardening as the tug came.  'It's a topsy-turvy
+affair!'
+
+The maid came back.  "Would the gentleman state his business, please?"
+
+"Say it concerns Mr. Jon," said Soames.
+
+And once more he was alone in that hall with the pool of grey-white
+marble designed by her first lover.  Ah! she had been a bad lot--had
+loved two men, and not himself!  He must remember that when he came face
+to face with her once more.  And suddenly he saw her in the opening chink
+between the long heavy purple curtains, swaying, as if in hesitation; the
+old perfect poise and line, the old startled dark-eyed gravity, the old
+calm defensive voice: "Will you come in, please?"
+
+He passed through that opening.  As in the picture-gallery and the
+confectioner's shop, she seemed to him still beautiful.  And this was the
+first time--the very first--since he married her seven-and-thirty years
+ago, that he was speaking to her without the legal right to call her his.
+She was not wearing black--one of that fellow's radical notions, he
+supposed.
+
+"I apologise for coming," he said glumly; "but this business must be
+settled one way or the other."
+
+"Won't you sit down?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+Anger at his false position, impatience of ceremony between them,
+mastered him, and words came tumbling out:
+
+"It's an infernal mischance; I've done my best to discourage it.  I
+consider my daughter crazy, but I've got into the habit of indulging her;
+that's why I'm here.  I suppose you're fond of your son."
+
+"Devotedly."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"It rests with him."
+
+He had a sense of being met and baffled.  Always--always she had baffled
+him, even in those old first married days.
+
+"It's a mad notion," he said.
+
+"It is."
+
+"If you had only--!  Well--they might have been--" he did not finish that
+sentence "brother and sister and all this saved," but he saw her shudder
+as if he had, and stung by the sight he crossed over to the window.  Out
+there the trees had not grown--they couldn't, they were old!
+
+"So far as I'm concerned," he said, "you may make your mind easy.  I
+desire to see neither you nor your son if this marriage comes about.
+Young people in these days are--are unaccountable.  But I can't bear to
+see my daughter unhappy.  What am I to say to her when I go back?"
+
+"Please say to her as I said to you, that it rests with Jon."
+
+"You don't oppose it?"
+
+"With all my heart; not with my lips."
+
+Soames stood, biting his finger.
+
+"I remember an evening--" he said suddenly; and was silent.  What was
+there--what was there in this woman that would not fit into the four
+corners of his hate or condemnation?  "Where is he--your son?"
+
+"Up in his father's studio, I think."
+
+"Perhaps you'd have him down."
+
+He watched her ring the bell, he watched the maid come in.
+
+"Please tell Mr. Jon that I want him."
+
+"If it rests with him," said Soames hurriedly, when the maid was gone, "I
+suppose I may take it for granted that this unnatural marriage will take
+place; in that case there'll be formalities.  Whom do I deal
+with--Herring's?"
+
+Irene nodded.
+
+"You don't propose to live with them?"
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+"What happens to this house?"
+
+"It will be as Jon wishes."
+
+"This house," said Soames suddenly: "I had hopes when I began it.  If
+they live in it--their children!  They say there's such a thing as
+Nemesis.  Do you believe in it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! You do!"
+
+He had come back from the window, and was standing close to her, who, in
+the curve of her grand piano, was, as it were, embayed.
+
+"I'm not likely to see you again," he said slowly.  "Will you shake
+hands"--his lip quivered, the words came out jerkily--"and let the past
+die."  He held out his hand.  Her pale face grew paler, her eyes so dark,
+rested immovably on his, her hands remained clasped in front of her.  He
+heard a sound and turned.  That boy was standing in the opening of the
+curtains.  Very queer he looked, hardly recognisable as the young fellow
+he had seen in the Gallery off Cork Street--very queer; much older, no
+youth in the face at all--haggard, rigid, his hair ruffled, his eyes deep
+in his head.  Soames made an effort, and said with a lift of his lip, not
+quite a smile nor quite a sneer:
+
+"Well, young man!  I'm here for my daughter; it rests with you, it
+seems--this matter.  Your mother leaves it in your hands."
+
+The boy continued staring at his mother's face, and made no answer.
+
+"For my daughter's sake I've brought myself to come," said Soames. "What
+am I to say to her when I go back?"
+
+Still looking at his mother, the boy said, quietly:
+
+"Tell Fleur that it's no good, please; I must do as my father wished
+before he died."
+
+"Jon!"
+
+"It's all right, Mother."
+
+In a kind of stupefaction Soames looked from one to the other; then,
+taking up hat and umbrella which he had put down on a chair, he walked
+toward the curtains.  The boy stood aside for him to go by. He passed
+through and heard the grate of the rings as the curtains were drawn
+behind him.  The sound liberated something in his chest.
+
+'So that's that!'  he thought, and passed out of the front door.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE DARK TUNE
+
+As Soames walked away from the house at Robin Hill the sun broke through
+the grey of that chill afternoon, in smoky radiance.  So absorbed in
+landscape painting that he seldom looked seriously for effects of Nature
+out of doors--he was struck by that moody effulgence--it mourned with a
+triumph suited to his own feeling. Victory in defeat.  His embassy had
+come to naught.  But he was rid of those people, had regained his
+daughter at the expense of--her happiness.  What would Fleur say to him?
+Would she believe he had done his best?  And under that sunlight faring
+on the elms, hazels, hollies of the lane and those unexploited fields,
+Soames felt dread. She would be terribly upset!  He must appeal to her
+pride.  That boy had given her up, declared part and lot with the woman
+who so long ago had given her father up!  Soames clenched his hands.
+Given him up, and why?  What had been wrong with him?  And once more he
+felt the malaise of one who contemplates himself as seen by another--like
+a dog who chances on his refection in a mirror and is intrigued and
+anxious at the unseizable thing.
+
+Not in a hurry to get home, he dined in town at the Connoisseurs. While
+eating a pear it suddenly occurred to him that, if he had not gone down
+to Robin Hill, the boy might not have so decided.  He remembered the
+expression on his face while his mother was refusing the hand he had held
+out.  A strange, an awkward thought!  Had Fleur cooked her own goose by
+trying to make too sure?
+
+He reached home at half-past nine.  While the car was passing in at one
+drive gate he heard the grinding sputter of a motor-cycle passing out by
+the other.  Young Mont, no doubt, so Fleur had not been lonely.  But he
+went in with a sinking heart.  In the cream-panelled drawing-room she was
+sitting with her elbows on her knees, and her chin on her clasped hands,
+in front of a white camellia plant which filled the fireplace.  That
+glance at her before she saw him renewed his dread.  What was she seeing
+among those white camellias?
+
+"Well, Father!"
+
+Soames shook his head.  His tongue failed him.  This was murderous work!
+He saw her eyes dilate, her lips quivering.
+
+"What?  What?  Quick, Father!"
+
+"My dear," said Soames, "I--I did my best, but--" And again he shook his
+head.
+
+Fleur ran to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
+
+"She?"
+
+"No," muttered Soames; "he. I was to tell you that it was no use; he must
+do what his father wished before he died."  He caught her by the waist.
+"Come, child, don't let them hurt you.  They're not worth your little
+finger."
+
+Fleur tore herself from his grasp.
+
+"You didn't you--couldn't have tried.  You--you betrayed me, Father!"
+
+Bitterly wounded, Soames gazed at her passionate figure writhing there in
+front of him.
+
+"You didn't try--you didn't--I was a fool!  Iwon't believe he could--he
+ever could!  Only yesterday he--!  Oh! why did I ask you?"
+
+"Yes," said Soames, quietly, "why did you?  I swallowed my feelings; I
+did my best for you, against my judgment--and this is my reward.
+Good-night!"
+
+With every nerve in his body twitching he went toward the door.
+
+Fleur darted after him.
+
+"He gives me up?  You mean that?  Father!"
+
+Soames turned and forced himself to answer:
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh!" cried Fleur.  "What did you--what could you have done in those old
+days?"
+
+The breathless sense of really monstrous injustice cut the power of
+speech in Soames' throat.  What had he done!  What had they done to him!
+
+And with quite unconscious dignity he put his hand on his breast, and
+looked at her.
+
+"It's a shame!" cried Fleur passionately.
+
+Soames went out.  He mounted, slow and icy, to his picture gallery, and
+paced among his treasures.  Outrageous!  Oh!  Outrageous!  She was
+spoiled!  Ah! and who had spoiled her?  He stood still before the Goya
+copy.  Accustomed to her own way in everything.  Flower of his life!  And
+now that she couldn't have it!  He turned to the window for some air.
+Daylight was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the poplars!  What sound
+was that?  Why!  That piano thing!  A dark tune, with a thrum and a
+throb!  She had set it going--what comfort could she get from that?  His
+eyes caught movement down there beyond the lawn, under the trellis of
+rambler roses and young acacia-trees, where the moonlight fell.  There
+she was, roaming up and down.  His heart gave a little sickening jump.
+What would she do under this blow?  How could he tell?  What did he know
+of her--he had only loved her all his life--looked on her as the apple of
+his eye!  He knew nothing--had no notion.  There she was--and that dark
+tune--and the river gleaming in the moonlight!
+
+'I must go out,' he thought.
+
+He hastened down to the drawing-room, lighted just as he had left it,
+with the piano thrumming out that waltz, or fox-trot, or whatever they
+called it in these days, and passed through on to the verandah.
+
+Where could he watch, without her seeing him?  And he stole down through
+the fruit garden to the boat-house.  He was between her and the river
+now, and his heart felt lighter.  She was his daughter, and
+Annette's--she wouldn't do anything foolish; but there it was--he didn't
+know!  From the boat house window he could see the last acacia and the
+spin of her skirt when she turned in her restless march. That tune had
+run down at last--thank goodness!  He crossed the floor and looked
+through the farther window at the water slow-flowing past the lilies.  It
+made little bubbles against them, bright where a moon-streak fell.  He
+remembered suddenly that early morning when he had slept on the
+house-boat after his father died, and she had just been born--nearly
+nineteen years ago!  Even now he recalled the unaccustomed world when he
+woke up, the strange feeling it had given him.  That day the second
+passion of his life began--for this girl of his, roaming under the
+acacias.  What a comfort she had been to him! And all the soreness and
+sense of outrage left him.  If he could make her happy again, he didn't
+care!  An owl flew, queeking, queeking; a bat flitted by; the moonlight
+brightened and broadened on the water. How long was she going to roam
+about like this!  He went back to the window, and suddenly saw her coming
+down to the bank.  She stood quite close, on the landing-stage.  And
+Soames watched, clenching his hands.  Should he speak to her?  His
+excitement was intense.  The stillness of her figure, its youth, its
+absorption in despair, in longing, in--itself.  He would always remember
+it, moonlit like that; and the faint sweet reek of the river and the
+shivering of the willow leaves.  She had everything in the world that he
+could give her, except the one thing that she could not have because of
+him!  The perversity of things hurt him at that moment, as might a
+fish-bone in his throat.
+
+Then, with an infinite relief, he saw her turn back toward the house.
+What could he give her to make amends?  Pearls, travel, horses, other
+young men--anything she wanted--that he might lose the memory of her
+young figure lonely by the water!  There!  She had set that tune going
+again!  Why--it was a mania!  Dark, thrumming, faint, travelling from the
+house.  It was as though she had said: "If I can't have something to keep
+me going, I shall die of this!"  Soames dimly understood.  Well, if it
+helped her, let her keep it thrumming on all night!  And, mousing back
+through the fruit garden, he regained the verandah.  Though he meant to
+go in and speak to her now, he still hesitated, not knowing what to say,
+trying hard to recall how it felt to be thwarted in love.  He ought to
+know, ought to remember--and he could not!  Gone--all real recollection;
+except that it had hurt him horribly.  In this blankness he stood passing
+his handkerchief over hands and lips, which were very dry.  By craning
+his head he could just see Fleur, standing with her back to that piano
+still grinding out its tune, her arms tight crossed on her breast, a
+lighted cigarette between her lips, whose smoke half veiled her face.
+The expression on it was strange to Soames, the eyes shone and stared,
+and every feature was alive with a sort of wretched scorn and anger.
+Once or twice he had seen Annette look like that--the face was too vivid,
+too naked, not his daughter's at that moment. And he dared not go in,
+realising the futility of any attempt at consolation.  He sat down in the
+shadow of the ingle-nook.
+
+Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him!  Nemesis!  That old unhappy
+marriage!  And in God's name-why?  How was he to know, when he wanted
+Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that she would never
+love him?  The tune died and was renewed, and died again, and still
+Soames sat in the shadow, waiting for he knew not what. The fag of
+Fleur's cigarette, flung through the window, fell on the grass; he
+watched it glowing, burning itself out.  The moon had freed herself above
+the poplars, and poured her unreality on the garden. Comfortless light,
+mysterious, withdrawn--like the beauty of that woman who had never loved
+him--dappling the nemesias and the stocks with a vesture not of earth.
+Flowers!  And his flower so unhappy! Ah!  Why could one not put happiness
+into Local Loans, gild its edges, insure it against going down?
+
+Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window.  All was
+silent and dark in there.  Had she gone up?  He rose, and, tiptoeing,
+peered in.  It seemed so!  He entered.  The verandah kept the moonlight
+out; and at first he could see nothing but the outlines of furniture
+blacker than the darkness.  He groped toward the farther window to shut
+it.  His foot struck a chair, and he heard a gasp. There she was, curled
+and crushed into the corner of the sofa!  His hand hovered.  Did she want
+his consolation?  He stood, gazing at that ball of crushed frills and
+hair and graceful youth, trying to burrow its way out of sorrow.  How
+leave her there?  At last he touched her hair, and said:
+
+"Come, darling, better go to bed.  I'll make it up to you, somehow." How
+fatuous!  But what could he have said?
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER THE OAK-TREE
+
+When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood without
+speaking, till he said suddenly:
+
+"I ought to have seen him out."
+
+But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went upstairs to
+his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.
+
+The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had once been
+married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever since she
+left him the night before.  It had put the finishing touch of reality.
+To marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face; to betray his dead
+father!  It was no good!  Jon had the least resentful of natures.  He
+bore his parents no grudge in this hour of his distress.  For one so
+young there was a rather strange power in him of seeing things in some
+sort of proportion.  It was worse for Fleur, worse for his mother even,
+than it was for him.  Harder than to give up was to be given up, or to be
+the cause of some one you loved giving up for you.  He must not, would
+not behave grudgingly! While he stood watching the tardy sunlight, he had
+again that sudden vision of the world which had come to him the night
+before.  Sea on sea, country on country, millions on millions of people,
+all with their own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering--all with
+things they had to give up, and separate struggles for existence. Even
+though he might be willing to give up all else for the one thing he
+couldn't have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered much in
+so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad.  He pictured the
+people who had nothing--the millions who had given up life in the War,
+the millions whom the War had left with life and little else; the hungry
+children he had read of, the shattered men; people in prison, every kind
+of unfortunate.  And--they did not help him much.  If one had to miss a
+meal, what comfort in the knowledge that many others had to miss it too?
+There was more distraction in the thought of getting away out into this
+vast world of which he knew nothing yet.  He could not go on staying
+here, walled in and sheltered, with everything so slick and comfortable,
+and nothing to do but brood and think what might have been. He could not
+go back to Wansdon, and the memories of Fleur.  If he saw her again he
+could not trust himself; and if he stayed here or went back there, he
+would surely see her.  While they were within reach of each other that
+must happen.  To go far away and quickly was the only thing to do.  But,
+however much he loved his mother, he did not want to go away with her.
+Then feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind desperately to propose
+that they should go to Italy.  For two hours in that melancholy room he
+tried to master himself, then dressed solemnly for dinner.
+
+His mother had done the same.  They ate little, at some length, and
+talked of his father's catalogue.  The show was arranged for October, and
+beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.
+
+After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a little,
+talked a little, till they were standing silent at last beneath the
+oak-tree.  Ruled by the thought: 'If I show anything, I show all,' Jon
+put his arm through hers and said quite casually:
+
+"Mother, let's go to Italy."
+
+Irene pressed his arm, and said as casually:
+
+"It would be very nice; but I've been thinking you ought to see and do
+more than you would if I were with you."
+
+"But then you'd be alone."
+
+"I was once alone for more than twelve years.  Besides, I should like to
+be here for the opening of Father's show."
+
+Jon's grip tightened round her arm; he was not deceived.
+
+"You couldn't stay here all by yourself; it's too big."
+
+"Not here, perhaps.  In London, and I might go to Paris, after the show
+opens.  You ought to have a year at least, Jon, and see the world."
+
+"Yes, I'd like to see the world and rough it.  But I don't want to leave
+you all alone."
+
+"My dear, I owe you that at least.  If it's for your good, it'll be for
+mine.  Why not start tomorrow?  You've got your passport."
+
+"Yes; if I'm going it had better be at once.  Only--Mother--if--if I
+wanted to stay out somewhere--America or anywhere, would you mind coming
+presently?"
+
+"Wherever and whenever you send for me.  But don't send until you really
+want me."
+
+Jon drew a deep breath.
+
+"I feel England's choky."
+
+They stood a few minutes longer under the oak-tree--looking out to where
+the grand stand at Epsom was veiled in evening.  The branches kept the
+moonlight from them, so that it only fell everywhere else--over the
+fields and far away, and on the windows of the creepered house behind,
+which soon would be to let.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+FLEUR'S WEDDING
+
+The October paragraphs describing the wedding of Fleur Forsyte to Michael
+Mont hardly conveyed the symbolic significance of this event. In the
+union of the great-granddaughter of "Superior Dosset" with the heir of a
+ninth baronet was the outward and visible sign of that merger of class in
+class which buttresses the political stability of a realm.  The time had
+come when the Forsytes might resign their natural resentment against a
+"flummery" not theirs by birth, and accept it as the still more natural
+due of their possessive instincts.  Besides, they had to mount to make
+room for all those so much more newly rich.  In that quiet but tasteful
+ceremony in Hanover Square, and afterward among the furniture in Green
+Street, it had been impossible for those not in the know to distinguish
+the Forsyte troop from the Mont contingent--so far away was "Superior
+Dosset" now.  Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of
+his moustache, his accent, or the shine on his top-hat, a pin to choose
+between Soames and the ninth baronet himself?  Was not Fleur as
+self-possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the likeliest
+Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present?  If anything, the Forsytes had
+it in dress and looks and manners.  They had become "upper class" and now
+their name would be formally recorded in the Stud Book, their money
+joined to land.  Whether this was a little late in the day, and those
+rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money, destined for the
+melting-pot--was still a question so moot that it was not mooted.  After
+all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up.  Timothy, the last, the
+missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater Road--so Francie had
+reported.  It was whispered, too, that this young Mont was a sort of
+socialist--strangely wise of him, and in the nature of insurance,
+considering the days they lived in.  There was no uneasiness on that
+score.  The landed classes produced that sort of amiable foolishness at
+times, turned to safe uses and confined to theory.  As George remarked to
+his sister Francie: "They'll soon be having puppies--that'll give him
+pause."
+
+The church with white flowers and something blue in the middle of the
+East window looked extremely chaste, as though endeavouring to counteract
+the somewhat lurid phraseology of a Service calculated to keep the
+thoughts of all on puppies.  Forsytes, Haymans, Tweetymans, sat in the
+left aisle; Monts, Charwells; Muskhams in the right; while a sprinkling
+of Fleur's fellow-sufferers at school, and of Mont's fellow-sufferers in,
+the War, gaped indiscriminately from either side, and three maiden
+ladies, who had dropped in on their way from Skyward's brought up the
+rear, together with two Mont retainers and Fleur's old nurse.  In the
+unsettled state of the country as full a house as could be expected.
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed his
+hand more than once during the performance.  To her, who knew the plot of
+this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh painful.  'I
+wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought--Jon, out in British
+Columbia.  She had received a letter from him only that morning which had
+made her smile and say:
+
+"Jon's in British Columbia, Val, because he wants to be in California.
+He thinks it's too nice there."
+
+"Oh!" said Val, "so he's beginning to see a joke again."
+
+"He's bought some land and sent for his mother."
+
+"What on earth will she do out there?"
+
+"All she cares about is Jon.  Do you still think it a happy release?"
+
+Val's shrewd eyes narrowed to grey pin-points between their dark lashes.
+
+"Fleur wouldn't have suited him a bit.  She's not bred right."
+
+"Poor little Fleur!" sighed Holly.  Ah! it was strange--this marriage.
+The young man, Mont, had caught her on the rebound, of course, in the
+reckless mood of one whose ship has just gone down. Such a plunge could
+not but be--as Val put it--an outside chance. There was little to be told
+from the back view of her young cousin's veil, and Holly's eyes reviewed
+the general aspect of this Christian wedding.  She, who had made a
+love-match which had been successful, had a horror of unhappy marriages.
+This might not be one in the end--but it was clearly a toss-up; and to
+consecrate a toss-up in this fashion with manufactured unction before a
+crowd of fashionable free-thinkers--for who thought otherwise than
+freely, or not at all, when they were "dolled" up--seemed to her as near
+a sin as one could find in an age which had abolished them.  Her eyes
+wandered from the prelate in his robes (a Charwell-the Forsytes had not
+as yet produced a prelate) to Val, beside her, thinking--she was
+certain--of the Mayfly filly at fifteen to one for the Cambridgeshire.
+They passed on and caught the profile of the ninth baronet, in
+counterfeitment of the kneeling process.  She could just see the neat
+ruck above his knees where he had pulled his trousers up, and thought:
+'Val's forgotten to pull up his!'  Her eyes passed to the pew in front of
+her, where Winifred's substantial form was gowned with passion, and on
+again to Soames and Annette kneeling side by side.  A little smile came
+on her lips--Prosper Profond, back from the South Seas of the Channel,
+would be kneeling too, about six rows behind.  Yes!  This was a funny
+"small" business, however it turned out; still it was in a proper church
+and would be in the proper papers to-morrow morning.
+
+They had begun a hymn; she could hear the ninth baronet across the aisle,
+singing of the hosts of Midian.  Her little finger touched Val's
+thumb--they were holding the same hymn-book--and a tiny thrill passed
+through her, preserved--from twenty years ago.  He stooped and whispered:
+
+"I say, d'you remember the rat?"  The rat at their wedding in Cape
+Colony, which had cleaned its whiskers behind the table at the
+Registrar's!  And between her little and third forgers she squeezed his
+thumb hard.
+
+The hymn was over, the prelate had begun to deliver his discourse. He
+told them of the dangerous times they lived in, and the awful conduct of
+the House of Lords in connection with divorce.  They were all
+soldiers--he said--in the trenches under the poisonous gas of the Prince
+of Darkness, and must be manful.  The purpose of marriage was children,
+not mere sinful happiness.
+
+An imp danced in Holly's eyes--Val's eyelashes were meeting. Whatever
+happened; he must not snore.  Her finger and thumb closed on his thigh
+till he stirred uneasily.
+
+The discourse was over, the danger past.  They were signing in the
+vestry; and general relaxation had set in.
+
+A voice behind her said:
+
+"Will she stay the course?"
+
+"Who's that?" she whispered.
+
+"Old George Forsyte!"
+
+Holly demurely scrutinized one of whom she had often heard.  Fresh from
+South Africa, and ignorant of her kith and kin, she never saw one without
+an almost childish curiosity.  He was very big, and very dapper; his eyes
+gave her a funny feeling of having no particular clothes.
+
+"They're off!" she heard him say.
+
+They came, stepping from the chancel.  Holly looked first in young Mont's
+face.  His lips and ears were twitching, his eyes, shifting from his feet
+to the hand within his arm, stared suddenly before them as if to face a
+firing party.  He gave Holly the feeling that he was spiritually
+intoxicated.  But Fleur!  Ah!  That was different.  The girl was
+perfectly composed, prettier than ever, in her white robes and veil over
+her banged dark chestnut hair; her eyelids hovered demure over her dark
+hazel eyes.  Outwardly, she seemed all there. But inwardly, where was
+she?  As those two passed, Fleur raised her eyelids--the restless glint
+of those clear whites remained on Holly's vision as might the flutter of
+caged bird's wings.
+
+In Green Street Winifred stood to receive, just a little less composed
+than usual.  Soames' request for the use of her house had come on her at
+a deeply psychological moment.  Under the influence of a remark of
+Prosper Profond, she had begun to exchange her Empire for Expressionistic
+furniture.  There were the most amusing arrangements, with violet, green,
+and orange blobs and scriggles, to be had at Mealard's.  Another month
+and the change would have been complete. Just now, the very "intriguing"
+recruits she had enlisted, did not march too well with the old guard.  It
+was as if her regiment were half in khaki, half in scarlet and bearskins.
+But her strong and comfortable character made the best of it in a
+drawing-room which typified, perhaps, more perfectly than she imagined,
+the semi-bolshevized imperialism of her country.  After all, this was a
+day of merger, and you couldn't have too much of it!  Her eyes travelled
+indulgently among her guests.  Soames had gripped the back of a buhl
+chair; young Mont was behind that "awfully amusing" screen, which no one
+as yet had been able to explain to her.  The ninth baronet had shied
+violently at a round scarlet table, inlaid under glass with blue
+Australian butteries' wings, and was clinging to her Louis-Quinze
+cabinet; Francie Forsyte had seized the new mantel-board, finely carved
+with little purple grotesques on an ebony ground; George, over by the old
+spinet, was holding a little sky-blue book as if about to enter bets;
+Prosper Profond was twiddling the knob of the open door, black with
+peacock-blue panels; and Annette's hands, close by, were grasping her own
+waist; two Muskhams clung to the balcony among the plants, as if feeling
+ill; Lady Mont, thin and brave-looking, had taken up her long-handled
+glasses and was gazing at the central light shade, of ivory and orange
+dashed with deep magenta, as if the heavens had opened.  Everybody, in
+fact, seemed holding on to something.  Only Fleur, still in her bridal
+dress, was detached from all support, flinging her words and glances to
+left and right.
+
+The room was full of the bubble and the squeak of conversation. Nobody
+could hear anything that anybody said; which seemed of little
+consequence, since no one waited for anything so slow as an answer.
+Modern conversation seemed to Winifred so different from the days of her
+prime, when a drawl was all the vogue.  Still it was "amusing," which, of
+course, was all that mattered.  Even the Forsytes were talking with
+extreme rapidity--Fleur and Christopher, and Imogen, and young Nicholas's
+youngest, Patrick.  Soames, of course, was silent; but George, by the
+spinet, kept up a running commentary, and Francie, by her mantel-shelf.
+Winifred drew nearer to the ninth baronet.  He seemed to promise a
+certain repose; his nose was fine and drooped a little, his grey
+moustaches too; and she said, drawling through her smile:
+
+"It's rather nice, isn't it?"
+
+His reply shot out of his smile like a snipped bread pellet
+
+"D'you remember, in Frazer, the tribe that buries the bride up to the
+waist?"
+
+He spoke as fast as anybody!  He had dark lively little eyes, too, all
+crinkled round like a Catholic priest's.  Winifred felt suddenly he might
+say things she would regret.
+
+"They're always so amusing--weddings," she murmured, and moved on to
+Soames.  He was curiously still, and Winifred saw at once what was
+dictating his immobility.  To his right was George Forsyte, to his left
+Annette and Prosper Profond.  He could not move without either seeing
+those two together, or the reflection of them in George Forsyte's japing
+eyes.  He was quite right not to be taking notice.
+
+"They say Timothy's sinking;" he said glumly.
+
+"Where will you put him, Soames?"
+
+"Highgate."  He counted on his fingers.  "It'll make twelve of them
+there, including wives.  How do you think Fleur looks?"
+
+"Remarkably well."
+
+Soames nodded.  He had never seen her look prettier, yet he could not rid
+himself of the impression that this business was unnatural--remembering
+still that crushed figure burrowing into the corner of the sofa.  From
+that night to this day he had received from her no confidences.  He knew
+from his chauffeur that she had made one more attempt on Robin Hill and
+drawn blank--an empty house, no one at home.  He knew that she had
+received a letter, but not what was in it, except that it had made her
+hide herself and cry.  He had remarked that she looked at him sometimes
+when she thought he wasn't noticing, as if she were wondering still what
+he had done--forsooth--to make those people hate him so.  Well, there it
+was!  Annette had come back, and things had worn on through the
+summer--very miserable, till suddenly Fleur had said she was going to
+marry young Mont.  She had shown him a little more affection when she
+told him that.  And he had yielded--what was the good of opposing it?
+God knew that he had never wished to thwart her in anything!  And the
+young man seemed quite delirious about her.  No doubt she was in a
+reckless mood, and she was young, absurdly young.  But if he opposed her,
+he didn't know what she would do; for all he could tell she might want to
+take up a profession, become a doctor or solicitor, some nonsense.  She
+had no aptitude for painting, writing, music, in his view the legitimate
+occupations of unmarried women, if they must do something in these days.
+On the whole, she was safer married, for he could see too well how
+feverish and restless she was at home.  Annette, too, had been in favour
+of it--Annette, from behind the veil of his refusal to know what she was
+about, if she was about anything.  Annette had said: "Let her marry this
+young man. He is a nice boy--not so highty-flighty as he seems."  Where
+she got her expressions, he didn't know--but her opinion soothed his
+doubts.  His wife, whatever her conduct, had clear eyes and an almost
+depressing amount of common sense.  He had settled fifty thousand on
+Fleur, taking care that there was no cross settlement in case it didn't
+turn out well.  Could it turn out well?  She had not got over that other
+boy--he knew.  They were to go to Spain for the honeymoon.  He would be
+even lonelier when she was gone.  But later, perhaps, she would forget,
+and turn to him again! Winifred's voice broke on his reverie.
+
+"Why!  Of all wonders-June!"
+
+There, in a djibbah--what things she wore!--with her hair straying from
+under a fillet, Soames saw his cousin, and Fleur going forward to greet
+her.  The two passed from their view out on to the stairway.
+
+"Really," said Winifred, "she does the most impossible things!  Fancy her
+coming!"
+
+"What made you ask her?" muttered Soames.
+
+"Because I thought she wouldn't accept, of course."
+
+Winifred had forgotten that behind conduct lies the main trend of
+character; or, in other words, omitted to remember that Fleur was now a
+"lame duck."
+
+On receiving her invitation, June had first thought, 'I wouldn't go near
+them for the world!' and then, one morning, had awakened from a dream of
+Fleur waving to her from a boat with a wild unhappy gesture. And she had
+changed her mind.
+
+When Fleur came forward and said to her, "Do come up while I'm changing
+my dress," she had followed up the stairs.  The girl led the way into
+Imogen's old bedroom, set ready for her toilet.
+
+June sat down on the bed, thin and upright, like a little spirit in the
+sear and yellow.  Fleur locked the door.
+
+The girl stood before her divested of her wedding dress.  What a pretty
+thing she was!
+
+"I suppose you think me a fool," she said, with quivering lips, "when it
+was to have been Jon.  But what does it matter?  Michael wants me, and I
+don't care.  It'll get me away from home."  Diving her hand into the
+frills on her breast, she brought out a letter.  "Jon wrote me this."
+
+June read:  "Lake Okanagen, British Columbia.  I'm not coming back to
+England.  Bless you always.  Jon."
+
+"She's made safe, you see," said Fleur.
+
+June handed back the letter.
+
+"That's not fair to Irene," she said, "she always told Jon he could do as
+he wished."
+
+Fleur smiled bitterly.  "Tell me, didn't she spoil your life too?" June
+looked up.  "Nobody can spoil a life, my dear.  That's nonsense. Things
+happen, but we bob up."
+
+With a sort of terror she saw the girl sink on her knees and bury her
+face in the djibbah.  A strangled sob mounted to June's ears.
+
+"It's all right--all right," she murmured, "Don't!  There, there!"
+
+But the point of the girl's chin was pressed ever closer into her thigh,
+and the sound was dreadful of her sobbing.
+
+Well, well!  It had to come.  She would feel better afterward!  June
+stroked the short hair of that shapely head; and all the scattered
+mother-sense in her focussed itself and passed through the tips of her
+fingers into the girl's brain.
+
+"Don't sit down under it, my dear," she said at last.  "We can't control
+life, but we can fight it.  Make the best of things.  I've had to.  I
+held on, like you; and I cried, as you're crying now.  And look at me!"
+
+Fleur raised her head; a sob merged suddenly into a little choked laugh.
+In truth it was a thin and rather wild and wasted spirit she was looking
+at, but it had brave eyes.
+
+"All right!" she said.  "I'm sorry.  I shall forget him, I suppose, if I
+fly fast and far enough."
+
+And, scrambling to her feet, she went over to the wash-stand.
+
+June watched her removing with cold water the traces of emotion. Save for
+a little becoming pinkness there was nothing left when she stood before
+the mirror.  June got off the bed and took a pin-cushion in her hand.  To
+put two pins into the wrong places was all the vent she found for
+sympathy.
+
+"Give me a kiss," she said when Fleur was ready, and dug her chin into
+the girl's warm cheek.
+
+"I want a whiff," said Fleur; "don't wait."
+
+June left her, sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her lips and
+her eyes half closed, and went down-stairs.  In the doorway of the
+drawing-room stood Soames as if unquiet at his daughter's tardiness.
+June tossed her head and passed down on to the half-landing.  Her cousin
+Francie was standing there.
+
+"Look!" said June, pointing with her chin at Soames.  "That man's fatal!"
+
+"How do you mean," said Francie, "fatal?"
+
+June did not answer her.  "I shan't wait to see them off," she said.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye!" said Francie, and her eyes, of a Celtic grey, goggled. That
+old feud!  Really, it was quite romantic!
+
+Soames, moving to the well of the staircase, saw June go, and drew a
+breath of satisfaction.  Why didn't Fleur come?  They would miss their
+train.  That train would bear her away from him, yet he could not help
+fidgeting at the thought that they would lose it.  And then she did come,
+running down in her tan-coloured frock and black velvet cap, and passed
+him into the drawing-room.  He saw her kiss her mother, her aunt, Val's
+wife, Imogen, and then come forth, quick and pretty as ever.  How would
+she treat him at this last moment of her girlhood?  He couldn't hope for
+much!
+
+Her lips pressed the middle of his cheek.
+
+"Daddy!" she said, and was past and gone!  Daddy!  She hadn't called him
+that for years.  He drew a long breath and followed slowly down. There
+was all the folly with that confetti stuff and the rest of it to go
+through with yet.  But he would like just to catch her smile, if she
+leaned out, though they would hit her in the eye with the shoe, if they
+didn't take care.  Young Mont's voice said fervently in his ear:
+
+"Good-bye, sir; and thank you!  I'm so fearfully bucked."
+
+"Good-bye," he said; "don't miss your train."
+
+He stood on the bottom step but three, whence he could see above the
+heads--the silly hats and heads.  They were in the car now; and there was
+that stuff, showering, and there went the shoe.  A flood of something
+welled up in Soames, and--he didn't know--he couldn't see!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
+
+When they came to prepare that terrific symbol Timothy Forsyte--the one
+pure individualist left, the only man who hadn't heard of the Great
+War--they found him wonderful--not even death had undermined his
+soundness.
+
+To Smither and Cook that preparation came like final evidence of what
+they had never believed possible--the end of the old Forsyte family on
+earth.  Poor Mr. Timothy must now take a harp and sing in the company of
+Miss Forsyte, Mrs. Julia, Miss Hester; with Mr. Jolyon, Mr. Swithin, Mr.
+James, Mr. Roger, and Mr. Nicholas of the party. Whether Mrs. Hayman
+would be there was more doubtful, seeing that she had been cremated.
+Secretly Cook thought that Mr. Timothy would be upset--he had always been
+so set against barrel organs.  How many times had she not said: "Drat the
+thing!  There it is again! Smither, you'd better run up and see what you
+can do."  And in her heart she would so have enjoyed the tunes, if she
+hadn't known that Mr. Timothy would ring the bell in a minute and say:
+"Here, take him a halfpenny and tell him to move on."  Often they had
+been obliged to add threepence of their own before the man would
+go--Timothy had ever underrated the value of emotion.  Luckily he had
+taken the organs for blue-bottles in his last years, which had been a
+comfort, and they had been able to enjoy the tunes.  But a harp!  Cook
+wondered.  It was a change!  And Mr. Timothy had never liked change.  But
+she did not speak of this to Smither, who did so take a line of her own
+in regard to heaven that it quite put one about sometimes.
+
+She cried while Timothy was being prepared, and they all had sherry
+afterward out of the yearly Christmas bottle, which would not be needed
+now.  Ah! dear!  She had been there five-and-forty years and Smither
+three-and-forty!  And now they would be going to a tiny house in Tooting,
+to live on their savings and what Miss Hester had so kindly left
+them--for to take fresh service after the glorious past--No!  But they
+would like just to see Mr. Soames again, and Mrs. Dartie, and Miss
+Francie, and Miss Euphemia.  And even if they had to take their own cab,
+they felt they must go to the funeral.  For six years Mr. Timothy had
+been their baby, getting younger and younger every day, till at last he
+had been too young to live.
+
+They spent the regulation hours of waiting in polishing and dusting, in
+catching the one mouse left, and asphyxiating the last beetle so as to
+leave it nice, discussing with each other what they would buy at the
+sale.  Miss Ann's workbox; Miss Juley's (that is Mrs. Julia's) seaweed
+album; the fire-screen Miss Hester had crewelled; and Mr. Timothy's
+hair--little golden curls, glued into a black frame.  Oh! they must have
+those--only the price of things had gone up so!
+
+It fell to Soames to issue invitations for the funeral.  He had them
+drawn up by Gradman in his office--only blood relations, and no flowers.
+Six carriages were ordered.  The Will would be read afterward at the
+house.
+
+He arrived at eleven o'clock to see that all was ready.  At a quarter
+past old Gradman came in black gloves and crape on his hat.  He and
+Soames stood in the drawing-room waiting.  At half-past eleven the
+carriages drew up in a long row.  But no one else appeared.  Gradman
+said:
+
+"It surprises me, Mr. Soames.  I posted them myself."
+
+"I don't know," said Soames; "he'd lost touch with the family." Soames
+had often noticed in old days how much more neighbourly his family were
+to the dead than to the living.  But, now, the way they had flocked to
+Fleur's wedding and abstained from Timothy's funeral, seemed to show some
+vital change.  There might, of course, be another reason; for Soames felt
+that if he had not known the contents of Timothy's Will, he might have
+stayed away himself through delicacy. Timothy had left a lot of money,
+with nobody in particular to leave it to.  They mightn't like to seem to
+expect something.
+
+At twelve o'clock the procession left the door; Timothy alone in the
+first carriage under glass.  Then Soames alone; then Gradman alone; then
+Cook and Smither together.  They started at a walk, but were soon
+trotting under a bright sky.  At the entrance to Highgate Cemetery they
+were delayed by service in the Chapel.  Soames would have liked to stay
+outside in the sunshine.  He didn't believe a word of it; on the other
+hand, it was a form of insurance which could not safely be neglected, in
+case there might be something in it after all.
+
+They walked up two and two--he and Gradman, Cook and Smither--to the
+family vault.  It was not very distinguished for the funeral of the last
+old Forsyte.
+
+He took Gradman into his carriage on the way back to the Bayswater Road
+with a certain glow in his heart.  He had a surprise in pickle for the
+old chap who had served the Forsytes four-and-fifty years-a treat that
+was entirely his doing.  How well he remembered saying to Timothy the
+day--after Aunt Hester's funeral: "Well; Uncle Timothy, there's Gradman.
+He's taken a lot of trouble for the family.  What do you say to leaving
+him five thousand?" and his surprise, seeing the difficulty there had
+been in getting Timothy to leave anything, when Timothy had nodded.  And
+now the old chap would be as pleased as Punch, for Mrs. Gradman, he knew,
+had a weak heart, and their son had lost a leg in the War.  It was
+extraordinarily gratifying to Soames to have left him five thousand
+pounds of Timothy's money.  They sat down together in the little
+drawing-room, whose walls--like a vision of heaven--were sky-blue and
+gold with every picture-frame unnaturally bright, and every speck of dust
+removed from every piece of furniture, to read that little
+masterpiece--the Will of Timothy. With his back to the light in Aunt
+Hester's chair, Soames faced Gradman with his face to the light, on Aunt
+Ann's sofa; and, crossing his legs, began:
+
+"This is the last Will and Testament of me Timothy Forsyte of The Bower
+Bayswater Road, London I appoint my nephew Soames Forsyte of The Shelter
+Mapleduram and Thomas Gradman of 159 Folly Road Highgate (hereinafter
+called my Trustees) to be the trustees and executors of this my Will To
+the said Soames Forsyte I leave the sum of one thousand pounds free of
+legacy duty and to the said Thomas Gradman I leave the sum of five
+thousand pounds free of legacy duty."
+
+Soames paused.  Old Gradman was leaning forward, convulsively gripping a
+stout black knee with each of his thick hands; his mouth had fallen open
+so that the gold fillings of three teeth gleamed; his eyes were blinking,
+two tears rolled slowly out of them.  Soames read hastily on.
+
+"All the rest of my property of whatsoever description I bequeath to my
+Trustees upon Trust to convert and hold the same upon the following
+trusts namely To pay thereout all my debts funeral expenses and outgoings
+of any kind in connection with my Will and to hold the residue thereof in
+trust for that male lineal descendant of my father Jolyon Forsyte by his
+marriage with Ann Pierce who after the decease of all lineal descendants
+whether male or female of my said father by his said marriage in being at
+the time of my death shall last attain the age of twenty-one years
+absolutely it being my desire that my property shall be nursed to the
+extreme limit permitted by the laws of England for the benefit of such
+male lineal descendant as aforesaid."
+
+Soames read the investment and attestation clauses, and, ceasing, looked
+at Gradman.  The old fellow was wiping his brow with a large
+handkerchief, whose brilliant colour supplied a sudden festive tinge to
+the proceedings.
+
+"My word, Mr. Soames!" he said, and it was clear that the lawyer in him
+had utterly wiped out the man: "My word!  Why, there are two babies now,
+and some quite young children--if one of them lives to be eighty--it's
+not a great age--and add twenty-one--that's a hundred years; and Mr.
+Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound net if he's worth a
+penny.  Compound interest at five per cent. doubles you in fourteen
+years.  In fourteen years three hundred thousand-six hundred thousand in
+twenty-eight--twelve hundred thousand in forty-two--twenty-four hundred
+thousand in fifty-six--four million eight hundred thousand in
+seventy--nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four--Why, in a
+hundred years it'll be twenty million!  And we shan't live to use it!  It
+is a Will!"
+
+Soames said dryly: "Anything may happen.  The State might take the lot;
+they're capable of anything in these days."
+
+"And carry five," said Gradman to himself.  "I forgot--Mr. Timothy's in
+Consols; we shan't get more than two per cent. with this income tax.  To
+be on the safe side, say eight millions.  Still, that's a pretty penny."
+
+Soames rose and handed him the Will.  "You're going into the City. Take
+care of that, and do what's necessary.  Advertise; but there are no
+debts.  When's the sale?"
+
+"Tuesday week," said Gradman.  "Life or lives in bein' and twenty-one
+years afterward--it's a long way off.  But I'm glad he's left it in the
+family...."
+
+The sale--not at Jobson's, in view of the Victorian nature of the
+effects--was far more freely attended than the funeral, though not by
+Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give them their
+heart's desires.  Winifred was present, Euphemia, and Francie, and
+Eustace had come in his car.  The miniatures, Barbizons, and J. R.
+drawings had been bought in by Soames; and relics of no marketable value
+were set aside in an off-room for members of the family who cared to have
+mementoes.  These were the only restrictions upon bidding characterised
+by an almost tragic languor.  Not one piece of furniture, no picture or
+porcelain figure appealed to modern taste. The humming birds had fallen
+like autumn leaves when taken from where they had not hummed for sixty
+years.  It was painful to Soames to see the chairs his aunts had sat on,
+the little grand piano they had practically never played, the books whose
+outsides they had gazed at, the china they had dusted, the curtains they
+had drawn, the hearth-rug which had warmed their feet; above all, the
+beds they had lain and died in--sold to little dealers, and the
+housewives of Fulham. And yet--what could one do?  Buy them and stick
+them in a lumber-room?  No; they had to go the way of all flesh and
+furniture, and be worn out.  But when they put up Aunt Ann's sofa and
+were going to knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out, suddenly:
+"Five pounds!"  The sensation was considerable, and the sofa his.
+
+When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those Victorian
+ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October sunshine feeling as
+if cosiness had died out of the world, and the board "To Let" was up,
+indeed.  Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in Spain; no comfort in
+Annette; no Timothy's on the Bayswater Road.  In the irritable desolation
+of his soul he went into the Goupenor Gallery.  That chap Jolyon's
+watercolours were on view there.  He went in to look down his nose at
+them--it might give him some faint satisfaction.  The news had trickled
+through from June to Val's wife, from her to Val, from Val to his mother,
+from her to Soames, that the house--the fatal house at Robin Hill--was
+for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British Columbia, or
+some such place.  For one wild moment the thought had come to Soames:
+'Why shouldn't I buy it back?  I meant it for my!'  No sooner come than
+gone.  Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many humiliating memories for
+himself and Fleur. She would never live there after what had happened.
+No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer.  It had been a
+bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud; and with the
+woman gone, it was an empty shell.  "For Sale or To Let."  With his
+mind's eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied wall which
+he had built.
+
+He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery.  There was
+certainly a body of work!  And now that the fellow was dead it did not
+seem so trivial.  The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense
+of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work.  'His father
+and my father; he and I; his child and mine!' thought Soames.  So it had
+gone on!  And all about that woman! Softened by the events of the past
+week, affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came
+nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth--passing the
+understanding of a Forsyte pure--that the body of Beauty has a spiritual
+essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks not of self.  After
+all, he was near that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps that
+made him understand a little how he had missed the prize.  And there,
+among the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that which he had
+found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance which
+surprised him.  But he did not buy a drawing.
+
+Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air he
+met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his mind
+when he went into the Gallery--Irene, herself, coming in.  So she had not
+gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that fellow's remains!
+He subdued the little involuntary leap of his subconsciousness, the
+mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm of this once-owned woman,
+and passed her with averted eyes.  But when he had gone by he could not
+for the life of him help looking back. This, then, was finality--the heat
+and stress of his life, the madness and the longing thereof, the only
+defeat he had known, would be over when she faded from his view this
+time; even such memories had their own queer aching value.
+
+She, too, was looking back.  Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her
+lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak.  It was the turn of
+Soames to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell wave; he
+went out into the fashionable street quivering from head to foot.  He
+knew what she had meant to say: "Now that I am going for ever out of the
+reach of you and yours--forgive me; I wish you well." That was the
+meaning; last sign of that terrible reality--passing morality, duty,
+common sense--her aversion from him who had owned her body, but had never
+touched her spirit or her heart.  It hurt; yes--more than if she had
+kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
+
+Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-cab
+to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the Forsyte
+vault.  Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria, tall, ugly,
+and individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive system.  He
+could remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated the addition to
+its face of the pheasant proper.  The proposal had been rejected in
+favour of a wreath in stone, above the stark words: "The family vault of
+Jolyon Forsyte: 1850."  It was in good order. All trace of the recent
+interment had been removed, and its sober grey gloomed reposefully in the
+sunshine.  The whole family lay there now, except old Jolyon's wife, who
+had gone back under a contract to her own family vault in Suffolk; old
+Jolyon himself lying at Robin Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that
+none knew where she might be.  Soames gazed at it with
+satisfaction--massive, needing little attention; and this was important,
+for he was well aware that no one would attend to it when he himself was
+gone, and he would have to be looking out for lodgings soon.  He might
+have twenty years before him, but one never knew.  Twenty years without
+an aunt or uncle, with a wife of whom one had better not know anything,
+with a daughter gone from home.  His mood inclined to melancholy and
+retrospection.
+
+This cemetery was full, they said--of people with extraordinary names,
+buried in extraordinary taste.  Still, they had a fine view up here,
+right over London.  Annette had once given him a story to read by that
+Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern, where all the skeletons
+emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious inscriptions on
+the stones were altered to descriptions of their sins.  Not a true story
+at all.  He didn't know about the French, but there was not much real
+harm in English people except their teeth and their taste, which was
+certainly deplorable.  "The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850."  A lot
+of people had been buried here since then--a lot of English life crumbled
+to mould and dust!  The boom of an airplane passing under the gold-tinted
+clouds caused him to lift his eyes.  The deuce of a lot of expansion had
+gone on.  But it all came back to a cemetery--to a name and a date on a
+tomb.  And he thought with a curious pride that he and his family had
+done little or nothing to help this feverish expansion.  Good solid
+middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.
+"Superior Dosset," indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted in
+a doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them all
+had soiled his hands by creating anything--unless you counted Val Dartie
+and his horse-breeding.  Collectors, solicitors, barristers, merchants,
+publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even soldiers--there
+they had been!  The country had expanded, as it were, in spite of them.
+They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken advantage of the
+process and when you considered how "Superior Dosset" had begun life with
+next to nothing, and his lineal descendants already owned what old
+Gradman estimated at between a million and a million and a half, it was
+not so bad!  And yet he sometimes felt as if the family bolt was shot,
+their possessive instinct dying out.  They seemed unable to make
+money--this fourth generation; they were going into art, literature,
+farming, or the army; or just living on what was left them--they had no
+push and no tenacity.  They would die out if they didn't take care.
+
+Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze.  The air up
+here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the feeling
+that mortality was in it.  He gazed restlessly at the crosses and the
+urns, the angels, the "immortelles," the flowers, gaudy or withering; and
+suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different from anything else
+up there that he was obliged to walk the few necessary yards and look at
+it.  A sober corner, with a massive queer-shaped cross of grey rough-hewn
+granite, guarded by four dark yew-trees.  The spot was free from the
+pressure of the other graves, having a little box-hedged garden on the
+far side, and in front a goldening birch-tree.  This oasis in the desert
+of conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and he
+sat down there in the sunshine.  Through those trembling gold birch
+leaves he gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of memory.  He
+thought of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair was rusty-golden
+and her white shoulders his--Irene, the prize of his love-passion,
+resistant to his ownership.  He saw Bosinney's body lying in that white
+mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with the eyes of
+a dying bird.  Again he thought of her by the little green Niobe in the
+Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him.  His fancy took him on beside
+his drifting river on the November day when Fleur was to be born, took
+him to the dead leaves floating on the green-tinged water and the
+snake-headed weed for ever swaying and nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered.
+And on again to the window opened to the cold starry night above Hyde
+Park, with his father lying dead. His fancy darted to that picture of
+"the future town," to that boy's and Fleur's first meeting; to the bluish
+trail of Prosper Profond's cigar, and Fleur in the window pointing down
+to where the fellow prowled.  To the sight of Irene and that dead fellow
+sitting side by side in the stand at Lord's.  To her and that boy at
+Robin Hill.  To the sofa, where Fleur lay crushed up in the corner; to
+her lips pressed into his cheek, and her farewell "Daddy."  And suddenly
+he saw again Irene's grey-gloved hand waving its last gesture of release.
+
+He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the scut of his
+possessive instinct, warming himself even with its failures.
+
+"To Let"--the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his soul, his
+investments, and his woman, without check or question.  And now the State
+had, or would have, his investments, his woman had herself, and God knew
+who had his soul.  "To Let"--that sane and simple creed!
+
+The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new forms
+only when their destructive flood should have passed its full. He sat
+there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts resolutely set on the
+past--as a man might ride into a wild night with his face to the tail of
+his galloping horse.  Athwart the Victorian dykes the waters were rolling
+on property, manners, and morals, on melody and the old forms of
+art--waters bringing to his mouth a salt taste as of blood, lapping to
+the foot of this Highgate Hill where Victorianism lay buried.  And
+sitting there, high up on its most individual spot, Soames--like a figure
+of Investment--refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he would not
+fight them--there was in him too much primeval wisdom, of Man the
+possessive animal.  They would quiet down when they had fulfilled their
+tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when the creations and the
+properties of others were sufficiently broken and defected--they would
+lapse and ebb, and fresh forms would rise based on an instinct older than
+the fever of change--the instinct of Home.
+
+"Je m'en fiche," said Prosper Profond.  Soames did not say "Je m'en
+fiche"--it was French, and the fellow was a thorn in his side--but deep
+down he knew that change was only the interval of death between two forms
+of life, destruction necessary to make room for fresher property.  What
+though the board was up, and cosiness to let?--some one would come along
+and take it again some day.
+
+And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there--the melancholy
+craving in his heart--because the sun was like enchantment on his face
+and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's rustle
+was so gentle, and the yewtree green so dark, and the sickle of a moon
+pale in the sky.
+
+He might wish and wish and never get it--the beauty and the loving in the
+world!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Awakening and To Let, by John Galsworthy
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diff --git a/old/24092004.2596.zip b/old/24092004.2596.zip
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext Awakening & To Let, by John Galsworthy
+#6 in our series by John Galsworthy
+#3 in our series of The Forsyte Saga
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
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+Title:  Awakening & To Let
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+Author:  John Galsworthy
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+March, 2001  [Etext #2596]
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+
+Project Gutenberg's Etext Awakening & To Let, by John Galsworthy
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+This etext was prepared by David Widger, < widger@cecomet.net >
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE FORSYTE SAGA
+VOLUME III - AWAKENING and TO LET
+
+by John Galsoworty
+
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the
+July sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway
+turned; and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-
+linen-suited.  His hair was shining, and his eyes, from beneath a
+frown, for he was considering how to go downstairs, this last of
+innumerable times, before the car brought his father and mother home.
+Four at a time, and five at the bottom?  Stale!  Down the banisters?
+But in which fashion?  On his face, feet foremost?  Very stale.  On
+his stomach, sideways?  Paltry!  On his back, with his arms stretched
+down on both sides?  Forbidden!  Or on his face, head foremost, in a
+manner unknown as yet to any but himself?  Such was the cause of the
+frown on the illuminated face of little Jon....
+
+In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to
+simplify the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of little
+Jon, or they would have claimed him for a disciple.  But one can be
+too simple in this life, for his real name was Jolyon, and his living
+father and dead half-brother had usurped of old the other
+shortenings, Jo and Jolly.  As a fact little Jon had done his best to
+conform to convention and spell himself first Jhon, then John; not
+till his father had explained the sheer necessity, had he spelled his
+name Jon.
+
+Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart by
+the groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse "Da," who
+wore the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins
+in that private life lived at odd moments even by domestic servants.
+His mother had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling
+delicious, smoothing his forehead just before he fell asleep, and
+sometimes docking his hair, of a golden brown colour.  When he cut
+his head open against the nursery fender she was there to be bled
+over; and when he had nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle
+his head against her neck.  She was precious but remote, because "Da"
+was so near, and there is hardly room for more than one woman at a
+time in a man's heart.  With his father, too, of course, he had
+special bonds of union; for little Jon also meant to be a painter
+when he grew up--with the one small difference, that his father
+painted pictures, and little Jon intended to paint ceilings and
+walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders, in a dirty-white
+apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash.  His father also took him
+riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because it was
+so-coloured.
+
+Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was
+rather curly and large.  He had never heard his father or his mother
+speak in an angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody
+else; the groom, Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other servants, even
+"Da," who alone restrained him in his courses, had special voices
+when they talked to him.  He was therefore of opinion that the world
+was a place of perfect and perpetual gentility and freedom.
+
+A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just
+over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing
+for the Liberal revival of 1906.  Coercion was unpopular, parents had
+exalted notions of giving their offspring a good time.  They spoiled
+their rods, spared their children, and anticipated the results with
+enthusiasm.  In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of
+fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a
+woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon
+had done well and wisely.  What had saved him from becoming a cross
+between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father's adoration
+of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely
+just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his
+father's heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet.
+As for "Auntie" June, his half-sister (but so old that she had grown
+out of the relationship) she loved him, of course, but was too
+sudden.  His devoted "Da," too, had a Spartan touch.  His bath was
+cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged to be sorry for
+himself.  As to the vexed question of his education, little Jon
+shared the theory of those who considered that children should not be
+forced.  He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came for two hours
+every morning to teach him her language, together with history,
+geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave
+him disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune,
+never making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so
+that he remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers.
+Under his father he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals.
+He was not a highly educated little boy.  Yet, on the whole, the
+silver spoon stayed in his mouth without spoiling it, though "Da"
+sometimes said that other children would do him a "world of good."
+
+It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she
+held him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which
+she did not approve.  This first interference with the free
+individualism of a Forsyte drove him almost frantic.  There was
+something appalling in the utter helplessness of that position, and
+the uncertainty as to whether it would ever come to an end.  Suppose
+she never let him get up any more!  He suffered torture at the top of
+his voice for fifty seconds.  Worse than anything was his perception
+that "Da" had taken all that time to realise the agony of fear he was
+enduring.  Thus, dreadfully, was revealed to him the lack of
+imagination in the human being.
+
+When he was let up he remained convinced that "Da" had done a
+dreadful thing.  Though he did not wish to bear witness against her,
+he had been compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and
+say: "Mum, don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again."
+
+His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits
+of hair--"couleur de feuille morte," as little Jon had not yet
+learned to call it--had looked at him with eyes like little bits of
+his brown velvet tunic, and answered:
+
+"No, darling, I won't."
+
+She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
+especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
+happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to
+his father:
+
+"Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I?  She's so devoted to
+him"; and his father's answer:
+
+"Well, she mustn't show it that way.  I know exactly what it feels
+like to be held down on one's back.  No Forsyte can stand it for a
+minute."
+
+Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little
+Jon was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed
+where he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
+
+Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence.
+Nothing much had been revealed to him after that, till one day,
+having gone down to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from
+the cow, after Garratt had finished milking, he had seen Clover's
+calf, dead.  Inconsolable, and followed by an upset Garratt, he had
+sought "Da"; but suddenly aware that she was not the person he
+wanted, had rushed away to find his father, and had run into the arms
+of his mother.
+
+"Clover's calf's dead!  Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!"
+
+His mother's clasp, and her:
+
+"Yes, darling, there, there!" had stayed his sobbing.  But if
+Clover's calf could die, anything could--not only bees, flies,
+beetles and chickens--and look soft like that!  This was appalling--
+and soon forgotten!
+
+The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant
+experience, which his mother had understood much better than "Da";
+and nothing of vital importance had happened after that till the year
+turned; when, following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a
+disease composed of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many
+Tangerine oranges.  It was then that the world had flowered.  To
+"Auntie" June he owed that flowering, for no sooner was he a little
+lame duck than she came rushing down from London, bringing with her
+the books which had nurtured her own Berserker spirit, born in the
+noted year of 1869.  Aged, and of many colours, they were stored with
+the most formidable happenings.  Of these she read to little Jon,
+till he was allowed to read to himself; whereupon she whisked back to
+London and left them with him in a heap.  Those books cooked his
+fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but midshipmen and
+dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses, sharks,
+battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
+extravagant delights.  The moment he was suffered to get up, he
+rigged his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath
+across green seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of
+its mahogany drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking
+tumbler screwed to his eye, in search of rescuing sails.  He made a
+daily raft out of the towel stand, the tea tray, and his pillows.  He
+saved the juice from his French plums, bottled it in an empty
+medicine bottle, and provisioned the raft with the rum that it
+became; also with pemmican made out of little saved-up bits of
+chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with lime juice against
+scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a little
+economised juice.  He made a North Pole one morning from the whole of
+his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark
+canoe (in private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a
+polar bear fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up in
+"Da's" nightgown.  After that, his father, seeking to steady his
+imagination, brought him Ivanboe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur,
+and Tom Brown's Schooldays.  He read the first, and for three days
+built, defended and stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every
+part in the piece except those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing
+cries of: "En avant, de Bracy!" and similar utterances.  After
+reading the book about King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir
+Lamorac de Galis, because, though there was very little about him, he
+preferred his name to that of any other knight; and he rode his old
+rocking-horse to death, armed with a long bamboo.  Bevis he found
+tame; besides, it required woods and animals, of which he had none in
+his nursery, except his two cats, Fitz and Puck Forsyte, who
+permitted no liberties.  For Tom Brown he was as yet too young.
+There was relief in the house when, after the fourth week, he was
+permitted to go down and out.
+
+The month being March the trees were exceptionally like the masts of
+ships, and for little Jon that was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard
+on his knees, suits, and the patience of "Da," who had the washing
+and reparation of his clothes.  Every morning the moment his
+breakfast was over, he could be viewed by his mother and father,
+whose windows looked out that way, coming from the study, crossing
+the terrace, climbing the old oak tree, his face resolute and his
+hair bright.  He began the day thus because there was not time to go
+far afield before his lessons.  The old tree's variety never staled;
+it had mainmast, foremast, top-gallant mast, and he could always come
+down by the halyards--or ropes of the swing.  After his lessons,
+completed by eleven, he would go to the kitchen for a thin piece of
+cheese, a biscuit and two French plums--provision enough for a jolly-
+boat at least--and eat it in some imaginative way; then, armed to the
+teeth with gun, pistols, and sword, he would begin the serious
+climbing of the morning, encountering by the way innumerable slavers,
+Indians, pirates, leopards, and bears.  He was seldom seen at that
+hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like Dick Needham)
+amid the rapid explosion of copper caps.  And many were the gardeners
+he brought down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun.  He
+lived a life of the most violent action.
+
+"Jon," said his father to his mother, under the oak tree, "is
+terrible.  I'm afraid he's going to turn out a sailor, or something
+hopeless.  Do you see any sign of his appreciating beauty?"
+
+"Not the faintest."
+
+"Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines!  I can bear
+anything but that.  But I wish he'd take more interest in Nature."
+
+"He's imaginative, Jolyon."
+
+"Yes, in a sanguinary way.  Does he love anyone just now?"
+
+"No; only everyone.  There never was anyone born more loving or more
+lovable than Jon."
+
+"Being your boy, Irene."
+
+At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them,
+brought them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged,
+thick, in his small gizzard.  Loving, lovable, imaginative,
+sanguinary!
+
+The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
+which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always
+memorable for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons,
+and ginger beer.
+
+Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he
+stood in the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several
+important things had happened.
+
+"Da," worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious
+instinct which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the
+very day after his birthday in floods of tears "to be married"--of
+all things--"to a man."  Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was
+inconsolable for an afternoon.  It ought not to have been kept from
+him!  Two large boxes of soldiers and some artillery, together with
+The Young Buglers, which had been among his birthday presents,
+cooperated with his grief in a sort of conversion, and instead of
+seeking adventures in person and risking his own life, he began to
+play imaginative games, in which he risked the lives of countless tin
+soldiers, marbles, stones and beans.  Of these forms of "chair a
+canon" he made collections, and, using them alternately, fought the
+Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty Years, and other wars, about
+which he had been reading of late in a big History of Europe which
+had been his grandfather's.  He altered them to suit his genius, and
+fought them all over the floor in his day nursery, so that nobody
+could come in, for fearing of disturbing Gustavus Adolphus, King of
+Sweden, or treading on an army of Austrians.  Because of the sound of
+the word he was passionately addicted to the Austrians, and finding
+there were so few battles in which they were successful he had to
+invent them in his games.  His favourite generals were Prince Eugene,
+the Archduke Charles and Wallenstein.  Tilly and Mack ("music-hall
+turns" he heard his father call them one day, whatever that might
+mean) one really could not love very much, Austrian though they were.
+For euphonic reasons, too, he doted on Turenne.
+
+This phase, which caused his parents anxiety, because it kept him
+indoors when he ought to have been out, lasted through May and half
+of June, till his father killed it by bringing home to him Tom Sawyer
+and Huckleberry Finn.  When he read those books something happened in
+him, and he went out of doors again in passionate quest of a river.
+There being none on the premises at Robin Hill, he had to make one
+out of the pond, which fortunately had water lilies, dragonflies,
+gnats, bullrushes, and three small willow trees.  On this pond, after
+his father and Garratt had ascertained by sounding that it had a
+reliable bottom and was nowhere more than two feet deep, he was
+allowed a little collapsible canoe, in which he spent hours and hours
+paddling, and lying down out of sight of Indian Joe and other
+enemies.  On the shore of the pond, too, he built himself a wigwam
+about four feet square, of old biscuit tins, roofed in by boughs.  In
+this he would make little fires, and cook the birds he had not shot
+with his gun, hunting in the coppice and fields, or the fish he did
+not catch in the pond because there were none.  This occupied the
+rest of June and that July, when his father and mother were away in
+Ireland.  He led a lonely life of "make believe" during those five
+weeks of summer weather, with gun, wigwam, water and canoe; and,
+however hard his active little brain tried to keep the sense of
+beauty away, she did creep in on him for a second now and then,
+perching on the wing of a dragon-fly, glistening on the water lilies,
+or brushing his eyes with her blue as he Jay on his back in ambush.
+
+"Auntie" June, who had been left in charge, had a "grown-up" in the
+house, with a cough and a large piece of putty which he was making
+into a face; so she hardly ever came down to see him in the pond.
+Once, however, she brought with her two other "grown-ups."  Little
+Jon, who happened to have painted his naked self bright blue and
+yellow in stripes out of his father's water-colour box, and put some
+duck's feathers in his hair, saw them coming, and--ambushed himself
+among the willows.  As he had foreseen, they came at once to his
+wigwam and knelt down to look inside, so that with a blood-curdling
+yell he was able to take the scalps of "Auntie" June and the woman
+"grown-up" in an almost complete manner before they kissed him.  The
+names of the two grown-ups were "Auntie" Holly and "Uncle" Val, who
+had a brown face and a little limp, and laughed at him terribly.  He
+took a fancy to "Auntie" Holly, who seemed to be a sister too; but
+they both went away the same afternoon and he did not see them again.
+Three days before his father and mother were to come home "Auntie"
+June also went off in a great hurry, taking the "grown-up" who
+coughed and his piece of putty; and Mademoiselle said: "Poor man, he
+was veree ill.  I forbid you to go into his room, Jon."  Little Jon,
+who rarely did things merely because he was told not to, refrained
+from going, though he was bored and lonely.  In truth the day of the
+pond was past, and he was filled to the brim of his soul with
+restlessness and the want of something--not a tree, not a gun--
+something soft.  Those last two days had seemed months in spite of
+Cast Up by the Sea, wherein he was reading about Mother Lee and her
+terrible wrecking bonfire.  He had gone up and down the stairs
+perhaps a hundred times in those two days, and often from the day
+nursery, where he slept now, had stolen into his mother's room,
+looked at everything, without touching, and on into the dressing-
+room; and standing on one leg beside the bath, like Slingsby, had
+whispered:
+
+"Ho, ho, ho!  Dog my cats!" mysteriously, to bring luck.  Then,
+stealing back, he had opened his mother's wardrobe, and taken a long
+sniff which seemed to bring him nearer to--he didn't know what.
+
+He had done this just before he stood in the streak of sunlight,
+debating in which of the several ways he should slide down the
+banisters.  They all seemed silly, and in a sudden languor he began
+descending the steps one by one.  During that descent he could
+remember his father quite distinctly--the short grey beard, the deep
+eyes twinkling, the furrow between them, the funny smile, the thin
+figure which always seemed so tall to little Jon; but his mother he
+couldn't see.  All that represented her was something swaying with
+two dark eyes looking back at him; and the scent of her wardrobe.
+
+Bella was in the hall, drawing aside the big curtains, and opening
+the front door.  Little Jon said, wheedling
+
+"Bella!"
+
+"Yes, Master Jon."
+
+"Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know they'd
+like it best."
+
+"You mean you'd like it best."
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+"No, they would, to please me."
+
+Bella smiled.  "Very well, I'll take it out if you'll stay quiet here
+and not get into mischief before they come."
+
+Little Jon sat down on the bottom step, and nodded.  Bella came
+close, and looked him over.
+
+"Get up!" she said.
+
+Little Jon got up.  She scrutinized him behind; he was not green, and
+his knees seemed clean.
+
+"All right!" she said.  "My!  Aren't you brown?  Give me a kiss!"
+
+And little Jon received a peck on his hair.
+
+"What jam?" he asked.  "I'm so tired of waiting."
+
+"Gooseberry and strawberry."
+
+Num!  They were his favourites!
+
+When she was gone he sat still for quite a minute.  It was quiet in
+the big hall open to its East end so that he could see one of his
+trees, a brig sailing very slowly across the upper lawn.  In the
+outer hall shadows were slanting from the pillars.  Little Jon got
+up, jumped one of them, and walked round the clump of iris plants
+which filled the pool of grey-white marble in the centre.  The
+flowers were pretty, but only smelled a very little.  He stood in the
+open doorway and looked out.  Suppose!--suppose they didn't come!  He
+had waited so long that he felt he could not bear that, and his
+attention slid at once from such finality to the dust motes in the
+bluish sunlight coming in: Thrusting his hand up, he tried to catch
+some.  Bella ought to have dusted that piece of air!  But perhaps
+they weren't dust--only what sunlight was made of, and he looked to
+see whether the sunlight out of doors was the same.  It was not.  He
+had said he would stay quiet in the hall, but he simply couldn't any
+more; and crossing the gravel of the drive he lay down on the grass
+beyond.  Pulling six daisies he named them carefully, Sir Lamorac,
+Sir Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Sir Palimedes, Sir Bors, Sir Gawain, and
+fought them in couples till only Sir Lamorac, whom he had selected
+for a specially stout stalk, had his head on, and even he, after
+three encounters, looked worn and waggly.  A beetle was moving slowly
+in the grass, which almost wanted cutting.  Every blade was a small
+tree, round whose trunk the beetle had to glide.  Little Jon
+stretched out Sir Lamorac, feet foremost, and stirred the creature
+up.  It scuttled painfully.  Little Jon laughed, lost interest, and
+sighed.  His heart felt empty.  He turned over and lay on his back.
+There was a scent of honey from the lime trees in flower, and in the
+sky the blue was beautiful, with a few white clouds which looked and
+perhaps tasted like lemon ice.  He could hear Bob playing: "Way down
+upon de Suwannee ribber" on his concertina, and it made him nice and
+sad.  He turned over again and put his ear to the ground--Indians
+could hear things coming ever so far--but he could hear nothing--only
+the concertina!  And almost instantly he did hear a grinding sound, a
+faint toot.  Yes!  it was a car--coming--coming!  Up he jumped.
+Should he wait in the porch, or rush upstairs, and as they came in,
+shout: "Look!" and slide slowly down the banisters, head foremost?
+Should he?  The car turned in at the drive.  It was too late!  And he
+only waited, jumping up and down in his excitement.  The car came
+quickly, whirred, and stopped.  His father got out, exactly like
+life.  He bent down and little Jon bobbed up--they bumped.  His
+father said
+
+"Bless us!  Well, old man, you are brown!"  Just as he would; and the
+sense of expectation--of something wanted--bubbled unextinguished in
+little Jon.  Then, with a long, shy look he saw his mother, in a blue
+dress, with a blue motor scarf over her cap and hair, smiling.  He
+jumped as high as ever he could, twined his legs behind her back, and
+hugged.  He heard her gasp, and felt her hugging back.  His eyes,
+very dark blue just then, looked into hers, very dark brown, till her
+lips closed on his eyebrow, and, squeezing with all his might, he
+heard her creak and laugh, and say:
+
+"You are strong, Jon!"
+
+He slid down at that, and rushed into the hall, dragging her by the
+hand.
+
+While he was eating his jam beneath the oak tree, he noticed things
+about his mother that he had never seemed to see before, her cheeks
+for instance were creamy, there were silver threads in her dark goldy
+hair, her throat had no knob in it like Bella's, and she went in and
+out softly.  He noticed, too, some little lines running away from the
+corners of her eyes, and a nice darkness under them.  She was ever so
+beautiful, more beautiful than "Da" or Mademoiselle, or "Auntie" June
+or even "Auntie" Holly, to whom he had taken a fancy; even more
+beautiful than Bella, who had pink cheeks and came out too suddenly
+in places.  This new beautifulness of his mother had a kind of
+particular importance, and he ate less than he had expected to.
+
+When tea was over his father wanted him to walk round the gardens.
+He had a long conversation with his father about things in general,
+avoiding his private life--Sir Lamorac, the Austrians, and the
+emptiness he had felt these last three days, now so suddenly filled
+up.  His father told him of a place called Glensofantrim, where he
+and his mother had been; and of the little people who came out of the
+ground there when it was very quiet.  Little Jon came to a halt, with
+his heels apart.
+
+"Do you really believe they do, Daddy?"  "No, Jon, but I thought you
+might."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You're younger than I; and they're fairies."  Little Jon squared the
+dimple in his chin.
+
+"I don't believe in fairies.  I never see any."  "Ha!" said his
+father.
+
+"Does Mum?"
+
+His father smiled his funny smile.
+
+"No; she only sees Pan."
+
+"What's Pan?"
+
+"The Goaty God who skips about in wild and beautiful places."
+
+"Was he in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Mum said so."
+
+Little Jon took his heels up, and led on.
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+"No; I only saw Venus Anadyomene."
+
+Little Jon reflected; Venus was in his book about the Greeks and
+Trojans.  Then Anna was her Christian and Dyomene her surname?
+
+But it appeared, on inquiry, that it was one word, which meant rising
+from the foam.
+
+"Did she rise from the foam in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Yes; every day."
+
+"What is she like, Daddy?"
+
+"Like Mum."
+
+"Oh! Then she must be..." but he stopped at that, rushed at a wall,
+scrambled up, and promptly scrambled down again.  The discovery that
+his mother was beautiful was one which he felt must absolutely be
+kept to himself.  His father's cigar, however, took so long to smoke,
+that at last he was compelled to say:
+
+"I want to see what Mum's brought home.  Do you mind, Daddy?"
+
+He pitched the motive low, to absolve him from unmanliness, and was a
+little disconcerted when his father looked at him right through,
+heaved an important sigh, and answered:
+
+"All right, old man, you go and love her."
+
+He went, with a pretence of slowness, and then rushed, to make up.
+He entered her bedroom from his own, the door being open.  She was
+still kneeling before a trunk, and he stood close to her, quite
+still.
+
+She knelt up straight, and said:
+
+"Well, Jon?"
+
+"I thought I'd just come and see."
+
+Having given and received another hug, he mounted the window-seat,
+and tucking his legs up under him watched her unpack.  He derived a
+pleasure from the operation such as he had not yet known, partly
+because she was taking out things which looked suspicious, and partly
+because he liked to look at her.  She moved differently from anybody
+else, especially from Bella; she was certainly the refinedest-looking
+person he had ever seen.  She finished the trunk at last, and knelt
+down in front of him.
+
+"Have you missed us, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon nodded, and having thus admitted his feelings, continued
+to nod.
+
+"But you had 'Auntie' June?"
+
+"Oh! she had a man with a cough."
+
+His mother's face changed, and looked almost angry.  He added
+hastily:
+
+"He was a poor man, Mum; he coughed awfully; I--I liked him."
+
+His mother put her hands behind his waist.
+
+"You like everybody, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+"Up to a point," he said: "Auntie June took me to church one Sunday."
+
+"To church?  Oh!"
+
+"She wanted to see how it would affect me."  "And did it?"
+
+"Yes.  I came over all funny, so she took me home again very quick.
+I wasn't sick after all.  I went to bed and had hot brandy and water,
+and read The Boys of Beechwood.  It was scrumptious."
+
+His mother bit her lip.
+
+"When was that?"
+
+"Oh! about--a long time ago--I wanted her to take me again, but she
+wouldn't.  You and Daddy never go to church, do you?"
+
+"No, we don't."
+
+"Why don't you?"
+
+His mother smiled.
+
+"Well, dear, we both of us went when we were little.  Perhaps we went
+when we were too little."
+
+"I see," said little Jon, "it's dangerous."
+
+"You shall judge for yourself about all those  things as you grow
+up."
+
+Little Jon replied in a calculating manner:
+
+"I don't want to grow up, much.  I don't want  to go to school."  A
+sudden overwhelming desire  to say something more, to say what he
+really  felt, turned him red.  "I--I want to stay with you,  and be
+your lover, Mum."
+
+Then with an instinct to improve the situation, he added quickly   "I
+don't want to go to bed to-night, either.  I'm simply tired of going
+to bed, every night."
+
+"Have you had any more nightmares?"
+
+"Only about one.  May I leave the door open into your room to-night,
+Mum?"
+
+"Yes, just a little."  Little Jon heaved a sigh of satisfaction.
+
+"What did you see in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Nothing but beauty, darling."
+
+"What exactly is beauty?"
+
+"What exactly is--Oh! Jon, that's a  poser."
+
+"Can I see it, for instance?"   His mother got up, and sat beside
+him.  "You do, every day.  The sky is beautiful, the  stars, and
+moonlit nights, and then the birds, the flowers, the trees--they're
+all beautiful.  Look out of the window--there's beauty for you, Jon."
+
+"Oh! yes, that's the view.  Is that all?"
+
+"All? no.  The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with
+their foam flying back."
+
+"Did you rise from it every day, Mum?"
+
+His mother smiled.  "Well, we bathed."
+
+Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.
+
+"I know," he said mysteriously, "you're it, really, and all the rest
+is make-believe."
+
+She sighed, laughed, said:  "Oh! Jon!"
+
+Little Jon said critically:
+
+"Do you think Bella beautiful, for instance?  I hardly do."
+
+"Bella is young; that's something."
+
+"But you look younger, Mum.  If you bump against Bella she hurts.
+
+I don't believe 'Da' was beautiful, when I come to think of it; and
+Mademoiselle's almost ugly."
+
+"Mademoiselle has a very nice face."  "Oh! yes; nice.  I love your
+little rays, Mum."
+
+"Rays?"
+
+Little Jon put his finger to the outer corner of her eye.
+
+"Oh! Those?  But they're a sign of age."
+
+"They come when you smile."
+
+"But they usen't to."
+
+"Oh! well, I like them.  Do you love me, Mum?"
+
+"I do--I do love you, darling."
+
+"Ever so?"
+
+"Ever so!"
+
+"More than I thought you did?"
+
+"Much--much more."
+
+"Well, so do I; so that makes it even."
+
+Conscious that he had never in his life so given himself away, he
+felt a sudden reaction to the manliness of Sir Lamorac, Dick Needham,
+Huck Finn, and other heroes.
+
+"Shall I show you a thing or two?" he said; and slipping out of her
+arms, he stood on his head.  Then, fired by her obvious admiration,
+he mounted the bed, and threw himself head foremost from his feet on
+to his back, without touching anything with his hands.  He did this
+several times.
+
+That evening, having inspected what they had brought, he stayed up to
+dinner, sitting between them at the little round table they used when
+they were alone.  He was extremely excited.  His mother wore a
+French-grey dress, with creamy lace made out of little scriggly
+roses, round her neck, which was browner than the lace.  He kept
+looking at her, till at last his father's funny smile made him
+suddenly attentive to his slice of pineapple.  It was later than he
+had ever stayed up, when he went to bed.  His mother went up with
+him, and he undressed very slowly so as to keep her there.  When at
+last he had nothing on but his pyjamas, he said:
+
+"Promise you won't go while I say my prayers!"
+
+"I promise."
+
+Kneeling down and plunging his face into the bed, little Jon hurried
+up, under his breath, opening one eye now and then, to see her
+standing perfectly still with a smile on her face.  "Our Father"--so
+went his last prayer, "which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mum, thy
+Kingdom Mum--on Earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily
+Mum and forgive us our trespasses on earth as it is in heaven and
+trespass against us, for thine is the evil the power and the glory
+for ever and ever.  Amum!  Look out!"  He sprang, and for a long
+minute remained in her arms.  Once in bed, he continued to hold her
+hand.
+
+"You won't shut the door any more than that, will you?  Are you going
+to be long, Mum?"
+
+"I must go down and play to Daddy."
+
+"Oh! well, I shall hear you."
+
+"I hope not; you must go to sleep."
+
+"I can sleep any night."
+
+"Well, this is just a night like any other."
+
+"Oh! no--it's extra special."
+
+"On extra special nights one always sleeps soundest."
+
+"But if I go to sleep, Mum, I shan't hear you come up."
+
+"Well, when I do, I'll come in and give you a kiss, then if you're
+awake you'll know, and if you're not you'll still know you've had
+one."
+
+Little Jon sighed, "All right!" he said: "I suppose I must put up
+with that.  Mum?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"What was her name that Daddy believes in?  Venus Anna Diomedes?"
+
+"Oh! my angel!  Anadyomene."
+
+"Yes! but I like my name for you much better."
+
+"What is yours, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon answered shyly:
+
+"Guinevere! it's out of the Round Table
+
+I've only just thought of it, only of course her hair was down."
+
+His mother's eyes, looking past him, seemed to float.
+
+"You won't forget to come, Mum?"
+
+"Not if you'll go to sleep."
+
+"That's a bargain, then."  And little Jon screwed up his eyes.
+
+He felt her lips on his forehead, heard her footsteps; opened his
+eyes to see her gliding through the doorway, and, sighing, screwed
+them up again.
+
+Then Time began.
+
+For some ten minutes of it he tried loyally to sleep, counting a
+great number of thistles in a row, "Da's" old recipe for bringing
+slumber.  He seemed to have been hours counting.  It must, he
+thought, be nearly time for her to come up now.  He threw the
+bedclothes back.  "I'm hot!" he said, and his voice sounded funny in
+the darkness, like someone else's.  Why didn't she come?  He sat up.
+He must look!  He got out of bed, went to the window and pulled the
+curtain a slice aside.  It wasn't dark, but he couldn't tell whether
+because of daylight or the moon, which was very big.  It had a funny,
+wicked face, as if laughing at him, and he did not want to look at
+it.  Then, remembering that his mother had said moonlit nights were
+beautiful, he continued to stare out in a general way.  The trees
+threw thick shadows, the lawn looked like spilt milk, and a long,
+long way he could see; oh! very far; right over the world, and it all
+looked different and swimmy.  There was a lovely smell, too, in his
+open window.
+
+'I wish I had a dove like Noah!' he thought.
+
+
+"The moony moon was round and bright,
+It shone and shone and made it light."
+
+
+After that rhyme, which came into his head all at once, he became
+conscious of music, very soft-lovely!  Mum playing!  He bethought
+himself of a macaroon he had, laid up in his chest of drawers, and,
+getting it, came back to the window.  He leaned out, now munching,
+now holding his jaws to hear the music better.  "Da" used to say that
+angels played on harps in heaven; but it wasn't half so lovely as Mum
+playing in the moony night, with him eating a macaroon.  A cockchafer
+buzzed by, a moth flew in his face, the music stopped, and little Jon
+drew his head in.  She must be coming!  He didn't want to be found
+awake.  He got back into bed and pulled the clothes nearly over his
+head; but he had left a streak of moonlight coming in.  It fell
+across the floor, near the foot of the bed, and he watched it moving
+ever so slowly towards him, as if it were alive.  The music began
+again, but he could only just hear it now; sleepy music, pretty--
+sleepy--music--sleepy--slee.....
+
+And time slipped by, the music rose, fell, ceased; the moonbeam crept
+towards his face.  Little Jon turned in his sleep till he lay on his
+back, with one brown fist still grasping the bedclothes.  The corners
+of his eyes twitched--he had begun to dream.  He dreamed he was
+drinking milk out of a pan that was the moon, opposite a great black
+cat which watched him with a funny smile like his father's.  He heard
+it whisper: "Don't drink too much!" It was the cat's milk, of course,
+and he put out his hand amicably to stroke the creature; but it was
+no longer there; the pan had become a bed, in which he was lying, and
+when he tried to get out he couldn't find the edge; he couldn't find
+it--he--he--couldn't get out!  It was dreadful!
+
+He whimpered in his sleep.  The bed had begun to go round too; it was
+outside him and inside him; going round and round, and getting fiery,
+and Mother Lee out of Cast up by the Sea was stirring it!  Oh! so
+horrible she looked!  Faster and faster!--till he and the bed and
+Mother Lee and the moon and the cat were all one wheel going round
+and round and up and up--awful--awful--awful!
+
+He shrieked.
+
+A voice saying: "Darling, darling!" got through the wheel, and he
+awoke, standing on his bed, with his eyes wide open.
+
+There was his mother, with her hair like Guinevere's, and, clutching
+her, he buried his face in it.
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"It's all right, treasure.  You're awake now.  There!  There!  It's
+nothing!"
+
+But little Jon continued to say: "Oh! oh!"
+
+Her voice went on, velvety in his ear:
+
+"It was the moonlight, sweetheart, coming on your face."
+
+Little Jon burbled into her nightgown
+
+"You said it was beautiful.  Oh!"
+
+"Not to sleep in, Jon.  Who let it in?  Did you draw the curtains?"
+
+"I wanted to see the time; I--I looked out, I--I heard you playing,
+Mum; I--I ate my macaroon."  But he was growing slowly comforted; and
+the instinct to excuse his fear revived within him.
+
+"Mother Lee went round in me and got all fiery," he mumbled.
+
+"Well, Jon, what can you expect if you eat macaroons after you've
+gone to bed?"
+
+"Only one, Mum; it made the music ever so more beautiful.  I was
+waiting for you--I nearly thought it was to-morrow."
+
+"My ducky, it's only just eleven now."
+
+Little Jon was silent, rubbing his nose on her neck.
+
+"Mum, is Daddy in your room?"
+
+"Not to-night."
+
+"Can I come?"
+
+"If you wish, my precious."
+
+Half himself again, little Jon drew back.
+
+"You look different, Mum; ever so younger."
+
+"It's my hair, darling."
+
+Little Jon laid hold of it, thick, dark gold, with a few silver
+threads.
+
+"I like it," he said: "I like you best of all like this."
+
+Taking her hand, he had begun dragging her towards the door.  He shut
+it as they passed, with a sigh of relief.
+
+"Which side of the bed do you like, Mum?"
+
+"The left side."
+
+"All right."
+
+Wasting no time, giving her no chance to change her mind, little Jon
+got into the bed, which seemed much softer than his own.  He heaved
+another sigh, screwed his head into the pillow and lay examining the
+battle of chariots and swords and spears which always went on outside
+blankets, where the little hairs stood up against the light.
+
+"It wasn't anything, really, was it?" he said.
+
+>From before her glass his mother answered:
+
+"Nothing but the moon and your imagination heated up.  You mustn't
+get so excited, Jon."
+
+But, still not quite in possession of his nerves, little Jon answered
+boastfully:
+
+"I wasn't afraid, really, of course!"  And again he lay watching the
+spears and chariots.  It all seemed very long.
+
+"Oh! Mum, do hurry up!"
+
+"Darling, I have to plait my hair."
+
+"Oh! not to-night.  You'll only have to unplait it again to-morrow.
+I'm sleepy now; if you don't come, I shan't be sleepy soon."
+
+His mother stood up white and flowey before the winged mirror: he
+could see three of her, with her neck turned and her hair bright
+under the light, and her dark eyes smiling.  It was unnecessary, and
+he said:
+
+"Do come, Mum; I'm waiting."
+
+"Very well, my love, I'll come."
+
+Little Jon closed his eyes.  Everything was turning out most
+satisfactory, only she must hurry up!  He felt the bed shake, she was
+getting in.  And, still with his eyes closed, he said sleepily: "It's
+nice, isn't it?"
+
+He heard her voice say something, felt her lips touching his nose,
+and, snuggling up beside her who lay awake and loved him with her
+thoughts, he fell into the dreamless sleep, which rounded off his
+past.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO LET
+
+
+
+"From out the fatal loins of those two foes
+A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life."
+                        --Romeo and Juliet.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+ENCOUNTER
+
+
+Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was
+staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the
+intention of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork
+Street, and looking into the Future.  He walked.  Since the War he
+never took a cab if he could help it.  Their drivers were, in his
+view, an uncivil lot, though now that the War was over and supply
+beginning to exceed demand again, getting more civil in accordance
+with the custom of human nature.  Still, he had not forgiven them,
+deeply identifying them with gloomy memories, and now, dimly, like
+all members, of their class, with revolution.  The considerable
+anxiety he had passed through during the War, and the more
+considerable anxiety he had since undergone in the Peace, had
+produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature.  He had,
+mentally, so frequently experienced ruin, that he had ceased to
+believe in its material probability.  Paying away four thousand a
+year in income and super tax, one could not very well be worse off!
+A fortune of a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a wife and
+one daughter, and very diversely invested, afforded substantial
+guarantee even against that "wildcat notion" a levy on capital.  And
+as to confiscation of war profits, he was entirely in favour of it,
+for he had none, and "serve the beggars right!" The price of
+pictures, moreover, had, if anything, gone up, and he had done better
+with his collection since the War began than ever before.  Air-raids,
+also, had acted beneficially on a spirit congenitally cautious, and
+hardened a character already dogged.  To be in danger of being
+entirely dispersed inclined one to be less apprehensive of the more
+partial dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while the habit
+of condemning the impudence of the Germans had led naturally to
+condemning that of Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of
+his soul.
+
+He walked.  There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet
+him at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past
+two.  It was good for him to walk--his liver was a little
+constricted, and his nerves rather on edge.  His wife was always out
+when she was in Town, and his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all
+over the place like most young women since the War.  Still, he must
+be thankful that she had been too young to do anything in that War
+itself.  Not, of course, that he had not supported the War from its
+inception, with all his soul, but between that and supporting it with
+the bodies of his wife and daughter, there had been a gap fixed by
+something old-fashioned within him which abhorred emotional
+extravagance.  He had, for instance, strongly objected to Annette, so
+attractive, and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her native France,
+her "chere patrie" as, under the stimulus of war, she had begun to
+call it, to nurse her "braves poilus," forsooth!  Ruining her health
+and her looks!  As if she were really a nurse!  He had put a stopper
+on it.  Let her do needlework for them at home, or knit!  She had not
+gone, therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since.  A
+bad tendency of hers to mock at him, not openly, but in continual
+little ways, had grown.  As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed
+problem whether or not she should go to school.  She was better away
+from her mother in her war mood, from the chance of air-raids, and
+the impetus to do extravagant things; so he had placed her in a
+seminary as far West as had seemed to him compatibIe with excellence,
+and had missed her horribly.  Fleur!  He had never regretted the
+somewhat outlandish name by which at her birth he had decided so
+suddenly to call her--marked concession though it had been to the
+French.  Fleur!  A pretty name--a pretty child!  But restless--too
+restless; and wilful!  Knowing her power too over her father!  Soames
+often reflected on the mistake it was to dote on his daughter.  To
+get old and dote!  Sixty-five!  He was getting on; but he didn't feel
+it, for, fortunately perhaps, considering Annette's youth and good
+looks, his second marriage had turned out a cool affair.  He had
+known but one real passion in his life--for that first wife of his--
+Irene.  Yes, and that fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who had gone off
+with her, was looking very shaky, they said.  No wonder, at seventy-
+two, after twenty years of a third marriage!
+
+Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the
+Row.  A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house
+in Park Lane which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and
+the little house in Montpellier Square where thirty-five years ago he
+had enjoyed his first edition of matrimony.  Now, after twenty years
+of his second edition, that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous
+existence--which had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he
+had hoped for.  For many years he had ceased regretting, even
+vaguely, the son who had not been born; Fleur filled the bill in his
+heart.  After all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward
+at all to the time when she would change it.  Indeed, if he ever
+thought of such a calamity, it was seasoned by the vague feeling that
+he could make her rich enough to purchase perhaps and extinguish the
+name of the fellow who married her--why not, since, as it seemed,
+women were equal to men nowadays?  And Soames, secretly convinced
+that they were not, passed his curved hand over his face vigorously,
+till it reached the comfort of his chin.  Thanks to abstemious
+habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his nose was pale and thin,
+his grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight unimpaired.  A slight
+stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to his face by the
+heightening of his forehead in the recession of his grey hair.
+Little change had Time wrought in the "warmest" of the young
+Forsytes, as the last of the old Forsytes--Timothy-now in his hundred
+and first year, would have phrased it.
+
+The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had
+given up top hats--it was no use attracting attention to wealth in
+days like  these.  Plane-trees!  His thoughts travelled sharply to
+Madrid--the Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind
+about that Goya picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study
+the painter on his spot.  The fellow had impressed him--great range,
+real genius!  Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher
+before they had finished with him.  The second Goya craze would be
+greater even than the first; oh, yes!  And he had bought.  On that
+visit he had--as never before--commissioned a copy of a fresco
+painting called "La Vendimia," wherein was the figure of a girl with
+an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his daughter.  He had it now
+in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather poor it was--you couldn't
+copy Goya.  He would still look at it, however, if his daughter were
+not there, for the sake of something irresistibly reminiscent in the
+light, erect balance of the figure, the width between the arching
+eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.  Curious that Fleur
+should have dark eyes, when his own were grey--no pure Forsyte had
+brown eyes--and her mother's blue!  But of course her grandmother
+Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!
+
+He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner.  No greater change
+in all England than in the Row!  Born almost within hail of it, he
+could remember it from 1860 on.  Brought there as a child between the
+crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding
+with a cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white
+top hats; the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man
+in a long red waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs
+on several strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles
+spaniels, Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline--you
+never saw them now.  You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just
+working people sitting in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a
+few young bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory
+Colonials charging up and down on dismal-looking hacks; with, here
+and there, little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their
+livers, or an orderly trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no
+thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no gossip--nothing;
+only the trees the same--the trees in--different to the generations
+and declensions of mankind.  A democratic England--dishevelled,
+hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an apex.  And that something
+fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over within him.  Gone
+forever, the close borough of rank and polish!  Wealth there was--oh,
+yes!  wealth--he himself was a richer man than his father had ever
+been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast,
+ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.  Little half-beaten
+pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and there, dispersed and
+chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever again firm and
+coherent to look up to.  And into this new hurly-burly of bad manners
+and loose morals his daughter--flower of his life--was flung!  And
+when those Labour chaps got power--if they ever did--the worst was
+yet to come.
+
+He passed out under the archway, at last no longer--thank goodness!--
+disfigured by the gungrey of its search-light.  'They'd better put a
+search-light on to where they're all going,' he thought, 'and light
+up their precious democracy!' And he directed his steps along the
+Club fronts of Piccadilly.  George Forsyte, of course, would be
+sitting in the bay window of the Iseeum.  The chap was so big now
+that he was there nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic,
+humorous eye noting the decline of men and things.  And Soames
+hurried, ever constitutionally uneasy beneath his cousin's glance.
+George, who, as he had heard, had written a letter signed "Patriot"
+in the middle of the War, complaining of the Government's hysteria in
+docking the oats of race-horses.  Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous,
+neat, clean-shaven, with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling,
+no doubt, of the best hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand.  Well,
+be didn't change!  And for perhaps the first time in his life Soames
+felt a kind of sympathy tapping in his waistcoat for that sardonic
+kinsman.  With his weight, his perfectly parted hair, and bull-like
+gaze, he was a guarantee that the old order would take some shifting
+yet.  He saw George move the pink paper as if inviting him to ascend-
+-the chap must want to ask something about his property.  It was
+still under Soames' control; for in the adoption of a sleeping
+partnership at that painful period twenty years back when he had
+divorced Irene, Soames had found himself almost insensibly retaining
+control of all purely Forsyte affairs.
+
+Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in.  Since the death
+of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had
+quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not
+suicide--the Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames.
+George, too, he knew, had sown the last of his wild oats, and was
+committed definitely to the joys of the table, eating only of the
+very best so as to keep his weight down, and owning, as he said,
+"just one or two old screws to give me an interest in life."  He
+joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window without the
+embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel up there.
+George put out a well-kept hand.
+
+"Haven't seen you since the War," he said.  "How's your wife?"
+
+"Thanks," said Soames coldly, "well enough."
+
+Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George's fleshy face, and
+gloated from his eye.
+
+"That Belgian chap, Profond," he said, "is a member here now.  He's a
+rum customer."
+
+"Quite!" muttered Soames.  "What did you want to see me about?"
+
+"Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment.  I suppose
+he's made his Will."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up--last of the old
+lot; he's a hundred, you know.  They say he's like a rummy.  Where
+are you goin' to put him?  He ought to have a pyramid by rights."
+
+Soames shook his head.  "Highgate, the family vault."
+
+"Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere
+else.  They say he still takes an interest in food.  He might last
+on, you know.  Don't we get anything for the old Forsytes?   Ten of
+them--average age eighty-eight--I worked it out.  That ought to be
+equal to triplets."
+
+"Is that all?" said Soames, "I must be getting on."
+
+'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer.  "Yes, that's
+all: Look him up in his mausoleum--the old chap might want to
+prophesy."  The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he
+added: "Haven't you attorneys invented a way yet of dodging this
+damned income tax?  It hits the fixed inherited income like the very
+deuce.  I used to have two thousand five hundred a year; now I've got
+a beggarly fifteen hundred, and the price of living doubled."
+
+"Ah!" murmured Soames, "the turf's in danger."
+
+Over George's face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.
+
+"Well," he said, "they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in
+the sear and yellow, getting poorer every day.  These Labour chaps
+mean to have the lot before they've done.  What are you going to do
+for a living when it comes?  I shall work a six-hour day teaching
+politicians how to see a joke.  Take my tip, Soames; go into
+Parliament, make sure of your four hundred--and employ me."
+
+And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.
+
+Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his
+cousin's words.  He himself had always been a worker and a saver,
+George always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once
+began, it was he--the worker and the saver--who would be looted!
+That was the negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte
+principles.  Could civilization be built on any other?  He did not
+think so.  Well, they wouldn't confiscate his pictures, for they
+wouldn't know their worth.  But what would they be worth, if these
+maniacs once began to milk capital?  A drug on the market.  'I don't
+care about myself,' he thought; 'I could live on five hundred a year,
+and never know the difference, at my age.'  But Fleur!  This fortune,
+so widely invested, these treasures so carefully chosen and amassed,
+were all for--her.  And if it should turn out that he couldn't give
+or leave them to her--well, life had no meaning, and what was the use
+of going in to look at this crazy, futuristic stuff with the view of
+seeing whether it had any future?
+
+Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his
+shilling, picked up a catalogue, and entered.  Some ten persons were
+prowling round.  Soames took steps and came on what looked to him
+like a lamp-post bent by collision with a motor omnibus.  It was
+advanced some three paces from the wall, and was described in his
+catalogue as "Jupiter."  He examined it with curiosity, having
+recently turned some of his attention to sculpture.  'If that's
+Jupiter,' he thought, 'I wonder what Juno's like.'  And suddenly he
+saw her, opposite.  She appeared to him like nothing so much as a
+pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow.  He was still gazing at
+her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left.  "Epatant!" he
+heard one say.
+
+"Jargon!" growled Soames to himself.
+
+The other's boyish voice replied
+
+"Missed it, old bean; he's pulling your leg.  When Jove and Juno
+created he them, he was saying: 'I'll see how much these fools will
+swallow.'  And they've lapped up the lot."
+
+"You young duffer!  Vospovitch is an innovator.  Don't you see that
+he's brought satire into sculpture?  The future of plastic art, of
+music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric.  It was
+bound to.  People are tired--the bottom's tumbled out of sentiment."
+
+"Well, I'm quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty.  I was
+through the War.  You've dropped your handkerchief, sir."
+
+Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him.  He took it with
+some natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose.  It had the
+right scent--of distant Eau de Cologne--and his initials in a corner.
+Slightly reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man's face.  It
+had rather fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush
+growing out of it on each side, and small lively eyes, above a
+normally dressed appearance.
+
+"Thank you," he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: "Glad
+to hear you like beauty; that's rare, nowadays."
+
+"I dote on it," said the young man; "but you and I are the last of
+the old guard, sir."
+
+Soames smiled.
+
+"If you really care for pictures," he said, "here's my card.  I can
+show you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you're down the river
+and care to look in."
+
+"Awfully nice of you, sir.  I'll drop in like a bird.  My name's
+Mont-Michael."  And he took off his hat.
+
+Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in
+response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had
+a purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look-
+-as if he were a poet!
+
+It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he
+went and sat down in an alcove.  What had possessed him to give his
+card to a rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like
+that?  And Fleur, always at the back of his thoughts, started out
+like a filigree figure from a clock when the hour strikes.  On the
+screen opposite the alcove was a large canvas with a great many
+square tomato-coloured blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as
+Soames could see from where he sat.  He looked at his catalogue: "No.
+32 'The Future Town'--Paul Post."  'I suppose that's satiric too,' he
+thought.  'What a thing!' But his second impulse was more cautious.
+It did not do to condemn hurriedly.  There had been those stripey,
+streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out such trumps; and
+then the stippled school; and Gauguin.  Why, even since the Post-
+Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed
+at.  During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life, indeed,
+he had marked so many "movements," seen the tides of taste and
+technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything
+except that there was money to be made out of every change of
+fashion.  This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue
+primordial instinct, or lose the market.  He got up and stood before
+the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people.
+Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one
+passing said: "He's got the airplanes wonderfully, don't you think!"
+Below the tomato blobs was a band of white with vertical black
+stripes, to which he could assign no meaning whatever, till some one
+else came by, murmuring: "What expression he gets with his
+foreground!"  Expression?  Of what?  Soames went back to his seat.
+The thing was "rich," as his father would have said, and he wouldn't
+give a damn for it.  Expression!  Ah! they were all Expressionists
+now, he had heard, on the Continent.  So it was coming here too, was
+it?  He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887--or '8--
+hatched in China, so they said.  He wondered where this--this
+Expressionism had been hatched.  The thing was a regular disease!
+
+He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him
+and the "Future Town."  Their backs were turned; but very suddenly
+Soames put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat
+forward, gazed through the slit between.  No mistaking that back,
+elegant as ever though the hair above had gone grey.  Irene!  His
+divorced wife--Irene!  And this, no doubt, was--her son--by that
+fellow Jolyon Forsyte--their boy, six months older than his own girl!
+And mumbling over in his mind the bitter days of his divorce, he rose
+to get out of sight, but quickly sat down again.  She had turned her
+head to speak to her boy; her profile was still so youthful that it
+made her grey hair seem powdery, as if fancy-dressed; and her lips
+were smiling as Soames, first possessor of them, had never seen them
+smile.  Grudgingly he admitted her still beautiful and in figure
+almost as young as ever.  And how that boy smiled back at her!
+Emotion squeezed Soames' heart.  The sight infringed his sense of
+justice.  He grudged her that boy's smile--it went beyond what Fleur
+gave him, and it was undeserved.  Their son might have been his son;
+Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight!  He
+lowered his catalogue.  If she saw him, all the better!  A reminder
+of her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing
+of it, would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis
+which surely must soon or late visit her!  Then, half-conscious that
+such a thought was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took
+out his watch.  Past four!  Fleur was late.  She had gone to his
+niece Imogen Cardigan's, and there they would keep her smoking
+cigarettes and gossiping, and that.  He heard the boy laugh, and say
+eagerly: "I say, Mum, is this by one of Auntie June's lame ducks?"
+
+"Paul Post--I believe it is, darling."
+
+The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her
+use it.  And then she saw him.  His eyes must have had in them
+something of George Forsyte's sardonic look; for her gloved hand
+crisped the folds of her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went
+stony.  She moved on.
+
+"It is a caution," said the boy, catching her arm again.
+
+Soames stared after them.  That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte
+chin, and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a
+glass of old sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair.
+Better than they deserved--those two!  They passed from his view into
+the next room, and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but
+saw it not.  A little smile snarled up his lips.  He was despising
+the vehemence of his own feelings after all these years.  Ghosts!
+And yet as one grew old--was there anything but what was ghost-like
+left?  Yes, there was Fleur!  He fixed his eyes on the entrance.  She
+was due; but she would keep him waiting, of course!  And suddenly he
+became aware of a sort of human breeze--a short, slight form clad in
+a sea-green djibbah with a metal belt and a fillet binding unruly
+red-gold hair all streaked with grey.  She was talking to the Gallery
+attendants, and something familiar riveted his gaze--in her eyes, her
+chin, her hair, her spirit--something which suggested a thin Skye
+terrier just before its dinner.  Surely June Forsyte!  His cousin
+June--and coming straight to his recess!  She sat down beside him,
+deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil note.  Soames
+sat unmoving.  A confounded thing, cousinship!  "Disgusting!" he
+heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of an
+overhearing stranger, she looked at him.  The worst had happened.
+
+"Soames!"
+
+Soames turned his head a very little.
+
+"How are you?" he said.  "Haven't seen you for twenty years."
+
+"No.  Whatever made you come here?"
+
+"My sins," said Soames.  "What stuff!"
+
+"Stuff?  Oh, yes--of course; it hasn't arrived yet.
+
+"It never will," said Soames; "it must be making a dead loss."
+
+"Of course it is."
+
+"How d'you know?"
+
+"It's my Gallery."
+
+Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
+
+"Yours?  What on earth makes you run a show like this?"
+
+"I don't treat Art as if it were grocery."
+
+Soames pointed to the Future Town.  "Look at that!  Who's going to
+live in a town like that, or with it on his walls?"
+
+June contemplated the picture for a moment.
+
+"It's a vision," she said.
+
+"The deuce!"
+
+There was silence, then June rose.  'Crazylooking creature!' he
+thought.
+
+"Well," he said, "you'll find your young stepbrother here with a
+woman I used to know.  If you take my advice, you'll close this
+exhibition."
+
+June looked back at him.  "Oh! You Forsyte!" she said, and moved on.
+About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a
+look of dangerous decisions.  Forsyte!  Of course, he was a Forsyte!
+And so was she!  But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought
+Bosinney into his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June
+and never would!  And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a
+Gallery!... And suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of
+his own family.  The old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many
+years; there was no clearing-house for news.  What had they all done
+in the War?  Young Roger's boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's
+second son killed; young Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or
+whatever they gave them.  They had all joined up somehow, he
+believed.  That boy of Jolyon's and Irene's, he supposed, had been
+too young; his own generation, of course, too old, though Giles
+Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross--and Jesse Hayman been a
+special constable--those "Dromios" had always been of a sporting
+type!  As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read the
+papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought
+no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he
+could have done at his age.  Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him
+that he and his family had taken this war very differently to that
+affair with the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the
+resources of the Empire.  In that old war, of course, his nephew Val
+Dartie had been wounded, that fellow Jolyon's first son had died of
+enteric, "the Dromios" had gone out on horses, and June had been a
+nurse; but all that had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in
+this war everybody had done "their bit," so far as he could make out,
+as a matter of course.  It seemed to show the growth of something or
+other--or perhaps the decline of something else.  Had the Forsytes
+become less individual, or more Imperial, or less provincial?  Or was
+it simply that one hated Germans?...  Why didn't Fleur come, so that
+he could get away?  He saw those three return together from the other
+room and pass back along the far side of the screen.  The boy was
+standing before the Juno now.  And, suddenly, on the other side of
+her, Soames saw--his daughter, with eyebrows raised, as well they
+might be.  He could see her eyes glint sideways at the boy, and the
+boy look back at her.  Then Irene slipped her hand through his arm,
+and drew him on.  Soames saw him glancing round, and Fleur looking
+after them as the three went out.
+
+A voice said cheerfully: "Bit thick, isn't it, sir?"
+
+The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing.
+Soames nodded.
+
+"I don't know what we're coming to."
+
+"Oh! That's all right, sir," answered the young man cheerfully; "they
+don't either."
+
+Fleur's voice said: "Hallo, Father!  Here you are!" precisely as if
+he had been keeping her waiting.
+
+The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.
+
+"Well," said Soames, looking her up and down, "you're a punctual sort
+of young woman!"
+
+This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and
+colour, with short, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes
+were set in whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and
+yet in repose were almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids,
+held over them in a sort of suspense.  She had a charming profile,
+and nothing of her father in her face save a decided chin.  Aware
+that his expression was softening as he looked at her, Soames frowned
+to preserve the unemotionalism proper to a Forsyte.  He knew she was
+only too inclined to take advantage of his weakness.
+
+Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:
+
+"Who was that?"
+
+"He picked up my handkerchief.  We talked about the pictures."
+
+"You're not going to buy that, Father?"
+
+"No," said Soames grimly; "nor that Juno you've been looking at."
+
+Fleur dragged at his arm.  "Oh! Let's go!  It's a ghastly show."
+
+In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner.
+But Soames had hung out a board marked "Trespassers will be
+prosecuted," and he barely acknowledged the young fellow's salute.
+
+"Well," he said in the street, "whom did you meet at Imogen's?"
+
+"Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond."
+
+"Oh!" muttered Soames; "that chap!  What does your aunt see in him?"
+
+"I don't know.  He looks pretty deep--mother says she likes him."
+
+Soames grunted.
+
+"Cousin Val and his wife were there, too."
+
+"What!" said Soames.  "I thought they were back in South Africa."
+
+"Oh, no!  They've sold their farm.  Cousin Val is going to train
+race-horses on the Sussex Downs.  They've got a jolly old manor-
+house; they asked me down there."
+
+Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him.  "What's his wife
+like now?"
+
+"Very quiet, but nice, I think."
+
+Soames coughed again.  "He's a rackety chap, your Cousin Val."
+
+"Oh! no, Father; they're awfully devoted.  I promised to go--Saturday
+to Wednesday next."
+
+"Training race-horses!" said Soames.  It was extravagant, but not the
+reason for his distaste.  Why the deuce couldn't his nephew have
+stayed out in South Africa?  His own divorce had been bad enough,
+without his nephew's marriage to the daughter of the co-respondent; a
+half-sister too of June, and of that boy whom Fleur had just been
+looking at from under the pump-handle.  If he didn't look out, she
+would come to know all about that old disgrace!  Unpleasant things!
+They were round him this afternoon like a swarm of bees!
+
+"I don't like it!" he said.
+
+"I want to see the race-horses," murmured Fleur; "and they've
+promised I shall ride.  Cousin Val can't walk much, you know; but he
+can ride perfectly.  He's going to show me their gallops."
+
+"Racing!" said Soames.  "It's a pity the War didn't knock that on the
+head.  He's taking after his father, I'm afraid."
+
+"I don't know anything about his father."
+
+"No," said Soames, grimly.  "He took an interest in horses and broke
+his neck in Paris, walking down-stairs.  Good riddance for your
+aunt."  He frowned, recollecting the inquiry into those stairs which
+he had attended in Paris six years ago, because.  Montague Dartie
+could not attend it himself--perfectly normal stairs in a house where
+they played baccarat.  Either his winnings or the way he had
+celebrated them had gone to his brother-in-law's head.  The French
+procedure had been very loose; he had had a lot of trouble
+with it.
+
+A sound from Fleur distracted his attention.  "Look! The people who
+were in the Gallery with us."
+
+"What people?" muttered Soames, who knew perfectly well.
+
+"I think that woman's beautiful."
+
+"Come into this pastry-cook's," said Soames abruptly, and tightening
+his grip on her arm he turned into a confectioner's.  It was--for
+him--a surprising thing to do, and he said rather anxiously: "What
+will you have?"
+
+"Oh! I don't want anything.  I had a cocktail and a tremendous
+lunch."
+
+"We must have something now we're here," muttered Soames, keeping
+hold of her arm.
+
+"Two teas," he said; "and two of those nougat things."
+
+But no sooner was his body seated than his soul sprang up.  Those
+three--those three were coming in!  He heard Irene say something to
+her boy, and his answer:
+
+"Oh! no, Mum; this place is all right.  My stunt."  And the three sat
+down.
+
+At that moment, most awkward of his existence, crowded with ghosts
+and shadows from his past, in presence of the only two women he had
+ever loved--his divorced wife and his daughter by her successor--
+Soames was not so much afraid of them as of his cousin June.  She
+might make a scene--she might introduce those two children--she was
+capable of anything.  He bit too hastily at the nougat, and it stuck
+to his plate.  Working at it with his finger, he glanced at Fleur.
+She was masticating dreamily, but her eyes were on the boy.  The
+Forsyte in him said: "Think, feel, and you're done for!"  And he
+wiggled his finger desperately.  Plate!  Did Jolyon wear a plate?
+Did that woman wear a plate?  Time had been when he had seen her
+wearing nothing!  That was something, anyway, which had never been
+stolen from him.  And she knew it, though she might sit there calm
+and self-possessed, as if she had never been his wife.  An acid
+humour stirred in his Forsyte blood; a subtle pain divided by hair's
+breadth from pleasure.  If only June did not suddenly bring her
+hornets about his ears!  The boy was talking.
+
+"Of course, Auntie June"--so he called his half-sister "Auntie," did
+he?--well, she must be fifty, if she was a day!--" it's jolly good of
+you to encourage them.  Only--hang it all!"  Soames stole a glance.
+Irene's startled eyes were bent watchfully on her boy.  She--she had
+these devotions--for Bosinney--for that boy's father--for this boy!
+He touched Fleur's arm, and said:
+
+"Well, have you had enough?"
+
+"One more, Father, please."
+
+She would be sick!  He went to the counter to pay.  When he turned
+round again he saw Fleur standing near the door, holding a
+handkerchief which the boy had evidently just handed to her.
+
+"F. F.," he heard her say.  "Fleur Forsyte--it's mine all right.
+Thank you ever so."
+
+Good God!  She had caught the trick from what he'd told her in the
+Gallery--monkey!
+
+"Forsyte?  Why--that's my name too.  Perhaps we're cousins."
+
+"Really!  We must be.  There aren't any others.  I live at
+Mapledurham; where do you?"
+
+"Robin Hill."
+
+Question and answer had been so rapid that all was over before he
+could lift a finger.  He saw Irene's face alive with startled
+feeling, gave the slightest shake of his head, and slipped his arm
+through Fleur's.
+
+"Come along!" he said.
+
+She did not move.
+
+"Didn't you hear, Father?  Isn't it queer--our name's the same.  Are
+we cousins?"
+
+"What's that?" he said.  "Forsyte?  Distant, perhaps."
+
+"My name's Jolyon, sir.  Jon, for short."
+
+"Oh! Ah!" said Soames.  "Yes.  Distant.  How are you?  Very good of
+you.  Good-bye!"
+
+He moved on.
+
+"Thanks awfully," Fleur was saying.  "Au revoir!"
+
+"Au revoir!" he heard the boy reply.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
+
+
+Emerging from the "pastry-cook's," Soames' first impulse was to vent
+his nerves by saying to his daughter: 'Dropping your hand-kerchief!'
+to which her reply might well be: 'I picked that up from you!' His
+second impulse therefore was to let sleeping dogs lie.  But she would
+surely question him.  He gave her a sidelong look, and found she was
+giving him the same.  She said softly:
+
+"Why don't you like those cousins, Father?"  Soames lifted the corner
+of his lip.
+
+"What made you think that?"
+
+"Cela se voit."
+
+'That sees itself!'  What a way of putting it!  After twenty years of
+a French wife Soames had still little sympathy with her language; a
+theatrical affair and connected in his mind with all the refinements
+of domestic irony.
+
+"How?" he asked.
+
+"You must know them; and you didn't make a sign.  I saw them looking
+at you."
+
+"I've never seen the boy in my life," replied Soames with perfect
+truth.
+
+"No; but you've seen the others, dear."
+
+Soames gave her another look.  What had she picked up?  Had her Aunt
+Winifred, or Imogen, or Val Dartie and his wife, been talking?  Every
+breath of the old scandal had been carefully kept from her at home,
+and Winifred warned many times that he wouldn't have a whisper of it
+reach her for the world.  So far as she ought to know, he had never
+been married before.  But her dark eyes, whose southern glint and
+clearness often almost frightened him, met his with perfect
+innocence.
+
+"Well," he said, "your grandfather and his brother had a quarrel.
+The two families don't know each other."
+
+"How romantic!"
+
+'Now, what does she mean by that?' he thought.  The word was to him
+extravagant and dangerous--it was as if she had said: "How jolly!"
+
+"And they'll continue not to know each, other," he added, but
+instantly regretted the challenge in those words.  Fleur was smiling.
+In this age, when young people prided themselves on going their own
+ways and paying no attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had
+said the very thing to excite her wilfulness.  Then, recollecting the
+expression on Irene's face, he breathed again.
+
+"What sort of a quarrel?" he heard Fleur say.
+
+"About a house.  It's ancient history for you.  Your grandfather died
+the day you were born.  He was ninety."
+
+"Ninety?  Are there many Forsytes besides those in the Red Book?"
+
+"I don't know," said Soames.  "They're all dispersed now.  The old
+ones are dead, except Timothy."
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.
+
+"Timothy?  Isn't that delicious?"
+
+"Not at all," said Soames.  It offended him that she should think
+"Timothy" delicious--a kind of insult to his breed.  This new
+generation mocked at anything solid and tenacious.  "You go and see
+the old boy.  He might want to prophesy."  Ah!  If Timothy could see
+the disquiet England of his great-nephews and great-nieces, he would
+certainly give tongue.  And involuntarily he glanced up at the
+Iseeum; yes--George was still in the window, with the same pink paper
+in his hand.
+
+"Where is Robin Hill, Father?"
+
+Robin Hill!  Robin Hill, round which all that tragedy had centred!
+What did she want to know for?
+
+"In Surrey," he muttered; "not far from Richmond.  Why?"
+
+"Is the house there?"
+
+"What house?"
+
+"That they quarrelled about."
+
+"Yes.  But what's all that to do with you?  We're going home to-
+morrow--you'd better be thinking about your frocks."
+
+"Bless you!  They're all thought about.  A family feud?  It's like
+the Bible, or Mark Twain--awfully exciting.  What did you do in the
+feud, Father?"
+
+"Never you mind."
+
+"Oh! But if I'm to keep it up?"
+
+"Who said you were to keep it up?"
+
+"You, darling."
+
+"I?  I said it had nothing to do with you."
+
+"Just what I think, you know; so that's all right."  .
+
+She was too sharp for him; fine, as Annette sometimes called her.
+Nothing for it but to distract her attention.
+
+"There's a bit of rosaline point in here," he said, stopping before a
+shop, "that I thought you might like."
+
+When he had paid for it and they had resumed their progress, Fleur
+said:
+
+"Don't you think that boy's mother is the most beautiful woman of her
+age you've ever seen?"
+
+Soames shivered.  Uncanny, the way she stuck to it!
+
+"I don't know that I noticed her."
+
+"Dear, I saw the corner of your eye."
+
+"You see everything--and a great deal more, it seems to me!"
+
+"What's her husband like?  He must be your first cousin, if your
+fathers were brothers."
+
+"Dead, for all I know," said Soames, with sudden vehemence.  "I
+haven't seen him for twenty years."
+
+"What was he?"
+
+"A painter."
+
+"That's quite jolly."
+
+The words: "If you want to please me you'll put those people out of
+your head," sprang to Soames' lips, but he choked them back--he must
+not let her see his feelings.
+
+"He once insulted me," he said.
+
+Her quick eyes rested on his face.
+
+"I see!  You didn't avenge it, and it rankles.  Poor Father!  You let
+me have a go!"
+
+It was really like lying in the dark with a mosquito hovering above
+his face.  Such pertinacity in Fleur was new to him, and, as they
+reached the hotel, he said grimly:
+
+"I did my best.  And that's enough about these people.  I'm going up
+till dinner."
+
+"I shall sit here."
+
+With a parting look at her extended in a chair--a look half-
+resentful, half-adoring--Soames moved into the lift and was
+transported to their suite on the fourth floor.  He stood by the
+window of the sitting-room which gave view over Hyde Park, and
+drummed a finger on its pane.  His feelings were confused, tetchy,
+troubled.  The throb of that old wound, scarred over by Time and new
+interests, was mingled with displeasure and anxiety, and a slight
+pain in his chest where that nougat stuff had disagreed.  Had Annette
+come in?  Not that she was any good to him in such a difficulty.
+Whenever she had questioned him about his first marriage, he had
+always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it had been the
+great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself but domestic
+makeshift.  She had always kept the grudge of that up her sleeve, as
+it were, and used it commercially.  He listened.  A sound--the vague
+murmur of a woman's movements--was coming through the door.  She was
+in.  He tapped.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"I," said Soames.
+
+She had been changing her frock, and was still imperfectly clothed; a
+striking figure before her glass.  There was a certain magnificence
+about her arms, shoulders, hair, which had darkened since he first
+knew her, about the turn of her neck, the silkiness of her garments,
+her dark-lashed, greyblue eyes--she was certainly as handsome at
+forty as she had ever been.  A fine possession, an excellent
+housekeeper, a sensible and affectionate enough mother.  If only she
+weren't always so frankly cynical about the relations between them!
+Soames, who had no more real affection for her than she had for him,
+suffered from a kind of English grievance in that she had never
+dropped even the thinnest veil of sentiment over their partnership.
+Like most of his countrymen and women, he held the view that marriage
+should be based on mutual love, but that when from a marriage love
+had disappeared, or, been found never to have really existed--so that
+it was manifestly not based on love--you must not admit it.  There it
+was, and the love was not--but there you were, and must continue to
+be!  Thus you had it both ways, and were not tarred with cynicism,
+realism, and immorality like the French.  Moreover, it was necessary
+in the interests of property.  He knew that she knew that they both
+knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not to
+admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand
+what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.  He
+said:
+
+"Whom have you got at 'The Shelter' next week?"
+
+Annette went on touching her lips delicately with salve--he always
+wished she wouldn't do that.
+
+"Your sister Winifred, and the Car-r-digans"--she took up a tiny
+stick of black--"and Prosper Profond."
+
+"That Belgian chap?  Why him?"
+
+Annette turned her neck lazily, touched one eyelash, and said:
+
+"He amuses Winifred."
+
+"I want some one to amuse Fleur; she's restive."
+
+"R-restive?" repeated Annette.  "Is it the first time you see that,
+my friend?  She was born r-restive, as you call it."
+
+Would she never get that affected roll out of her r's?
+
+He touched the dress she had taken off, and asked:
+
+"What have you been doing?"
+
+Annette looked at him, reflected in her glass.  Her just-brightened
+lips smiled, rather full, rather ironical.
+
+"Enjoying myself," she said.
+
+"Oh!" answered Soames glumly.  "Ribbandry, I suppose."
+
+It was his word for all that incomprehensible running in and out of
+shops that women went in for.  "Has Fleur got her summer dresses?"
+
+"You don't ask if I have mine."
+
+"You don't care whether I do or not."
+
+"Quite right.  Well, she has; and I have mine--terribly expensive."
+
+"H'm!" said Soames.  "What does that chap Profond do in England?"
+
+Annette raised the eyebrows she had just finished.
+
+"He yachts."
+
+"Ah!" said Soames; "he's a sleepy chap."
+
+"Sometimes," answered Annette, and her face had a sort of quiet
+enjoyment.  "But sometimes very amusing."
+
+"He's got a touch of the tar-brush about him."
+
+Annette stretched herself.
+
+"Tar-brush?" she said.  "What is that?  His mother was Armenienne."
+
+"That's it, then," muttered Soames.  "Does he know anything about
+pictures?"
+
+"He knows about everything--a man of the world."
+
+"Well, get some one for Fleur.  I want to distract her.  She's going
+off on Saturday to Val Dartie and his wife; I don't like it."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Since the reason could not be explained without going into family
+history, Soames merely answered:
+
+"Racketing about.  There's too much of it."
+
+"I like that little Mrs. Val; she is very quiet and clever."
+
+"I know nothing of her except-- This thing's new."  And Soames took
+up a creation from the bed.
+
+Annette received it from him.
+
+"Would you hook me?" she said.
+
+Soames hooked.  Glancing once over her shoulder into the glass, he
+saw the expression on her face, faintly amused, faintly contemptuous,
+as much as to say: "Thanks!  You will never learn!"  No, thank God,
+he wasn't a Frenchman!  He finished with a jerk, and the words: "It's
+too low here."  And he went to the door, with the wish to get away
+from her and go down to Fleur again.
+
+Annette stayed a powder-puff, and said with startling suddenness
+
+"Que to es grossier!"
+
+He knew the expression--he had reason to.  The first time she had
+used it he had thought it meant "What a grocer you are!" and had not
+known whether to be relieved or not when better informed.  He
+resented the word--he was not coarse!  If he was coarse, what was
+that chap in the room beyond his, who made those horrible noises in
+the morning when he cleared his throat, or those people in the Lounge
+who thought it well-bred to say nothing but what the whole world
+could hear at the top of their voices--quacking inanity!  Coarse,
+because he had said her dress was low!  Well, so it was!  He went out
+without reply.
+
+Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where
+he had left her.  She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot
+in silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming.  Her
+eyes showed it too--they went off like that sometimes.  And then, in
+a moment, she would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a
+monkey.  And she knew so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen.
+What was that odious word?  Flapper!  Dreadful young creatures--
+squealing and squawking and showing their legs!  The worst of them
+bad dreams, the best of them powdered angels!  Fleur was not a
+flapper, not one of those slangy, ill-bred young females.  And yet
+she was frighteningly self-willed, and full of life, and determined
+to enjoy it.  Enjoy!  The word brought no puritan terror to Soames;
+but it brought the terror suited to his temperament.  He had always
+been afraid to enjoy to-day for fear he might not enjoy tomorrow so
+much.  And it was terrifying to feel that his daughter was divested
+of that safeguard.  The very way she sat in that chair showed it--
+lost in her dream.  He had never been lost in a dream himself--there
+was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it from he did not
+know!  Certainly not from Annette!  And yet Annette, as a young girl,
+when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look.  Well,
+she had lost it now!
+
+Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down
+at a writing-table.  Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to
+write as if she had not time to breathe before she got her letter
+written.  And suddenly she saw him.  The air of desperate absorption
+vanished, she smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were
+a little puzzled and a little bored.
+
+Ah!  She was "fine"--"fine!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AT ROBIN HILL
+
+
+Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill,
+quietly going into his affairs.  He did everything quietly now,
+because his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he
+disliked the idea of dying.  He had never realised how much till one
+day, two years ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms,
+and been told:
+
+"At any moment, on any overstrain."
+
+He had taken it with a smile--the natural Forsyte reaction against an
+unpleasant truth.  But with an increase of symptoms in the train on
+the way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over
+him.  To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work--though he did
+little enough work now!  To leave them for unknown darkness, for the
+unimaginable state, for such nothingness that he would not even be
+conscious of wind stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent
+of earth and grass.  Of such nothingness that, however hard he might
+try to conceive it, he never could, and must still hover on the hope
+that he might see again those he loved!  To realise this was to
+endure very poignant spiritual anguish.  Before he reached home that
+day he had determined to keep it from Irene.  He would have to be
+more careful than man had ever been, for the least thing would give
+it away and make her as wretched as himself, almost.  His doctor had
+passed him sound in other respects, and seventy was nothing of an
+age--he would last a long time yet, if he could.
+
+Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the
+full the subtler side of character.  Naturally not abrupt, except
+when nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate.  The sad
+patience of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a
+smile which his lips preserved even in private.  He devised
+continually all manner of cover to conceal his enforced lack of
+exertion.
+
+Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the
+Simple Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee
+with no coffee in it.  In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte
+in his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony.  Secure
+from discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had
+spent the fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might
+die to-morrow without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final
+polish to his terrestrial state.  Having docketed and enclosed it in
+his father's old Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope,
+wrote the words outside: "Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be
+found the exact state of me, J.  F.," and put it in his breast-
+pocket, where it would be always about him, in case of accident.
+Then, ringing for tea, he went out to have it under the old oak-tree.
+
+All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a
+little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he
+thought habitually, like other people, of other things.  He thought
+of his son now.
+
+Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
+Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his
+dead half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed
+to avoid the evil and contain the good of the Public School system,
+may or may not contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in
+April perfectly ignorant of whit he wanted to become.  The War, which
+had promised to go on for ever, had ended just as he was about to
+join the Army, six months before his time.  It had taken him ever
+since to get used to the idea that he could now choose for himself.
+He had held with his father several discussions, from which, under a
+cheery show of being ready for anything--except, of course, the
+Church, Army, Law, Stage, Stock Exchange, Medicine, Business, and
+Engineering--Jolyon had gathered rather clearly that Jon wanted to go
+in for nothing.  He himself had felt exactly like that at the same
+age.  With him that pleasant vacuity had soon been ended by an early
+marriage, and its unhappy consequences.  Forced to become an
+underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity before his
+artistic talent had outcropped.  But having--as the simple say--
+"learned" his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that Jon
+would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his
+aversion from everything else meant that he was going to be a writer.
+Holding, however, the view that experience was necessary even for
+that profession, there seemed to Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for
+Jon, but University, travel, and perhaps the eating of dinners for
+the Bar.  After that one would see, or more probably one would not.
+In face of these proffered allurements, however, Jon had remained
+undecided.
+
+Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether
+the world had really changed.  People said that it was a new age.
+With the profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived
+that under slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it
+had been.  Mankind was still divided into two species: The few who
+had "speculation" in their souls, and the many who had none, with a
+belt of hybrids like himself in the middle.  Jon appeared to have
+speculation; it seemed to his father a bad lookout.
+
+With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard
+the boy say, a fortnight ago: "I should like to try farming, Dad; if
+it won't cost you too much.  It seems to be about the only sort of
+life that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and of course that's out
+of the question for me."
+
+Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:
+
+"All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first
+Jolyon in 1760.  It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no
+doubt, you may grow a better turnip than he did."
+
+A little dashed, Jon had answered:
+
+"But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?"
+
+"'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it, you'll
+do more good than most men, which is little enough."
+
+To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it.  I give
+him four years.  Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'
+
+After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to
+his daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near
+them on the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice.  Holly's
+answer had been enthusiastic.  There was an excellent man quite
+close; she and Val would love Jon to live with them.
+
+The boy was due to go to-morrow.
+
+Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of
+the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
+thirty-two years.  The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day
+older!  So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the
+whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk.  A tree of memories,
+which would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut
+it down--would see old England out at the pace things were going!  He
+remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
+with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
+hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree.  Next day they had
+found a bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm.  That was before he knew
+that he was under sentence of death.  He could almost have wished the
+bomb had finished him.  It would have saved a lot of hanging about,
+many hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach.  He had counted on
+living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene
+would be seventy.  As it was, she would miss him.  Still there was
+Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who adored his
+mother.
+
+Under that tree, where old Jolyon--waiting for Irene to come to him
+across the lawn--had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
+whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not
+better close his own eyes and drift away.  There was something
+undignified in o parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of
+a life wherein he regretted two things only--the long division
+between his father and himself when he was young, and the lateness of
+his union o with Irene.
+
+>From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
+Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and
+his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower
+again.  Spring!  Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his
+heart was still young enough to love beauty!  Blackbirds sang
+recklessly in the shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves
+above him glistened; and over the fields was every imaginable tint of
+early foliage, burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the
+distant "smoke-bush" blue was trailed along the horizon.  Irene's
+flowers in their narrow beds had startling individuality that
+evening, little deep assertions of gay life.  Only Chinese and
+Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had known how to get that
+startling little ego into each painted flower, and bird, and beast--
+the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of life as well.
+They were the fellows!  'I've made nothing that will live!' thought
+Jolyon; 'I've been an amateur--a mere lover, not a creator.  Still, I
+shall leave Jon behind me when I go.'   What luck that the boy had
+not been caught by that ghastly war!  He might so easily have been
+killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal.  Jon
+would do something some day--if the Age didn't spoil him--an
+imaginative chap!  His whim to take up farming was but a bit of
+sentiment, and about as likely to last.  And just then he saw them
+coming up the field: Irene and the boy; walking from the station,
+with their arms linked.  And getting up, he strolled down through the
+new rose garden to meet them....
+
+Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window.  She
+sat there without speaking till he said:
+
+"What is it, my love?"
+
+"We had an encounter to-day."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Soames."
+
+Soames!  He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two
+years; conscious that it was bad for him.  And, now, his heart moved
+in a disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within his
+chest.
+
+Irene went on quietly:
+
+"He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
+confectioner's where we had tea."
+
+Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.
+
+"How did he look?"
+
+"Grey; but otherwise much the same."
+
+"And the daughter?"
+
+"Pretty.  At least, Jon thought so."
+
+Jolyon's heart side-slipped again.  His wife's face had a strained
+and puzzled look.
+
+
+"You didn't-?" he began.
+
+"No; but Jon knows their name.  The girl dropped her handkerchief and
+he picked it up."
+
+Jolyon sat down on his bed.  An evil chance!
+
+"June was with you.  Did she put her foot into it?"
+
+"No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it
+was."
+
+Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
+
+"I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from him.
+He'll find out some day."
+
+"The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard
+judgment.  When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your
+mother if she had done what I have?"
+
+Yes!  There it was!  Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of
+the tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the
+prisoned grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or
+passion--knew nothing at all, as yet!
+
+"What have you told him?" he said at last.
+
+"That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had
+never cared much for your family, or they for you.  I expect he will
+be asking you."
+
+Jolyon smiled.  "This promises to take the place of air-raids," he
+said.  "After all, one misses them."
+
+Irene looked up at him.
+
+"We've known it would come some day."
+
+He answered her with sudden energy:
+
+"I could never stand seeing Jon blame you.  He shan't do that, even
+in thought.  He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's put to
+him properly.  I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
+otherwise."
+
+"Not yet, Jolyon."
+
+That was like her--she had no foresight, and never went to meet
+trouble.  Still--who knew?--she might be right.  It was ill going
+against a mother's instinct.  It might be well to let the boy go on,
+if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by which
+he could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy,
+longing, had deepened his charity.  All the same, one must take
+precautions--every precaution possible!  And, long after Irene had
+left him, he lay awake turning over those precautions.  He must write
+to Holly, telling her that Jon knew nothing as yet of family history.
+Holly was discreet, she would make sure of her husband, she would see
+to it!  Jon could take the letter with him when he went to-morrow.
+
+And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate
+died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for
+Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so
+rounded off and polished....
+
+But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the
+prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, "love
+at first sight!"  He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of
+those dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno--a conviction that
+this was his 'dream'; so that what followed had seemed to him at once
+natural and miraculous.  Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for
+one who was terribly susceptible to the charm of words.  In a
+homoeopathic Age, when boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up
+in early life till sex was almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-
+fashioned.  His modern school took boys only, and his holidays had
+been spent at Robin Hill with boy friends, or his parents alone.  He
+had never, therefore, been inoculated against the germs of love by
+small doses of the poison.  And now in the dark his temperature was
+mounting fast.  He lay awake, featuring Fleur--as they called it--
+recalling her words, especially that "Au revoir!" so soft and
+sprightly.
+
+He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
+shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and
+out through the study window.  It was just light; there was a smell
+of grass.  'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!'  It was mysteriously white
+out of doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to
+chirp.  'I'll go down into the coppice,' he thought.  He ran down
+through the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed
+into the coppice.  Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the
+larch-trees there was mystery--the air, as it were, composed of that
+romantic quality.  Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the
+bluebells in the sharpening light.  Fleur!  It rhymed with her!  And
+she lived at Mapleduram--a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere.
+He could find it in the atlas presently.  He would write to her.  But
+would she answer?  Oh! She must.  She had said "Au revoir!"  Not
+good-bye!  What luck that she had dropped her handkerchief!  He would
+never have known her but for that.  And the more he thought of that
+handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.  Fleur!  It certainly
+rhymed with her!  Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be
+joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.
+
+Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then
+returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his
+bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration.  Then, remembering that the
+study window was open, he went down and shut it, first removing the
+ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his feeling.  The thing was
+too deep to be revealed to mortal soul-even-to his mother.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE MAUSOLEUM
+
+
+There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time,
+leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.  Such was not quite the
+condition of "Timothy's" on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul
+still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the
+atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose
+windows are only opened to air it twice a day.
+
+To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box,
+a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy.  One did not
+reach him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of
+old-time habit or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue
+moon and ask after their surviving uncle.  Such were Francie, now
+quite emancipated from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia,
+emancipated from old Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her "man of
+the world."  But, after all, everybody was emancipated now, or said
+they were--perhaps not quite the same thing!
+
+When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on
+the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation
+of seeing Timothy in the flesh.  His heart made a faint demonstration
+within him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly
+whitened doorstep of that little house where four Forsytes had once
+lived, and now but one dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into
+which Soames had come and out of which he had gone times without
+number, divested of, or burdened with, fardels of family gossip; the
+house of the "old people" of another century, another age.
+
+The sight of Smither--still corseted up to the armpits because the
+new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never
+been considered "nice" by Aunts Juley and Hester--brought a pale
+friendliness to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to
+old pattern in every detail, an invaluable servant--none such left--
+smiling back at him, with the words: "Why! it's Mr. Soames, after all
+this time!  And how are you, sir?  Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to
+know you've been."
+
+"How is he?"
+
+"Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's a
+wonderful man.  As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It
+would please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how
+he relishes a baked apple still.  But he's quite deaf.  And a mercy,
+I always think.  For what we should have done with him in the air-
+raids, I don't know."
+
+"Ah!" said Soames.  "What did you do with him?"
+
+"We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the
+cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang.  It would never
+have done to let him know there was a war on.  As I said to Cook, 'If
+Mr. Timothy rings, they may do what they like--I'm going up.  My dear
+mistresses would have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody
+going to him.'  But he slept through them all beautiful.  And the one
+in the daytime he was having his bath.  It was a mercy, because he
+might have noticed the people in the street all looking up--he often
+looks out of the window."
+
+"Quite!" murmured Soames.  Smither was getting garrulous!  "I just
+want to look round and see if there's anything to be done."
+
+"Yes, sir.  I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice in
+the dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of.  It's funny
+they should be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not
+coming down, just before the War.  But they're nasty little things;
+you never know where they'll take you next."
+
+"Does he leave his bed?"--
+
+"Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window
+in the morning, not to risk a change of air.  And he's quite
+comfortable in himself; has his Will out every day regular.  It's a
+great consolation to him--that."
+
+"Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything
+to say to me."
+
+Smither coloured up above her corsets.
+
+"It will be an occasion!" she said.  "Shall I take you round the
+house, sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?"
+
+"No, you go to him," said Soames.  "I can go round the house by
+myself."
+
+One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt
+that he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so
+saturated with the past.  When Smither, creaking with excitement, had
+left him, Soames entered the dining-room and sniffed.  In his opinion
+it wasn't mice, but incipient wood-rot, and he examined the
+panelling.  Whether it was worth a coat of paint, at Timothy's age,
+he was not sure.  The room had always been the most modern in the
+house; and only a faint smile curled Soames' lips and nostrils.
+Walls of a rich green surmounted the oak dado; a heavy metal
+chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling divided by imitation beams.
+The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a bargain, one day at
+Jobson's sixty years ago--three Snyder "still lifes," two faintly
+coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather charming, which bore
+the initials "J. R."--Timothy had always believed they might turn out
+to be Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who admired them, had discovered
+that they were only John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of a white
+pony being shod.  Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed dark
+mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and a
+mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
+apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body since
+he was four years old.  He looked especially at the two drawings, and
+thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'
+
+>From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study.  He did not
+remember ever having been in that room.  It was lined from floor to
+ceiling with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity.  One wall
+seemed devoted to educational books, which Timothy's firm had
+published two generations back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of
+one book.  Soames read their titles and shuddered.  The middle wall
+had precisely the same books as used to be in the library at his own
+father's in Park Lane, from which he deduced the fancy that James and
+his youngest brother had gone out together one day and bought a brace
+of small libraries.  The third wall he approached with more
+excitement.  Here, surely, Timothy's own taste would be found.  It
+was.  The books were dummies.  The fourth wall was all heavily
+curtained window.  And turned toward it was a large chair with a
+mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy
+of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to
+come down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him
+still.  In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited
+by Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but
+England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very
+sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the
+pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman;
+all due to Swithin, who was always taking things into his head, and
+who, thank goodness, had been sick too.  Soames knew all about it,
+having heard the tale fifty times at least from one or other of them.
+He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak
+and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs
+which had died on it in latitude 44.
+
+'Mausoleum!' he thought.  'George was right!'  And he went out and up
+the stairs.  On the half-landing he stopped before the case of
+stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood.  They looked
+not a day older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass.  If the case
+were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing
+would crumble, he suspected.  It wouldn't be worth putting that into
+the sale!  And suddenly he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann--dear
+old Aunt Ann--holding him by the hand in front of that case and
+saying: "Look, Soamey!  Aren't they bright and pretty, dear little
+humming-birds!"  Soames remembered his own answer: "They don't hum,
+Auntie."  He must have been six, in a black velveteen suit with a
+light-blue collar-he remembered that suit well!  Aunt Ann with her
+ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave old aquiline
+smile--a fine old lady, Aunt Ann!  He moved on up to the drawing-room
+door.  There on each side of it were the groups of miniatures.  Those
+he would certainIy buy in!  The miniatures of his four aunts, one of
+his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy.
+They had all been painted by a young lady friend of the family at a
+time, 1830, about, when miniatures were considered very genteel, and
+lasting too, painted as they were on ivory.  Many a time had he heard
+the tale of that young lady: "Very talented, my dear; she had quite a
+weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went into a consumption
+and died: so like Keats--we often spoke of it."
+
+Well, there they were!  Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan--quite a small
+child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
+waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on
+heaven.  Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been
+rather like that--a wonderful man to the last.  Yes, she must have
+had talent, and miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet
+of their own, little subject to the currents of competition on
+aesthetic Change.  Soames opened the drawing-room door.  The room was
+dusted, the furniture uncovered, the curtains drawn back, precisely
+as if his aunts still dwelt there patiently waiting.  And a thought
+came to him: When Timothy died--why not?  Would it not be almost a
+duty to preserve this house--like Carlyle's--and put up a tablet, and
+show it?  "Specimen of mid-Victorian abode--entrance, one shilling,
+with catalogue."  After all, it was the completest thing, and perhaps
+the deadest in the London of to-day.  Perfect in its special taste
+and culture, if, that is, he took down and carried over to his own
+collection the four Barbizon pictures he had given them.  The still
+sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned with red flowers and
+ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the cast-iron grate; the
+mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of little knickknacks; the
+beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey, Cowper, Coleridge,
+Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in a
+bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full
+of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their mother's
+father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow
+elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte,
+who had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery
+writing on it, recording God knew what!  And the pictures crowding on
+the walls--all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like
+tile foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that--pictures
+bright and illustrative, "Telling the Bees," "Hey for the Ferry!" and
+two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them
+by Swithin.  Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed a
+thousand times in supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection
+of bright, smooth gilt frames.
+
+And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed
+as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it.  And the
+gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked.  And on one side of
+the fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her
+Aunt Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright.
+And on the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to
+the light, for Aunt Hester.  Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to
+see them sitting there.  Ah!  and the atmosphere--even now, of too
+many stuffs and washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried
+bees' wings.  'No,' he thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it
+ought to be preserved.'  And, by George, they might laugh at it, but
+for a standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness
+of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day hollow--to-day
+with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its cross-legged,
+bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down to the waist if
+you took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr within each Forsyte but
+hardly his idea of a lady), with their feet, too, screwed round the
+legs of their chairs while they ate, and their "So longs," and their
+"Old Beans," and their laughter--girls who gave him the shudders
+whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed,
+capable, older women who managed life and gave him the shudders too.
+No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or
+very much their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and
+reverence for past and future.
+
+With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing up-
+stairs.  He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order of
+the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls.  At
+the top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors.  Which of them
+was Timothy's?  And he listened.  A sound, as of a child slowly
+dragging a hobby-horse about, came to his ears.  That must be
+Timothy!  He tapped, and a door was opened by Smither, very red in
+the face.
+
+Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him
+to attend.  If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see
+him through the door.
+
+Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.
+
+The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
+impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
+affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the
+window, a distance of some twelve feet.  The lower part of his square
+face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as
+short as it could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where
+the hair was also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a
+good yellow.  One hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the
+skirt of his Jaeger dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his
+bed-socked ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers.  The
+expression on his face was that of a crossed child, intent on
+something that he has not got.  Each time he turned he stumped the
+stick, and then dragged it, as if to show that he could do without
+it:
+
+"He still looks strong," said Soames under his breath.
+
+"Oh! yes, sir.  You should see him take his bath--it's wonderful; he
+does enjoy it so."
+
+Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight.  Timothy had resumed
+his babyhood.
+
+"Does he take any interest in things generally?" he said, also loud.
+
+"Oh I yes, sir; his food and his Will.  It's quite a sight to see him
+turn it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every now and
+then he asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a slate for him-
+very large.  Of course, I always write the same, what they were when
+he last took notice, in 1914.  We got the doctor to forbid him to
+read the paper when the War broke out.  Oh! he did take on about that
+at first.  But he soon came round, because he knew it tired him; and
+he's a wonder to conserve energy as he used to call it when my dear
+mistresses were alive, bless their hearts!  How he did go on at them
+about that; they were always so active, if you remember, Mr. Soames."
+
+"What would happen if I were to go in?" asked Soames: "Would he
+remember me?  I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in
+1907."
+
+"Oh! that, sir," replied Smither doubtfully, "I couldn't take on me
+to say.  I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his age."
+
+Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn, said
+in a loud voice: "Uncle Timothy!"
+
+Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.
+
+"Eh?" he said.
+
+"Soames," cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out his hand,
+"Soames Forsyte!"
+
+"No!" said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the floor, he
+continued his walk.
+
+"It doesn't seem to work," said Soames.
+
+"No, sir," replied Smither, rather crestfallen; "you see, he hasn't
+finished his walk.  It always was one thing at a time with him.  I
+expect he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the gas, and a
+pretty job I shall have to make him understand."
+
+"Do you think he ought to have a man about him?"
+
+Smither held up her hands.  "A man!  Oh! no.  Cook and me can manage
+perfectly.  A strange man about would send him crazy in no time.  And
+my mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house.  Besides,
+we're so--proud of him."
+
+"I suppose the doctor comes?"
+
+"Every morning.  He makes special terms for such a quantity, and Mr.
+Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to put out
+his tongue."
+
+"Well," said Soames, turning away, "it's rather sad and painful to
+me."
+
+"Oh! sir," returned Smither anxiously, "you mustn't think that.  Now
+that he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life, really he
+does.  As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man than he ever
+was.  You see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his bath, he's
+eatin', and when he's not eatin', he's sleepin'; and there it is.
+
+There isn't an ache or a care about him anywhere."
+
+"Well," said Soames, "there's something in that.  I'll go down.  By
+the way, let me see his Will."
+
+"I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under his
+pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active."
+
+"I only want to know if it's the one I made," said Soames; "you take
+a look at its date some time, and let me know."
+
+"Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and Cook witnessed,
+you remember, and there's our names on it still, and we've only done
+it once."
+
+"Quite," said Soames.  He did remember.  Smither and Jane had been
+proper witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they
+might have no interest in Timothy's death.  It had been--he fully
+admitted--an almost improper precaution, but Timothy had wished it,
+and, after all, Aunt Hester had provided for them amply.
+
+"Very well," he said; "good-bye, Smither.  Look after him, and if he
+should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me know."
+
+"Oh I yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that.  It's been such a
+pleasant change to see you.  Cook will be quite excited when I tell
+her."
+
+Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs.  He stood for fully two
+minutes by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many times.
+'So it all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins again.  Poor
+old chap!'  And he listened, if perchance the sound of Timothy
+trailing his hobby-horse might come down the well of the stairs; or
+some ghost of an old face show over the bannisters, and an old voice
+say: 'Why, it's dear Soames, and we were only saying that we hadn't
+seen him for a week!'
+
+Nothing--nothing!  Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a
+sunbeam through the fanlight over the door.  The little old house!  A
+mausoleum!  And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his
+train.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE NATIVE HEATH
+
+
+          "His foot's upon his native heath,
+          His name's--Val Dartie."
+
+With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his
+age, set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old
+manor-house he had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs.  His
+destination was Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn
+of 1899, when he stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire.  He
+paused at the door to give his wife a kiss, and put a flask of port
+into his pocket.
+
+"Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much."
+
+With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes looking
+into his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe.  He should be moderate;
+Holly was always right--she had a natural aptitude.  It did not seem
+so remarkable to him, perhaps, as it might to others, that--half
+Dartie as he was--he should have been perfectly faithful to his young
+first cousin during the twenty years since he married her
+romantically out in the Boer War; and faithful without any feeling of
+sacrifice or boredom--she was so quick, so slyly always a little in
+front of his mood.  Being first cousins they had decided, rather
+needlessly, to have no children; and, though a little sallower, she
+had kept her looks, her slimness, and the colour of her dark hair.
+Val particularly admired the life of her own she carried on, besides
+carrying on his, and riding better every year.  She kept up her
+music, she read an awful lot--novels, poetry, all sorts of stuff.
+Out on their farm in Cape colony she had looked after all the
+"nigger" babies and women in a miraculous manner.  She was, in fact,
+clever; yet made no fuss about it, and had no "side."  Though not
+remarkable for humility, Val had come to have the feeling that she
+was his superior, and he did not grudge it--a great tribute.  It
+might be noted that he never looked at Holly without her knowing of
+it, but that she looked at him sometimes unawares.
+
+He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so on
+the platform, though she was going to the station with him, to drive
+the car back.  Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles
+inseparable from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened
+in the Boer War, had probably saved his life in the War just past,
+Val was still much as he had been in the days of his courtship; his
+smile as wide and charming, his eyelashes, if anything, thicker and
+darker, his eyes screwed up under them, as bright a grey, his
+freckles rather deeper, his hair a little grizzled at the sides.  He
+gave the impression of one who has lived actively with horses in a
+sunny climate.
+
+Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:
+
+"When is young Jon coming?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+"Is there anything you want for him?  I could bring it down on
+Saturday."
+
+"No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur--one-forty."
+
+Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new
+country on bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects heaven
+at every hole.
+
+"That's a young woman who knows her way about," he said.  "I say, has
+it struck you?"
+
+"Yes," said Holly.
+
+"Uncle Soames and your Dad--bit awkward, isn't it?"
+
+"She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be said, of
+course.  It's only for five days, Val."
+
+"Stable secret!  Righto!"  If Holly thought it safe, it was.
+Glancing slyly round at him, she said: "Did you notice how
+beautifully she asked herself?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Well, she did.  What do you think of her, Val?"
+
+"Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she got
+her monkey up, I should say."
+
+"I'm wondering," Holly murmured, "whether she is the modern young
+woman.  One feels at sea coming home into all this."
+
+"You?  You get the hang of things so quick."
+
+Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.
+
+"You keep one in the know," said Val encouraged.  "What do you think
+of that Belgian fellow, Profond?"
+
+"I think he's rather 'a good devil.'"
+
+Val grinned.
+
+"He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family.  In fact,
+our family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying a
+Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first.  Our grandfathers
+would have had fits!"
+
+"So would anybody's, my dear."
+
+"This car," Val said suddenly, "wants rousing; she doesn't get her
+hind legs under her uphill.  I shall have to give her her head on the
+slope if I'm to catch that train."
+
+There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really
+sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his
+guidance compared with its running under that of Holly was always
+noticeable.  He caught the train.
+
+"Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can.  Good-bye,
+darling."
+
+"Good-bye," called Holly, and kissed her hand.
+
+In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between thoughts
+of Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim
+memory of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square
+book, all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and
+shape of horses.  The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a
+certain strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the
+Dartie hankering for a Nutter.  On getting back to England, after the
+profitable sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing
+that the sun seldom shone, Val had said to himself: "I've absolutely
+got to have an interest in life, or this country will give me the
+blues.  Hunting's not enough, I'll breed and I'll train."  With just
+that extra pinch of shrewdness and decision imparted by long
+residence in a new country, Val had seen the weak point of modern
+breeding.  They were all hypnotised by fashion and high price.  He
+should buy for looks, and let names go hang!  And here he was
+already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain of blood!
+Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in this damned
+climate which makes one go round in a ring.  All the same, I must
+have a strain of Mayfly blood.'
+
+In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes.  It was one of those
+quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather
+than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock.
+His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in
+which he had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the
+horseman, and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he
+called "the silly haw-haw" of some Englishmen, the "flapping
+cockatoory" of some English-women--Holly had none of that and Holly
+was his model.  Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to
+the heart of a transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way
+to the heart of a Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:
+
+"Mr. Val Dartie?  How's Mrs. Val Dartie?  She's well, I hope."  And
+he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.
+
+"Prosper Profond--I met you at lunch," said the voice.
+
+"How are you?" murmured Val.
+
+"I'm very well," replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
+inimitable slowness.  "A good devil," Holly had called him.  Well!
+He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed
+beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes,
+unexpectedly intelligent.
+
+"Here's a gentleman wants to know you--cousin of yours--Mr. George
+Forsyde."
+
+Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
+lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
+remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father
+at the Iseeum Club.
+
+"I used to go racing with your father," George was saying: "How's the
+stud?  Like to buy one of my screws?"
+
+Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen
+out of breeding.  They believed in nothing over here, not even in
+horses.  George Forsyte, Prosper Profond!  The devil himself was not
+more disillusioned than those two.
+
+"Didn't know you were a racing man," he said to Monsieur Profond.
+
+"I'm not.  I don't care for it.  I'm a yachtin' man.  I don't care
+for yachtin' either, but I like to see my friends.  I've got some
+lunch, Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you'd like to 'ave
+some; not much--just a small one--in my car."
+
+"Thanks," said Val; "very good of you.  I'll come along in about
+quarter of an hour."
+
+"Over there.  Mr. Forsyde's comin'," and Monsieur Profond "poinded"
+with a yellow-gloved finger; "small car, with a small lunch"; he
+moved on, groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte following,
+neat, huge, and with his jesting air.
+
+Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly.  George Forsyte, of course,
+was an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val
+felt extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which
+those two had laughed.  The animal had lost reality.
+
+"That 'small' mare"--he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur Profond-
+-"what do you see in her?--we must all die!"
+
+And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still!  The Mayfly
+strain--was it any better than any other?  He might just as well have
+a flutter with his money instead.
+
+"No, by gum!" he muttered suddenly, "if it's no good breeding horses,
+it's no good doing anything.  What did I come for?  I'll buy her."
+
+He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the
+stand.  Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers
+looking as if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their
+lives; tall, flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women;
+young men with an air as if trying to take it seriously--two or three
+of them with only one arm.
+
+'Life over here's a game!'  thought Val.  'Muffin bell rings, horses
+run, money changes hands; ring again, run again, money changes back.'
+
+But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to
+watch the Mayfly filly canter down.  She moved well; and he made his
+way over to the "small" car.  The "small" lunch was the sort a man
+dreams of but seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond
+walked back with him to the paddock.
+
+"Your wife's a nice woman," was his surprising remark.
+
+"Nicest woman I know," returned Val dryly.
+
+"Yes," said Monsieur Profond; "she has a nice face.  I admire nice
+women."
+
+Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct in
+the heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the moment.
+
+"Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small
+cruise."
+
+"Thanks," said Val, in arms again, "she hates the sea."
+
+"So do I," said Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Then why do you yacht?"
+
+The Belgian's eyes smiled.  "Oh! I don't know.  I've done everything;
+it's the last thing I'm doin'."
+
+"It must be d-d expensive.  I should want more reason than that."
+
+Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a heavy
+lower lip.
+
+"I'm an easy-goin' man," he said.
+
+"Were you in the War?" asked Val.
+
+"Ye-es.  I've done that too.  I was gassed; it was a small bit
+unpleasant."  He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity, as
+if he had caught it from his name.
+
+Whether his saying "small" when he ought to have said "little" was
+genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
+evidently capable of anything.
+
+Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
+Monsieur Profond said:
+
+"You goin' to bid?"
+
+Val nodded.  With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of
+faith.  Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the
+forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year
+to which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her
+grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could touch,
+having spent most of what he had realised from his South African farm
+on his establishment in Sussex.  And very soon he was thinking: 'Dash
+it! she's going beyond me!'  His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he
+dropped out of the bidding.  The Mayfly filly passed under the hammer
+at seven hundred and fifty guineas.  He was turning away vexed when
+the slow voice of Monsieur Profond said in his ear:
+
+"Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you take
+her and give her to your wife."
+
+Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour
+in his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.
+
+"I made a small lot of money in the War," began Monsieur Profond in
+answer to that look.  "I 'ad armament shares.  I like to give it
+away.  I'm always makin' money.  I want very small lot myself.  I
+like my friends to 'ave it."
+
+"I'll buy her of you at the price you gave," said Val with sudden
+resolution.
+
+"No," said Monsieur Profond.  "You take her.  I don' want her."
+
+"Hang it! one doesn't--"
+
+"Why not?" smiled Monsieur Profond.  "I'm a friend of your family."
+
+"Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars," said Val
+impatiently.
+
+"All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you like
+with her."
+
+"So long as she's yours," said Val.  "I don't mind that."
+
+"That's all right," murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.
+
+Val watched; he might be "a good devil," but then again he might not.
+He saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no more.
+
+He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
+Street.
+
+Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering
+the three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague
+Dartie, till almost happily released by a French staircase.  It was
+to her a vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from
+South Africa after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and
+to have taken a fancy to his wife.  Winifred, who in the late
+seventies, before her marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom,
+pleasure, and fashion, confessed her youth outclassed by the
+donzellas of the day.  They seemed, for instance, to regard marriage
+as an incident, and Winifred sometimes regretted that she had not
+done the same; a second, third, fourth incident might have secured
+her a partner of less dazzling inebriety; though, after all, he had
+left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a colonel and unharmed
+by the War--none of whom had been divorced as yet.  The steadiness of
+her children often amazed one who remembered their father; but, as
+she was fond of believing, they were really all Forsytes, favouring
+herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen.  Her brother's
+"little girl" Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred.  The child was as
+restless as any of these modern young women0--"She's a small flame in
+a draught," Prosper Profond had said one day after dinner--but she
+did not flop, or talk at the top of her voice.  The steady Forsyteism
+in Winifred's own character instinctively resented the feeling in the
+air, the modern girl's habits and her motto: "All's much of a
+muchness!  Spend, to-morrow we shall be poor!"  She found it a saving
+grace in Fleur that, having set her heart on a thing, she had no
+change of heart until she got it--though--what happened after, Fleur
+was, of course, too young to have made evident.  The child was a
+"very pretty little thing," too, and quite a credit to take about,
+with her mother's French taste and gift for wearing clothes;
+everybody turned to look at Fleur--great consideration to Winifred, a
+lover of the style and distinction which had so cruelly deceived her
+in the case of Montague Dartie.
+
+In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning,
+Winifred dwelt on the family skeleton.
+
+"That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene, Val--
+it's old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing about it--
+making a fuss.  Your Uncle Soames is very particular about that.  So
+you'll be careful."
+
+"Yes!  But it's dashed awkward--Holly's young half-brother is coming
+to live with us while he learns farming.  He's there already."
+
+"Oh!" said Winifred.  "That is a gaff!  What is he like?"
+
+"Only saw him once--at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909; he was
+naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes--a jolly little chap."
+
+Winifred thought that "rather nice," and added comfortably: "Well,
+Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with it.  I shan't tell
+your uncle.  It'll only bother him.  It's a great comfort to have you
+back, my dear boy, now that I'm getting on."
+
+"Getting on!  Why!  you're as young as ever.  That chap Profond,
+Mother, is he all right?"
+
+"Prosper Profond!  Oh! the most amusing man I know."
+
+Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.
+
+"That's so like him," murmured Winifred.  "He does all sorts of
+things."
+
+"Well," said Val shrewdly, "our family haven't been too lucky with
+that kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted for us."
+
+It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute before
+she answered:
+
+"Oh! well!  He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances."
+
+"All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow."
+
+And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and left
+her for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria station.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+JON
+
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen
+deeply in love, fortunately with something of her own, for the object
+of her passion was the prospect in front of her windows, the cool
+clear light on the green Downs.  It was England again, at last!
+England more beautiful than she had dreamed.  Chance had, in fact,
+guided the Val Darties to a spot where the South Downs had real charm
+when the sun shone.  Holly had enough of her father's eye to
+apprehend the rare quality of their outlines and chalky radiance; to
+go up there by the ravine-like lane and wander along toward
+Chanctonbury or Amberley, was still a delight which she hardly
+attempted to share with Val, whose admiration of Nature was confused
+by a Forsyte's instinct for getting something out of it, such as the
+condition of the turf for his horses' exercise.
+
+Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she
+promised herself that the first use she would make of Jon would be to
+take him up there, and show him "the view" under this May-day sky.
+
+She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a motherliness
+not exhausted by Val.  A three-day visit to Robin Hill, soon after
+their arrival home, had yielded no sight of him--he was still at
+school; so that her recollection, like Val's, was of a little sunny-
+haired boy, striped blue and yellow, down by the pond.
+
+Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad, embarrassing.
+Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's courtship; the ageing
+of her father, not seen for twenty years, something funereal in his
+ironic gentleness which did not escape one who had much subtle
+instinct; above all, the presence of her stepmother, whom she could
+still vaguely remember as the "lady in grey" of days when she was
+little and grandfather alive and Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because
+that intruder gave her music lessons--all these confused and
+tantalised a spirit which had longed to find Robin Hill untroubled.
+But Holly was adept at keeping things to herself, and all had seemed
+to go quite well.
+
+Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she was
+sure had trembled.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said, "the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has it?
+If only you could have brought Jolly back with you!  I say, can you
+stand this spiritualistic racket?  When the oak-tree dies, it dies,
+I'm afraid."
+
+>From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had let
+the cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.
+
+"Spiritualism--queer word, when the more they manifest the more they
+prove that they've got hold of matter."
+
+"How?" said Holly.
+
+"Why!  Look at their photographs of auric presences.  You must have
+something material for light and shade to fall on before you can take
+a photograph.  No, it'll end in our calling all matter spirit, or all
+spirit matter--I don't know which."
+
+"But don't you believe in survival, Dad?"
+
+Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face
+impressed her deeply.
+
+"Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death.  I've
+been looking into it a bit.  But for the life of me I can't find
+anything that telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from the
+storehouse of this world can't account for just as well.  Wish I
+could!  Wishes father thought but they don't breed evidence."
+Holly had pressed her lips again to his forehead with the feeling
+that it confirmed his theory that all matter was becoming spirit--his
+brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.
+
+But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been watching,
+unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter from Jon.  It
+was--she decided--the prettiest sight she had ever seen.  Irene, lost
+as it were in the letter of her boy, stood at a window where the
+light fell on her face and her fine grey hair; her lips were moving,
+smiling, her dark eyes laughing, dancing, and the hand which did not
+hold the letter was pressed against her breast.  Holly withdrew as
+from a vision of perfect love, convinced that Jon must be nice.
+
+When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in either
+hand, she was confirmed in her predisposition.  He was a little like
+Jolly, that long-lost idol of her childhood, but eager-looking and
+less formal, with deeper eyes and brighter-coloured hair, for he wore
+no hat; altogether a very interesting "little" brother!
+
+His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance
+in the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him
+home, instead of his driving her.  Shouldn't he have a shot?  They
+hadn't a car at Robin Hill since the War, of course, and he had only
+driven once, and landed up a bank, so she oughtn't to mind his
+trying.  His laugh, soft and infectious, was very attractive, though
+that word, she had heard, was now quite old-fashioned.  When they
+reached the house he pulled out a crumpled letter which she read
+while he was washing--a quite short letter, which must have cost her
+father many a pang to write.
+
+
+"MY DEAR,
+
+"You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of
+family history.  His mother and I think he is too young at present.
+The boy is very dear, and the apple of her eye.  Verbum sapientibus.
+your loving father,
+
+"J. F."
+
+
+That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur was
+coming.
+
+After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up the
+hill.  They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit grown
+over with brambles and goosepenny.  Milkwort and liverwort starred
+the green slope, the larks sang, and thrushes in the brake, and now
+and then a gull flighting inland would wheel very white against the
+paling sky, where the vague moon was coming up.  Delicious fragrance
+came to them, as if little invisible creatures were running and
+treading scent out of the blades of grass.
+
+Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:
+
+"I say, this is wonderful!  There's no fat on it at all.  Gull's
+flight and sheep-bells"
+
+"'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'!  You're a poet, my dear!"
+
+Jon sighed.
+
+"Oh, Golly!  No go!"
+
+"Try!  I used to at your age."
+
+"Did you?  Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so rotten.  Have you any of
+yours for me to see?"
+
+"My dear," Holly murmured, "I've been married nineteen years.  I only
+wrote verses when I wanted to be."
+
+"Oh!" said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she could
+see was a charming colour.  Was Jon "touched in the wind," then, as
+Val would have called it?  Already?  But, if so, all the better, he
+would take no notice of young Fleur.  Besides, on Monday he would
+begin his farming.  And she smiled.  Was it Burns who followed the
+plough, or only Piers Plowman?  Nearly every young man and most young
+women seemed to be poets now, judging from the number of their books
+she had read out in South Africa, importing them from Hatchus and
+Bumphards; and quite good--oh! quite; much better than she had been
+herself!  But then poetry had only really come in since her day--with
+motor-cars.  Another long talk after dinner over a wood fire in the
+low hall, and there seemed little left to know about Jon except
+anything of real importance.  Holly parted from him at his bedroom
+door, having seen twice over that he had everything, with the
+conviction that she would love him, and Val would like him.  He was
+eager, but did not gush; he was a splendid listener, sympathetic,
+reticent about himself.  He evidently loved their father, and adored
+his mother.  He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games.
+He saved moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them
+out of doors in screws of paper sooner than kill them.  In a word, he
+was amiable.  She went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer
+horribly if anybody hurt him; but who would hurt him?
+
+Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of paper
+and a pencil, writing his first "real poem" by the light of a candle
+because there was not enough moon to see by, only enough to make the
+night seem fluttery and as if engraved on silver.  Just the night for
+Fleur to walk, and turn her eyes, and lead on-over the hills and far
+away.  And Jon, deeply furrowed in his ingenuous brow, made marks on
+the paper and rubbed them out and wrote them in again, and did all
+that was necessary for the completion of a work of art; and he had a
+feeling such as the winds of Spring must have, trying their first
+songs among the coming blossom.  Jon was one of those boys (not many)
+in whom a home-trained love of beauty had survived school life.  He
+had had to keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the
+drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear
+within him.  And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the
+night was winged.  But he kept it, all the same.  It was a "beast,"
+but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible.  And
+he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show it
+to Mother.'  He slept terribly well, when he did sleep, overwhelmed
+by novelty.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FLEUR
+
+
+To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered,
+all that had been told Jon was:
+
+"There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end."
+
+For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: "We've got a
+youngster staying with us."
+
+The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore
+in a manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired.
+They were thus introduced by Holly:
+
+"This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon."
+
+Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong
+sunlight, was so confounded by the providential nature of this
+miracle, that he had time to hear Fleur say calmly: "Oh, how do you
+do?" as if he had never seen her, and to understand dimly from the
+quickest imaginable little movement of her head that he never had
+seen her.  He bowed therefore over her hand in an intoxicated manner,
+and became more silent than the grave.  He knew better than to speak.
+Once in his early life, surprised reading by a nightlight, he had
+said fatuously "I was just turning over the leaves, Mum," and his
+mother had replied: "Jon, never tell stories, because of your face
+nobody will ever believe them."
+
+The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
+success of spoken untruth.  He listened therefore to Fleur's swift
+and rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with
+scones and jam, and got away as soon as might be.  They say that in
+delirium tremens you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which
+suddenly changes shape and position.  Jon saw the fixed object; it
+had dark eyes and passably dark hair, and changed its position, but
+never its shape.  The knowledge that between him and that object
+there was already a secret understanding (however impossible to
+understand) thrilled him so that he waited feverishly, and began to
+copy out his poem--which of course he would never dare to--show her--
+till the sound of horses' hoofs roused him, and, leaning from his
+window, he saw her riding forth with Val.  It was clear that she
+wasted no time, but the sight filled him with grief.  He wasted his.
+If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy, he might have been
+asked to go too.  And from his window he sat and watched them
+disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge
+once more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down.  'Silly
+brute!' he thought; 'I always miss my chances.'
+
+Why couldn't he be self-confident and ready?  And, leaning his chin
+on his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her.  A
+week-end was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it.
+Did he know any one except himself who would have been such a flat?
+He did not.
+
+He dressed for dinner early, and was first down.  He would miss no
+more.  But he missed Fleur, who came down last.  He sat opposite her
+at dinner, and it was terrible--impossible to say anything for fear
+of saying the wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her
+in the only natural way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one
+with whom in fancy he had already been over the hills and far away;
+conscious, too, all the time, that he must seem to her, to all of
+them, a dumb gawk.  Yes, it was terrible!  And she was talking so
+well--swooping with swift wing this way and that.  Wonderful how she
+had learned an art which he found so disgustingly difficult.  She
+must think him hopeless indeed!
+
+His sister's eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged
+him at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and
+eager, seeming to say, "Oh! for goodness' sake!" obliged him to look
+at Val, where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet--that, at
+least, had no eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.
+
+"Jon is going to be a farmer," he heard Holly say; "a farmer and a
+poet."
+
+He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow
+just like their father's, laughed, and felt better.
+
+Val recounted the incident of Monsieur Prosper Profond; nothing could
+have been more favourable, for, in relating it, he regarded Holly,
+who in turn regarded him, while Fleur seemed to be regarding with a
+slight frown some thought of her own, and Jon was really free to look
+at her at last.  She had on a white frock, very simple and well made;
+her arms were bare, and her hair had a white rose in it.  In just
+that swift moment of free vision, after such intense discomfort, Jon
+saw her sublimated, as one sees in the dark a slender white fruit-
+tree; caught her like a verse of poetry flashed before the eyes of
+the mind, or a tune which floats out in the distance and dies.
+He wondered giddily how old she was--she seemed so much more self-
+possessed and experienced than himself.  Why mustn't he say they had
+met?  He remembered suddenly his mother's face; puzzled, hurt-
+looking, when she answered: "Yes, they're relations, but we don't
+know them."  Impossible that his mother, who loved beauty, should not
+admire Fleur if she did know her.
+
+Alone with Val after dinner, he sipped port deferentially and
+answered the advances of this new-found brother-in-law.  As to riding
+(always the first consideration with Val) he could have the young
+chestnut, saddle and unsaddle it himself, and generally look after it
+when he brought it in.  Jon said he was accustomed to all that at
+home, and saw that he had gone up one in his host's estimation.
+
+"Fleur," said Val, "can't ride much yet, but she's keen.  Of course,
+her father doesn't know a horse from a cart-wheel.  Does your Dad
+ride?"
+
+"He used to; but now he's--you know, he's--"He stopped, so hating the
+word "old."  His father was old, and yet not old; no--never!
+
+"Quite," muttered Val.  "I used to know your brother up at Oxford,
+ages ago, the one who died in the Boer War.  We had a fight in New
+College Gardens.  That was a queer business," he added, musing; "a
+good deal came out of it."
+
+Jon's eyes opened wide; all was pushing him toward historical
+research, when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:
+
+"Come along, you two," and he rose, his heart pushing him toward
+something far more modern.
+
+Fleur having declared that it was "simply too wonderful to stay
+indoors," they all went out.  Moonlight was frosting the dew, and an
+old sundial threw a long shadow.  Two box hedges at right angles,
+dark and square, barred off the orchard.  Fleur turned through that
+angled opening.
+
+"Come on!" she called.  Jon glanced at the others, and followed.  She
+was running among the trees like a ghost.  All was lovely and
+foamlike above her, and there was a scent of old trunks, and of
+nettles.  She vanished.  He thought he had lost her, then almost ran
+into her standing quite still.
+
+"Isn't it jolly?" she cried, and Jon answered:
+
+"Rather!"
+
+She reached up, twisted off a blossom and, twirling it in her
+fingers, said:
+
+"I suppose I can call you Jon?"
+
+"I should think so just."
+
+"All right!  But you know there's a feud between our families?"
+
+Jon stammered: "Feud?  Why?"
+
+"It's ever so romantic and silly.  That's why I pretended we hadn't
+met.  Shall we get up early to-morrow morning and go for a walk
+before breakfast and have it out?  I hate being slow about things,
+don't you?"
+
+Jon murmured a rapturous assent.
+
+"Six o'clock, then.  I think your mother's beautiful"
+
+Jon said fervently: "Yes, she is."
+
+"I love all kinds of beauty," went on Fleur, "when it's exciting.  I
+don't like Greek things a bit."
+
+"What!  Not Euripides?"
+
+"Euripides?  Oh! no, I can't bear Greek plays; they're so long.  I
+think beauty's always swift.  I like to look at one picture, for
+instance, and then run off.  I can't bear a lot of things together.
+Look!"  She held up her blossom in the moonlight.  "That's better
+than all the orchard, I think."
+
+And, suddenly, with her other hand she caught Jon's.
+
+"Of all things in the world, don't you think caution's the most
+awful?  Smell the moonlight!"
+
+She thrust the blossom against his face; Jon agreed giddily that of
+all things in the world caution was the worst, and bending over,
+kissed the hand which held his.
+
+"That's nice and old-fashioned," said Fleur calmly.  "You're
+frightfully silent, Jon.  Still I like silence when it's swift."  She
+let go his hand.  "Did you think I dropped my handkerchief on
+purpose?"
+
+"No!" cried Jon, intensely shocked.
+
+"Well, I did, of course.  Let's get back, or they'll think we're
+doing this on purpose too."  And again she ran like a ghost among the
+trees.  Jon followed, with love in his heart, Spring in his heart,
+and over all the moonlit white unearthly blossom.  They came out
+where they had gone in, Fleur walking demurely.
+
+"It's quite wonderful in there," she said dreamily to Holly.
+
+Jon preserved silence, hoping against hope that she might be thinking
+it swift.
+
+She bade him a casual and demure good-night, which made him think he
+had been dreaming....
+
+In her bedroom Fleur had flung off her gown, and, wrapped in a
+shapeless garment, with the white flower still in her hair, she
+looked like a mousme, sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing by
+candlelight.
+
+
+"DEAREST CHERRY,
+
+"I believe I'm in love.  I've got it in the neck, only the feeling is
+really lower down.  He's a second cousin-such a child, about six
+months older and ten years younger than I am.  Boys always fall in
+love with their seniors, and girls with their juniors or with old men
+of forty.  Don't laugh, but his eyes are the truest things I ever
+saw; and he's quite divinely silent!  We had a most romantic first
+meeting in London under the Vospovitch Juno.  And now he's sleeping
+in the next room and the moonlight's on the blossom; and to-morrow
+morning, before anybody's awake, we're going to walk off into Down
+fairyland.  There's a feud between our families, which makes it
+really exciting.  Yes! and I may have to use subterfuge and come on
+you for invitations--if so, you'll know why!  My father doesn't want
+us to know each other, but I can't help that.  Life's too short.
+He's got the most beautiful mother, with lovely silvery hair and a
+young face with dark eyes.  I'm staying with his sister--who married
+my cousin; it's all mixed up, but I mean to pump her to-morrow.
+We've often talked about love being a spoil-sport; well, that's all
+tosh, it's the beginning of sport, and the sooner you feel it, my
+dear, the better for you.
+
+"Jon (not simplified spelling, but short for Jolyon, which is a name
+in my family, they say) is the sort that lights up and goes out;
+about five feet ten, still growing, and I believe he's going to be a
+poet.  If you laugh at me I've done with you forever.  I perceive all
+sorts of difficulties, but you know when I really want a thing I get
+it.  One of the chief effects of love is that you see the air sort of
+inhabited, like seeing a face in the moon; and you feel--you feel
+dancey and soft at the same time, with a funny sensation--like a
+continual first sniff of orange--blossom--Just above your stays.
+This is my first, and I feel as if it were going to be my last, which
+is absurd, of course, by all the laws of Nature and morality.  If you
+mock me I will smite you, and if you tell anybody I will never
+forgive you.  So much so, that I almost don't think I'll send this
+letter.  Anyway, I'll sleep over it.  So good-night, my Cherry--oh!
+"Your,
+
+"FLEUR."
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+IDYLL ON GRASS
+
+When those two young Forsytes emerged from the chine lane, and set
+their faces east toward the sun, there was not a cloud in heaven, and
+the Downs were dewy.  They had come at a good bat up the slope and
+were a little out of breath; if they had anything to say they did not
+say it, but marched in the early awkwardness of unbreakfasted morning
+under the songs of the larks.  The stealing out had been fun, but
+with the freedom of the tops the sense of conspiracy ceased, and gave
+place to dumbness.
+
+"We've made one blooming error," said Fleur, when they had gone half
+a mile.  "I'm hungry."
+
+Jon produced a stick of chocolate.  They shared it and their tongues
+were loosened.  They discussed the nature of their homes and previous
+existences, which had a kind of fascinating unreality up on that
+lonely height.  There remained but one thing solid in Jon's past--his
+mother; but one thing solid in Fleur's--her father; and of these
+figures, as though seen in the distance with disapproving faces, they
+spoke little.
+
+The Down dipped and rose again toward Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of
+far sea came into view, a sparrow-hawk hovered in the sun's eye so
+that the blood-nourished brown of his wings gleamed nearly red.  Jon
+had a passion for birds, and an aptitude for sitting very still to
+watch them; keen-sighted, and with a memory for what interested him,
+on birds he was almost worth listening to.  But in Chanctonbury Ring
+there were none--its great beech temple was empty of life, and almost
+chilly at this early hour; they came out willingly again into the sun
+on the far side.  It was Fleur's turn now.  She spoke of dogs, and
+the way people treated them.  It was wicked to keep them on chains!
+She would like to flog people who did that.  Jon was astonished to
+find her so humanitarian.  She knew a dog, it seemed, which some
+farmer near her home kept chained up at the end of his chicken run,
+in all weathers, till it had almost lost its voice from barking!
+
+"And the misery is," she said vehemently, "that if the poor thing
+didn't bark at every one who passes it wouldn't be kept there.  I do
+think men are cunning brutes.  I've let it go twice, on the sly; it's
+nearly bitten me both times, and then it goes simply mad with joy;
+but it always runs back home at last, and they chain it up again.  If
+I had my way, I'd chain that man up."  Jon saw her teeth and her eyes
+gleam.  "I'd brand him on his forehead with the word 'Brute'; that
+would teach him!"
+
+Jon agreed that it would be a good remedy.
+
+"It's their sense of property," he said, "which makes people chain
+things.  The last generation thought of nothing but property; and
+that's why there was the War."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur, "I never thought of that.  Your people and mine
+quarrelled about property.  And anyway we've all got it--at least, I
+suppose your people have."
+
+"Oh! yes, luckily; I don't suppose I shall be any good at making
+money."
+
+"If you were, I don't believe I should like you.
+
+Jon slipped his hand tremulously under her arm.  Fleur looked
+straight before her and chanted:
+
+"Jon, Jon, the farmer's son,
+Stole a pig, and away he run!"
+
+Jon's arm crept round her waist.
+
+"This is rather sudden," said Fleur calmly; "do you often do it?"
+
+Jon dropped his arm.  But when she laughed his arm stole back again;
+and Fleur began to sing:
+
+"O who will oer the downs so free,
+O who will with me ride?
+O who will up and follow me---"
+
+Sing, Jon!"
+
+Jon sang.  The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning
+church far away over in Steyning.  They went on from tune to tune,
+till Fleur said:
+
+"My God!  I am hungry now!"
+
+"Oh! I am sorry!"
+
+She looked round into his face.
+
+"Jon, you're rather a darling."
+
+And she pressed his hand against her waist.  Jon almost reeled from
+happiness.  A yellow-and-white dog coursing a hare startled them
+apart.  They watched the two vanish down the slope, till Fleur said
+with a sigh: "He'll never catch it, thank goodness!  What's the time?
+Mine's stopped.  I never wound it."
+
+Jon looked at his watch.  "By Jove!" he said, "mine's stopped; too."
+
+They walked on again, but only hand in hand.
+
+"If the grass is dry," said Fleur, "let's sit down for half a
+minute."
+
+Jon took off his coat, and they shared it.
+
+"Smell!  Actually wild thyme!"
+
+With his arm round her waist again, they sat some minutes in silence.
+
+"We are goats!" cried Fleur, jumping up; "we shall be most fearfully
+late, and look so silly, and put them on their guard.  Look here, Jon
+We only came out to get an appetite for breakfast, and lost our way.
+See?"
+
+"Yes," said Jon.
+
+"It's serious; there'll be a stopper put on us.  Are you a good
+liar?"
+
+"I believe not very; but I can try."
+
+Fleur frowned.
+
+"You know," she said, "I realize that they don't mean us to be
+friends."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I told you why."
+
+"But that's silly."
+
+"Yes; but you don't know my father!"
+
+"I suppose he's fearfully fond of you."
+
+"You see, I'm an only child.  And so are you--of your mother.  Isn't
+it a bore?  There's so much expected of one.  By the time they've
+done expecting, one's as good as dead."
+
+"Yes," muttered Jon, "life's beastly short.  One wants to live
+forever, and know everything."
+
+"And love everybody?"
+
+"No," cried Jon; "I only want to love once--you."
+
+"Indeed!  You're coming on!  Oh! Look!  There's the chalk-pit; we
+can't be very far now.  Let's run."
+
+Jon followed, wondering fearfully if he had offended her.
+
+The chalk-pit was full of sunshine and the murmuration of bees.
+Fleur flung back her hair.
+
+"Well," she said, "in case of accidents, you may give me one kiss,
+Jon," and she pushed her cheek forward.  With ecstasy he kissed that
+hot soft cheek.
+
+"Now, remember!  We lost our way; and leave it to me as much as you
+can.  I'm going to be rather beastly to you; it's safer; try and be
+beastly to me!"
+
+Jon shook his head.  "That's impossible."
+
+"Just to please me; till five o'clock, at all events."
+
+"Anybody will be able to see through it," said Jon gloomily.
+
+"Well, do your best.  Look!  There they are!  Wave your hat!  Oh! you
+haven't got one.  Well, I'll cooee!  Get a little away from me, and
+look sulky."
+
+Five minutes later, entering the house and doing his utmost to look
+sulky, Jon heard her clear voice in the dining-room:
+
+"Oh! I'm simply ravenous!  He's going to be a farmer--and he loses
+his way!  The boy's an idiot!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+GOYA
+
+
+Lunch was over and Soames mounted to the picture-gallery in his house
+near Mapleduram.  He had what Annette called "a grief."  Fleur was
+not yet home.  She had been expected on Wednesday; had wired that it
+would be Friday; and again on Friday that it would be Sunday
+afternoon; and here were her aunt, and her cousins the Cardigans, and
+this fellow Profond, and everything flat as a pancake for the want of
+her.  He stood before his Gauguin--sorest point of his collection.
+He had bought the ugly great thing with two early Matisses before the
+War, because there was such a fuss about those Post-Impressionist
+chaps.  He was wondering whether Profond would take them off his
+hands--the fellow seemed not to know what to do with his money--when
+he heard his sister's voice say: "I think that's a horrid thing,
+Soames," and saw that Winifred had followed him up.
+
+"Oh! you do?" he said dryly; "I gave five hundred for it."
+
+"Fancy!  Women aren't made like that even if they are black."
+
+Soames uttered a glum laugh.  "You didn't come up to tell me that."
+
+"No.  Do you know that Jolyon's boy is staying with Val and his
+wife?"
+
+Soames spun round.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Yes," drawled Winifred; "he's gone to live with them there while he
+learns farming."
+
+Soames had turned away, but her voice pursued him as he walked up and
+down.  "I warned Val that neither of them was to be spoken to about
+old matters."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me before?"
+
+Winifred shrugged her substantial shoulders.
+
+"Fleur does what she likes.  You've always spoiled her.  Besides, my
+dear boy, what's the harm?"
+
+"The harm!" muttered Soames.  "Why, she--" he checked himself.  The
+Juno, the handkerchief, Fleur's eyes, her questions, and now this
+delay in her return--the symptoms seemed to him so sinister that,
+faithful to his nature, he could not part with them.
+
+"I think you take too much care," said Winifred.  "If I were you, I
+should tell her of that old matter.  It's no good thinking that girls
+in these days are as they used to be.  Where they pick up their
+knowledge I can't tell, but they seem to know everything."
+
+Over Soames' face, closely composed, passed a sort of spasm, and
+Winifred added hastily:
+
+"If you don't like to speak of it, I could for you."
+
+Soames shook his head.  Unless there was absolute necessity the
+thought that his adored daughter should learn of that old scandal
+hurt his pride too much.
+
+"No," he said, "not yet.  Never if I can help it.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear.  Think what people are!"
+
+"Twenty years is a long time," muttered Soames.  "Outside our family,
+who's likely to remember?"
+
+Winifred was silenced.  She inclined more and more to that peace and
+quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in her youth.
+And, since pictures always depressed her, she soon went down again.
+
+Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya
+and the copy of the fresco "La Vendimia."  His acquisition of the
+real Goya rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested
+interests and passions which mesh the bright-winged fly of human
+life.  The real Goya's noble owner's ancestor had come into
+possession of it during some Spanish war--it was in a word loot.  The
+noble owner had remained in ignorance of its value until in the
+nineties an enterprising critic discovered that a Spanish painter
+named Goya was a genius.  It was only a fair Goya, but almost unique
+in England, and the noble owner became a marked man.  Having many
+possessions and that aristocratic culture which, independent of mere
+sensuous enjoyment, is founded on the sounder principle that one must
+know everything and be fearfully interested in life, he had fully
+intended to keep an article which contributed to his reputation while
+he was alive, and to leave it to the nation after he was dead.
+Fortunately for Soames, the House of Lords was violently attacked in
+1909, and the noble owner became alarmed and angry.  'If,' he said to
+himself, 'they think they can have it both ways they are very much
+mistaken.  So long as they leave me in quiet enjoyment the nation can
+have some of my pictures at my death.  But if the nation is going to
+bait me, and rob me like this, I'm damned if I won't sell the lot.
+They can't have my private property and my public spirit-both.'  He
+brooded in this fashion for several months till one morning, after
+reading the speech of a certain statesman, he telegraphed to his
+agent to come down and bring Bodkin.  On going over the collection
+Bodkin, than whose opinion on market values none was more sought,
+pronounced that with a free hand to sell to America, Germany, and
+other places where there was an interest in art, a lot more money
+could be made than by selling in England.  The noble owner's public
+spirit--he said--was well known but the pictures were unique.  The
+noble owner put this opinion in his pipe and smoked it for a year.
+At the end of that time he read another speech by the same statesman,
+and telegraphed to his agents: "Give Bodkin a free hand."  It was at
+this juncture that Bodkin conceived the idea which salved the Goya
+and two other unique pictures for the native country of the noble
+owner.  With one hand Bodkin proffered the pictures to the foreign
+market, with the other he formed a list of private British
+collectors.  Having obtained what he considered the highest possible
+bids from across the seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the
+private British collectors, and invited them, of their public spirit,
+to outbid.  In three instances (including the Goya) out of twenty-one
+he was successful.  And why?  One of the private collectors made
+buttons--he had made so many that he desired that his wife should be
+called Lady "Buttons."  He therefore bought a unique picture at great
+cost, and gave it to the nation.  It was "part," his friends said,
+"of his general game."  The second of the private collectors was an
+Americophobe, and bought an unique picture to "spite the damned
+Yanks."  The third of the private collectors was Soames, who--more
+sober than either of the, others--bought after a visit to Madrid,
+because he was certain that Goya was still on the up grade.  Goya was
+not booming at the moment, but he would come again; and, looking at
+that portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque in its directness, but with its
+own queer sharp beauty of paint, he was perfectly satisfied still
+that he had made no error, heavy though the price had been--heaviest
+he had ever paid.  And next to it was hanging the copy of "La
+Vendimia."  There she was--the little wretch-looking back at him in
+her dreamy mood, the mood he loved best because he felt so much safer
+when she looked like that.
+
+He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his
+nostrils, and a voice said:
+
+"Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?"
+
+That Belgian chap, whose mother-as if Flemish blood were not enough--
+had been Armenian!  Subduing a natural irritation, he said:
+
+"Are you a judge of pictures?"
+
+"Well, I've got a few myself."
+
+"Any Post-Impressionists?"
+
+"Ye-es, I rather like them."
+
+"What do you think of this?" said Soames, pointing to the Gauguin.
+
+Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard.
+
+"Rather fine, I think," he said; "do you want to sell it?"
+
+Soames checked his instinctive "Not particularly"--he would not
+chaffer with this alien.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"What do you want for it?"
+
+"What I gave."
+
+"All right," said Monsieur Profond.  "I'll be glad to take that small
+picture.  Post-Impressionists--they're awful dead, but they're
+amusin'.  I don' care for pictures much, but I've got some, just a
+small lot."
+
+"What do you care for?"
+
+Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty nuts."
+
+"You're young," said Soames.  If the fellow must make a
+generalization, he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked
+solidity!
+
+"I don' worry," replied Monsieur Profond smiling; "we're born, and we
+die.  Half the world's starvin'.  I feed a small lot of babies out in
+my mother's country; but what's the use?  Might as well throw my
+money in the river."
+
+Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya.  He didn't
+know what the fellow wanted.
+
+"What shall I make my cheque for?" pursued Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Five hundred," said Soames shortly; "but I don't want you to take it
+if you don't care for it more than that."
+
+"That's all right," said Monsieur Profond; "I'll be 'appy to 'ave
+that picture."
+
+He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold.
+Soames watched the process uneasily.  How on earth had the fellow
+known that he wanted to sell that picture?  Monsieur Profond held out
+the cheque.
+
+"The English are awful funny about pictures," he said.  "So are the
+French, so are my people.  They're all awful funny."
+
+"I don't understand you," said Soames stiffly.
+
+"It's like hats," said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, "small or
+large, turnin' up or down -just the fashion.  Awful funny."  And,
+smiling, he drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the
+smoke of his excellent cigar.
+
+Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
+ownership had been called in question.  'He's a cosmopolitan,' he
+thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with
+Annette, and saunter down the lawn toward the river.  What his wife
+saw in the fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak
+her language; and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would
+have called a "small doubt" whether Annette was not too handsome to
+be walking with any one so "cosmopolitan."  Even at that distance he
+could see the blue fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet
+sunlight; and his grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat--the fellow
+was a dandy!  And he could see the quick turn of his wife's head, so
+very straight on her desirable neck and shoulders.  That turn of her
+neck always seemed to him a little too showy, and in the "Queen of
+all I survey" manner--not quite distinguished.  He watched them walk
+along the path at the bottom of the garden.  A young man in flannels
+joined them down there--a Sunday caller no doubt, from up the river.
+He went back to his Goya.  He was still staring at that replica of
+Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news, when his wife's voice said:
+
+"Mr. Michael Mont, Soames.  You invited him to see your pictures."
+
+There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!
+
+"Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne.
+Jolly day, isn't it?"
+
+Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized
+his visitor.  The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly--
+he seemed always grinning.  Why didn't he grow the rest of those
+idiotic little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall
+buffoon?  What on earth were young men about, deliberately lowering
+their class with these tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers?  Ugh!
+Affected young idiots!  In other respects he was presentable, and his
+flannels very clean.
+
+"Happy to see you!" he said.
+
+The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side,
+became transfixed.  "I say!" he said, "'some' picture!"
+
+Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark
+to the Goya copy.
+
+"Yes," he said dryly, "that's not a Goya.  It's a copy.  I had it
+painted because it reminded me of my daughter."
+
+"By Jove!  I thought I knew the face, sir.  Is she here?"
+
+The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.
+
+"She'll be in after tea," he said.  "Shall we go round the pictures?"
+
+And Soames began that round which never tired him.  He had not
+anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an
+original, but as they passed from section to section, period to
+period, he was startled by the young man's frank and relevant
+remarks.  Natively shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his
+mask, Soames had not spent thirty-eight years over his one hobby
+without knowing something more about pictures than their market
+values.  He was, as it were, the missing link between the artist and
+the commercial public.  Art for art's sake and all that, of course,
+was cant.  But aesthetics and good taste were necessary.  The
+appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what gave a work of
+art its permanent market value, or in other words made it "a work of
+art."  There was no real cleavage.  And he was sufficiently
+accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by
+one who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: "Good old haystacks!" or of
+James Maris: "Didn't he just paint and paper 'em!  Mathew was the
+real swell, sir; you could dig into his surfaces!"  It was after the
+young man had whistled before a Whistler, with the words, "D'you
+think he ever really saw a naked woman, sir?" that Soames remarked:
+
+"What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?"
+
+"I, sir?  I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that.
+Then in the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock
+Exchange, snug and warm and just noisy enough.  But the Peace knocked
+that, shares seem off, don't they?  I've only been demobbed about a
+year.  What do you recommend, sir?"
+
+"Have you got money?"
+
+"Well," answered the young man, "I've got a father; I kept him alive
+during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now.  Though, of
+course, there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang
+on to his property.  What do you think about that, sir?"
+
+Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.
+
+"The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet.  He's
+got land, you know; it's a fatal disease."
+
+"This is my real Goya," said Soames dryly.
+
+"By George!  He was a swell.  I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled
+me middle stump.  A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous
+lace.  He made no compromise with the public taste.  That old boy was
+'some' explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his
+day.  Couldn't he just paint!  He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you
+think?"
+
+"I have no Velasquez," said Soames.
+
+The young man stared.  "No," he said; "only nations or profiteers can
+afford him, I suppose.  I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations
+sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers
+by force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an
+Old Master--see schedule--must hang it in a public gallery?  There
+seems something in that."
+
+"Shall we go down to tea?" said Soames.
+
+The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull.  'He's not dense,'
+thought Soames, following him off the premises.
+
+Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original "line,"
+and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to
+admiration the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the ingle-
+nook below.  He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice
+to the sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely
+pallor of brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in
+pale amber tea; justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there
+was something of the fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked
+the spirituality of that rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired,
+corseted solidity; to Soames, of a certain grey and flat-cheeked
+distinction; to the vivacious Michael Mont, pointed in ear and eye;
+to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance, growing a little stout; to
+Prosper Profond, with his expression as who should say, "Well, Mr.
+Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small party?" finally, to Jack
+Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity betraying the
+moving principle: "I'm English, and I live to be fit."
+
+Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly
+one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man--they were
+so dull--should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so
+destroyed all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to
+rest with ten thousand other Englishmen without knowing the
+difference from the one she had chosen to repose beside.  "Oh!" she
+would say of him, in her "amusing" way, "Jack keeps himself so
+fearfully fit; he's never had a day's illness in his life.  He went
+right through the War without a finger-ache.  You really can't
+imagine how fit he is!"  Indeed, he was so "fit" that he couldn't see
+when she was flirting, which was such a comfort in a way.  All the
+same she was quite fond of him, so far as one could be of a sports-
+machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after his pattern.  Her
+eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with Prosper Profond.
+There was no "small" sport or game which Monsieur Profond had not
+played at too, it seemed, from skittles to tarpon-fishing, and worn
+out every one.  Imogen would sometimes wish that they had worn out
+Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them with the simple
+zeal of a school-girl learning hockey; at the age of Great-uncle
+Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing carpet golf in her
+bedroom, and "wiping somebody's eye."
+
+He was telling them now how he had "pipped the pro--a charmin'
+fellow, playin' a very good game," at the last hole this morning; and
+how he had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying to incite
+Prosper Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea--do him good-
+"keep him fit.
+
+"But what's the use of keepin' fit?" said Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Yes, sir," murmured Michael Mont, "what do you keep fit for?"
+
+"Jack," cried Imogen, enchanted, "what do you keep fit for?"
+
+Jack Cardigan stared with all his health.  The questions were like
+the buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away.
+During the War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that
+it was over he either did not know, or shrank in delicacy from
+explanation of his moving principle.
+
+"But he's right," said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, "there's
+nothin' left but keepin' fit."
+
+The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed
+unanswered, but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.
+
+"Good!" he cried.  "That's the great discovery of the War.  We all
+thought we were progressing--now we know we're only changing."
+
+"For the worse," said Monsieur Profond genially.
+
+"How you are cheerful, Prosper!" murmured Annette.
+
+"You come and play tennis!" said Jack Cardigan; "you've got the hump.
+We'll soon take that down.  D'you play, Mr. Mont?"
+
+"I hit the ball about, sir."
+
+At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of
+preparation for the future which guided his existence.
+
+"When Fleur comes--" he heard Jack Cardigan say.
+
+Ah! and why didn't she come?  He passed through drawing-room, hall,
+and porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car.
+All was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the
+air.  There were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by
+the sunlight.  Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had
+waited in such agony with her life and her mother's balanced in his
+hands, came to him sharply.  He had saved her then, to be the flower
+of his life.  And now! was she going to give him trouble--pain--give
+him trouble?  He did not like the look of things!  A blackbird broke
+in on his reverie with an evening song--a great big fellow up in that
+acacia-tree.  Soames had taken quite an interest in his birds of late
+years; he and Fleur would walk round and watch them; her eyes were
+sharp as needles, and she knew every nest.  He saw her dog, a
+retriever, lying on the drive in a patch of sunlight, and called to
+him.  "Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!"  The dog came slowly
+with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid a pat on his head.
+The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur for him; no
+more, no less.  'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too fond!'  He was
+like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea.  Uninsured again--as in
+that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and jealous
+in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman--his frst wife--
+the mother of this infernal boy.  Ah!  There was the car at last!  It
+drew up, it had luggage, but no Fleur.
+
+"Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path."
+
+Walking all those miles?  Soames stared.  The man's face had the
+beginning of a smile on it.  What was he grinning at?  And very
+quickly he turned, saying, "All right, Sims!" and went into the
+house.  He mounted to the picture-gallery once more.  He had from
+there a view of the river bank, and stood with his eyes fixed on it,
+oblivious of the fact that it would be an hour at least before her
+figure showed there.  Walking up! And that fellow's grin!  The boy--!
+He turned abruptly from the window.  He couldn't spy on her.  If she
+wanted to keep things from him--she must; he could not spy on her.
+His heart felt empty, and bitterness mounted from it into his very
+mouth.  The staccato shouts of Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball, the
+laugh of young Mont rose in the stillness and came in.  He hoped they
+were making that chap Profond run.  And the girl in "La Vendimia"
+stood with her arm akimbo arid her dreamy eyes looking past him.
+'I've done all I could for you,' he thought, 'since you were no
+higher than my knee.  You aren't going to--to--hurt me, are you?'
+
+But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to
+tone down.  'There's no real life in it,' thought Soames.  'Why
+doesn't she come?'
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+TRIO
+
+
+Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth
+generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end prolonged unto the
+ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to
+snapping-point.  Never had Fleur been so "fine," Holly so watchful,
+Val so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed.  What he
+learned of farming in that week might have been balanced on the point
+of a penknife and puffed off.  He, whose nature was essentially
+averse from intrigue, and whose adoration of Fleur disposed him to
+think that any need for concealing it was "skittles," chafed and
+fretted, yet obeyed, taking what relief he could in the few moments
+when they were alone.  On Thursday, while they were standing in the
+bay window of the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:
+
+"Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if you
+were to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me
+down, and just get back here by the last train, after.  You were
+going home anyway, weren't you?"
+
+Jon nodded.
+
+"Anything to be with you," he said; "only why need I pretend--"
+
+Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:
+
+"You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me.  It's
+serious about our people.  We've simply got to be secret at present,
+if we want to be together."  The door was opened, and she added
+loudly: "You are a duffer, Jon."
+
+Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge
+about a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.
+
+On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning
+out of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of
+Paddington station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger-nail
+tapping on his door.  He rushed to it and listened.  Again the sound.
+It was a nail.  He opened.  Oh! What a lovely thing came in!
+
+"I wanted to show you my fancy dress," it said, and struck an
+attitude at the foot of his bed.
+
+Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door.  The apparition
+wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a
+wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist.
+
+It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a
+fan which touched its head.
+
+"This ought to be a basket of grapes," it whispered, "but I haven't
+got it here.  It's my Goya dress.  And this is the attitude in the
+picture.  Do you like it?"
+
+"It's a dream."
+
+The apparition pirouetted.  "Touch it, and see."
+
+Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.
+
+"Grape colour," came the whisper, "all grapes--La Vendimia--the
+vintage."
+
+Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up,
+with adoring eyes.
+
+"Oh! Jon," it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again,
+and, gliding out, was gone.
+
+Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed.
+How long he stayed like that he did not know.  The little noises--of
+the tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling--as in a dream--went
+on about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled
+and whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air.
+And his forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place
+between the brows, like the imprint of a flower.  Love filled his
+soul, that love of boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much,
+would not brush the down off for the world, and must become in time a
+fragrant memory--a searing passion--a humdrum mateship--or, once in
+many times, vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.
+
+Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to
+show what long marches lay between him and his great-great-
+grandfather, the first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea.  Jon was
+sensitive as a girl, more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the
+day; imaginative as one of his half-sister June's "lame duck"
+painters; affectionate as a son of his father and his mother
+naturally would be.  And yet, in his inner tissue, there was
+something of the old founder of his family, a secret tenacity of
+soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to know
+when he was beaten.  Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a
+bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark,
+and been but normally unhappy there.  Only with his mother had he, up
+till then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home
+to Robin Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had
+said that he must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had
+never yet kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met
+again, unless he found that she knew already.  So intolerable did
+this seem to him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and
+staying up in London.  And the first thing his mother said to him
+was:
+
+"So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon.
+What is she like on second thoughts?"
+
+With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:
+
+"Oh! awfully jolly, Mum."
+
+Her arm pressed his.
+
+Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to
+falsify Fleur's fears and to release his soul.  He turned to look at
+her, but something in her smiling face--something which only he
+perhaps would have caught--stopped the words bubbling up in him.
+Could fear go with a smile?  If so, there was fear in her face.  And
+out of Jon tumbled quite other words, about farming, Holly, and the
+Downs.  Talking fast, he waited for her to come back to Fleur.  But
+she did not.  Nor did his father mention her, though of course he,
+too, must know.  What deprivation, and killing of reality was in his
+silence about Fleur--when he was so full of her; when his mother was
+so full of Jon, and his father so full of his mother!  And so the
+trio spent the evening of that Saturday.
+
+After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
+liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing
+up where his fingers had run through it.  He gazed at his mother
+while she played, but he saw Fleur--Fleur in the moonlit orchard,
+Fleur in the sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying,
+whispering, stooping, kissing his forehead.  Once, while he listened,
+he forgot himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair.
+What was Dad looking like that for?  The expression on his face was
+so sad and puzzling.  It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that
+he got up and went and sat on the arm of his father's chair.  From
+there he could not see his face; and again he saw Fleur--in his
+mother's hands, slim and white on the keys, in the profile of her
+face and her powdery hair; and down the long room in the open window
+where the May night walked outside.
+
+When he went up to bed his mother came into his room.  She stood at
+the window, and said:
+
+"Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
+wonderfully.  I always think they look beautiful under a dropping
+moon.  I wish you had known your grandfather, Jon."
+
+"Were you married to father when he was alive?" asked Jon suddenly.
+
+"No, dear; he died in '92--very old--eighty-five, I think."
+
+"Is Father like him?"
+
+"A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid."
+
+"I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?"
+
+"One of June's 'lame ducks.'  But it's quite good."
+
+Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm.  "Tell me about the
+family quarrel, Mum."
+
+He felt her arm quivering.  "No, dear; that's for your Father some
+day, if he thinks fit."
+
+"Then it was serious," said Jon, with a catch in his breath.
+
+"Yes."  And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether
+the arm or the hand within it were quivering most.
+
+"Some people," said Irene softly, "think the moon on her back is
+evil; to me she's always lovely.  Look at those cypress shadows!
+Jon, Father says we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months.
+Would you like?"
+
+Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp and
+so confused.  Italy with his mother!  A fortnight ago it would have
+been perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that the
+sudden suggestion had to do with Fleur.  He stammered out:
+
+"Oh! yes; only--I don't know.  Ought I--now I've just begun?  I'd
+like to think it over."
+
+Her voice answered, cool and gentle:
+
+"Yes, dear; think it over.  But better now than when you've begun
+farming seriously.  Italy with you!  It would be nice!"
+
+Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.
+
+"Do you think you ought to leave Father?" he said feebly, feeling
+very mean.
+
+"Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least
+before you settle down to anything."
+
+The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes--he knew--that his
+father and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he
+himself.  They wanted to keep him from Fleur.  His heart hardened.
+And, as if she felt that process going on, his mother said:
+
+"Good-night, darling.  Have a good sleep and think it over.  But it
+would be lovely!"
+
+She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face.  Jon
+stood feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty little boy;
+sore because he was not loving, and because he was justified in his
+own eyes.
+
+But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed
+through the dressing-room between it and her husband's.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He will think it over, Jolyon."
+
+Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said
+quietly:
+
+"You had better let me tell him, and have done with it.  After all,
+Jon has the instincts of a gentleman.  He has only to understand--"
+
+"Only!  He can't understand; that's impossible."
+
+"I believe I could have at his age."
+
+Irene caught his hand.  "You were always more of a realist than Jon;
+and never so innocent."
+
+"That's true," said Jolyon.  "It's queer, isn't it?  You and I would
+tell our stories to the world without a particle of shame; but our
+own boy stumps us."
+
+"We've never cared whether the world approves or not."
+
+"Jon would not disapprove of us!"
+
+"Oh! Jolyon, yes.  He's in love, I feel he's in love.  And he'd say:
+'My mother once married without love!  How could she have!'  It'll
+seem to him a crime!  And so it was!"
+
+Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:
+
+"Ah! why on earth are we born young?  Now, if only we were born old
+and grew younger year by year, we should understand how things
+happen, and drop all our cursed intolerance.  But you know if the boy
+is really in love, he won't forget, even if he goes to Italy.  We're
+a tenacious breed; and he'll know by instinct why he's being sent.
+Nothing will really cure him but the shock of being told."
+
+"Let me try, anyway."
+
+Jolyon stood a moment without speaking.  Between this devil and this
+deep sea--the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of losing
+his wife for two months--he secretly hoped for the devil; yet if she
+wished for the deep sea he must put up with it.  After all, it would
+be training for that departure from which there would be no return.
+And, taking her in his arms, he kissed her eyes, and said:
+
+"As you will, my love."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+DUET
+
+
+That "small" emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with
+extinction.  Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his
+time and a full week after, as it seemed to him.  He stood at the
+appointed bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris
+tweed suit exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart.
+He read the names of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at
+last, to avoid being regarded with suspicion by the book-stall clerk.
+It was called "The Heart of the Trail!" which must mean something,
+though it did not seem to.  He also bought "The Lady's Mirror" and
+"The Landsman."  Every minute was an hour long, and full of horrid
+imaginings.  After nineteen had passed, he saw her with a bag and a
+porter wheeling her luggage.  She came swiftly; she came cool.  She
+greeted him as if he were a brother.
+
+"First class," she said to the porter, "corner seats; opposite."
+
+Jon admired her frightful self-possession.
+
+"Can't we get a carriage to ourselves," he whispered.
+
+"No good; it's a stopping train.  After Maidenhead perhaps.  Look
+natural, Jon."
+
+Jon screwed his features into a scowl.  They got in--with two other
+beasts!--oh! heaven!  He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his
+confusion.  The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there, and
+looking as if he knew all about it into the bargain.
+
+Fleur hid herself behind "The Lady's Mirror."  Jon imitated her
+behind "The Landsman."  The train started.  Fleur let "The Lady's
+Mirror" fall and leaned forward.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+"It's seemed about fifteen days."
+
+She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.
+
+"Look natural," murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of
+laughter.  It hurt him.  How could he look natural with Italy hanging
+over him?  He had meant to break it to her gently, but now he blurted
+it out.
+
+"They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months."
+
+Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her lips.
+"Oh!" she said.  It was all, but it was much.
+
+That "Oh!" was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing ready
+for riposte.  It came.
+
+"You must go!"
+
+"Go?" said Jon in a strangled voice.
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But--two months--it's ghastly."
+
+"No," said Fleur, "six weeks.  You'll have forgotten me by then.
+We'll meet in the National Gallery the day after you get back."
+
+Jon laughed.
+
+"But suppose you've forgotten me," he muttered into the noise of the
+train.
+
+Fleur shook her head.
+
+"Some other beast--" murmured Jon.
+
+Her foot touched his.
+
+"No other beast," she said, lifting "The Lady's Mirror."
+
+The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.
+
+'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at all.'
+
+The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.
+
+"I never let go," she said; "do you?"
+
+Jon shook his head vehemently.
+
+"Never!" he said.  "Will you write to me?"
+
+"No; but you can--to my Club."
+
+She had a Club; she was wonderful!
+
+"Did you pump Holly?" he muttered.
+
+"Yes, but I got nothing.  I didn't dare pump hard."
+
+"What can it be?" cried Jon.
+
+"I shall find out all right."
+
+A long silence followed till Fleur said: "This is Maidenhead; stand
+by, Jon!"
+
+The train stopped.  The remaining passenger got out.  Fleur drew down
+her blind.
+
+"Quick!" she cried.  "Hang out!  Look as much of a beast as you can."
+
+Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he scowled
+like that!  An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the handle.  It
+turned, but the door would not open.  The train moved, the young lady
+darted to another carriage.
+
+"What luck!" cried Jon.  "It Jammed."
+
+"Yes," said Fleur; "I was holding it."
+
+The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.
+
+"Look out for the corridor," she whispered; "and--quick!"
+
+Her lips met his.  And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten
+seconds, Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond, that, when
+he was again sitting opposite that demure figure, he was pale as
+death.  He heard her sigh, and the sound seemed to him the most
+precious he had ever heard--an exquisite declaration that he meant
+something to her.
+
+"Six weeks isn't really long," she said; "and you can easily make it
+six if you keep your head out there, and never seem to think of me."
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+"This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't you
+see?  If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop being
+ridiculous about it.  Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain; there's a girl
+in a Goya picture at Madrid who's like me, Father says.  Only she
+isn't--we've got a copy of her."
+
+It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog.  "I'll
+make it Spain," he said, "Mother won't mind; she's never been there.
+And my Father thinks a lot of Goya."
+
+"Oh! yes, he's a painter--isn't he?"
+
+"Only water-colour," said Jon, with honesty.
+
+"When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to Caversham
+lock and wait for me.  I'll send the car home and we'll walk by the
+towing-path."
+
+Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the world
+well lost, and one eye on the corridor.  But the train seemed to run
+twice as fast now, and its sound was almost lost in that of Jon's
+sighing.
+
+"We're getting near," said Fleur; "the towing-path's awfully exposed.
+One more!  Oh! Jon, don't forget me."
+
+Jon answered with his kiss.  And very soon, a flushed, distracted-
+looking youth could have been seen--as they say--leaping from the
+train and hurrying along the platform, searching his pockets for his
+ticket.
+
+When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond
+Caversham lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure of
+equanimity.  If they had to part, he would not make a scene!  A
+breeze by the bright river threw the white side of the willow leaves
+up into the sunlight, and followed those two with its faint rustle.
+
+"I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy," said Fleur.  "Did you
+look pretty natural as you went out?"
+
+"I don't know.  What is natural?"
+
+"It's natural to you to look seriously happy.  When I first saw you I
+thought you weren't a bit like other people."
+
+"Exactly what I thought when I saw you.  I knew at once I should
+never love anybody else."
+
+Fleur laughed.
+
+"We're absurdly young.  And love's young dream is out of date, Jon.
+Besides, it's awfully wasteful.  Think of all the fun you might have.
+You haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really.  And there's me.  I
+wonder!"
+
+Confusion came on Jon's spirit.  How could she say such things just
+as they were going to part?
+
+"If you feel like that," he said, "I can't go.  I shall tell Mother
+that I ought to try and work.  There's always the condition of the
+world!"
+
+"The condition of the world!"
+
+Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
+
+"But there is," he said; "think of the people starving!"
+
+Fleur shook her head.  "No, no, I never, never will make myself
+miserable for nothing."
+
+"Nothing!  But there's an awful state of things, and of course one
+ought to help."
+
+"Oh! yes, I know all that.  But you can't help people, Jon; they're
+hopeless.  When you pull them out they only get into another hole.
+Look at them, still fighting and plotting and struggling, though
+they're dying in heaps all the time.  Idiots!"
+
+"Aren't you sorry for them?"
+
+"Oh! sorry--yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy about it;
+that's no good."
+
+And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each other's
+natures.
+
+"I think people are brutes and idiots," said Fleur stubbornly.
+
+"I think they're poor wretches," said Jon.  It was as if they had
+quarrelled--and at this supreme and awful moment, with parting
+visible out there in that last gap of the willows!
+
+"Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me."
+
+Jon stood still.  Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs
+trembled.  Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.
+
+"I must believe in things," said Jon with a sort of agony; "we're all
+meant to enjoy life."
+
+Fleur laughed.  "Yes; and that's what you won't do, if you don't take
+care.  But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself
+wretched.  There are lots of people like that, of course."
+
+She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned.  Was it
+Fleur thus staring at the water?  Jon had an unreal feeling as if he
+were passing through the scene in a book where the lover has to
+choose between love and duty.  But just then she looked round at him.
+Never was anything so intoxicating as that vivacious look.  It acted
+on him exactly as the tug of a chain acts on a dog--brought him up to
+her with his tail wagging and his tongue out.
+
+"Don't let's be silly," she said, "time's too short.  Look, Jon, you
+can just see where I've got to cross the river.  There, round the
+bend, where the woods begin."
+
+Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the trees-
+-and felt his heart sink.
+
+"I mustn't dawdle any more.  It's no good going beyond the next
+hedge, it gets all open.  Let's get on to it and say good-bye."
+
+They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge,
+where the may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.
+
+"My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street, Piccadilly.  Letters
+there will be quite safe, and I'm almost always up once a week."
+
+Jon nodded.  His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared
+straight before him.
+
+"To-day's the twenty-third of May," said Fleur; "on the ninth of July
+I shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne' at three o'clock;
+will you?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"If you feel as bad as I it's all right.  Let those people pass!"
+
+A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday
+fashion.
+
+The last of them passed the wicket gate.
+
+"Domesticity!" said Fleur, and blotted herself against the hawthorn
+hedge.  The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink cluster
+brushed her cheek.  Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.
+
+"Good-bye, Jon."  For a second they stood with hands hard clasped.
+Then their lips met for the third time, and when they parted Fleur
+broke away and fled through the wicket gate.  Jon stood where she had
+left him, with his forehead against that pink cluster.  Gone!  For an
+eternity--for seven weeks all but two days!  And here he was, wasting
+the last sight of her!  He rushed to the gate.  She was walking
+swiftly on the heels of the straggling children.  She turned her
+head, he saw her hand make a little flitting gesture; then she sped
+on, and the trailing family blotted her out from his view.
+
+The words of a comic song--
+
+        "Paddington groan-worst ever known--
+        He gave a sepulchral Paddington groan--"
+
+came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading
+station.  All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with
+"The Heart of the Trail" open on his knee, knitting in his head a
+poem so full of feeling that it would not rhyme.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+CAPRICE
+
+
+Fleur sped on.  She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and
+wanted all her wits about her when she got in.  She passed the
+islands, the station, and hotel, and was about to take the ferry,
+when she saw a skiff with a young man standing up in it, and holding
+to the bushes.
+
+"Miss Forsyte," he said; "let me put you across.  I've come on
+purpose."
+
+She looked at him in blank amazement.
+
+"It's all right, I've been having tea with your people.  I thought
+I'd save you the last bit.  It's on my way, I'm just off back to
+Pangbourne.  My name's Mont.  I saw you at the picture-gallery--you
+remember--when your father invited me to see his pictures."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur; "yes--the handkerchief."
+
+To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped
+down into the skiff.  Still emotional, and a little out of breath,
+she sat silent; not so the young man.  She had never heard any one
+say so much in so short a time.  He told her his age, twenty-four;
+his weight, ten stone eleven; his place of residence, not far away;
+described his sensations under fire, and what it felt like to be
+gassed; criticized the Juno, mentioned his own conception of that
+goddess; commented on the Goya copy, said Fleur was not too awfully
+like it; sketched in rapidly the condition of England; spoke of
+Monsieur Profond--or whatever his name was--as "an awful sport";
+thought her father had some "ripping" pictures and some rather "dug-
+up"; hoped he might row down again and take her on the river because
+he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave her
+his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet together some
+time--considered the name Fleur Forsyte simply topping; cursed his
+people for giving him the name of Michael on the top of Mont;
+outlined his father, and said that if she wanted a good book she
+should read "Job"; his father was rather like Job while Job still had
+land.
+
+"But Job didn't have land," Fleur murmured; "he only had flocks and
+herds and moved on."
+
+"Ah!" answered Michael Mont, "I wish my gov'nor would move on.  Not
+that I want his land.  Land's an awful bore in these days, don't you
+think?"
+
+"We never have it in my family," said Fleur.  "We have everything
+else.  I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental farm
+in Dorset, because we came from there originally, but it cost him
+more than it made him happy."
+
+"Did he sell it?"
+
+"No; he kept it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because nobody would buy it."
+
+"Good for the old boy!"
+
+"No, it wasn't good for him.  Father says it soured him.  His name
+was Swithin."
+
+"What a corking name!"
+
+"Do you know that we're getting farther off, not nearer?  This river
+flows."
+
+"Splendid!" cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; "it's good to
+meet a girl who's got wit."
+
+"But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural."
+
+Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.
+
+"Look out!" cried Fleur.  "Your scull!"
+
+"All right!  It's thick enough to bear a scratch."
+
+"Do you mind sculling?" said Fleur severely.  "I want to get in."
+
+"Ah!" said Mont; "but when you get in, you see, I shan't see you any
+more to-day.  Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on her
+bed after saying her prayers.  Don't you bless the day that gave you
+a French mother, and a name like yours?"
+
+"I like my name, but Father gave it me.  Mother wanted me called
+Marguerite."
+
+"Which is absurd.  Do you mind calling me M. M.  and letting me call
+you F. F.?  It's in the spirit of the age."
+
+"I don't mind anything, so long as I get in."
+
+Mont caught a little crab, and answered: "That was a nasty one!"
+
+"Please row."
+
+"I am."  And he did for several strokes, looking at her with rueful
+eagerness.  "Of course, you know," he ejaculated, pausing, "that I
+came to see you, not your father's pictures."
+
+Fleur rose.
+
+"If you don't row, I shall get out and swim."
+
+"Really and truly?  Then I could come in after you."
+
+"Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once."
+
+When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and
+grasping his hair with both hands, looked at her.
+
+Fleur smiled.
+
+"Don't!" cried the irrepressible Mont.  "I know you're going to say:
+'Out, damned hair!'"
+
+Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand.  "Good-bye, Mr.
+M.M.!" she called, and was gone among the rose-trees.  She looked at
+her wrist-watch and the windows of the house.  It struck her as
+curiously uninhabited.  Past six!  The pigeons were just gathering to
+roost, and sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy feathers,
+and beyond in a shower on the top boughs of the woods.  The click of
+billiard-balls came from the ingle-nook--Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a
+faint rustling, too, from an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in
+this old English garden.  She reached the verandah and was passing
+in, but stopped at the sound of voices from the drawing-room to her
+left.  Mother!  Monsieur Profond!  From behind the verandah screen
+which fenced the ingle-nook she heard these words:
+
+"I don't, Annette."
+
+Did Father know that he called her mother "Annette"?  Always on the
+side of her Father--as children are ever on one side or the other in
+houses where relations are a little strained--she stood, uncertain.
+Her mother was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly metallic
+voice--one word she caught: "Demain."  And Profond's answer: "All
+right."  Fleur frowned.  A little sound came out into the stillness.
+Then Profond's voice: "I'm takin' a small stroll."
+
+Fleur darted through the window into the morning-room.  There he came
+from the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn; and the
+click of billiard-balls which, in listening for other sounds, she had
+ceased to hear, began again.  She shook herself, passed into the
+hall, and opened the drawing-room door.  Her mother was sitting on
+the sofa between the windows, her knees crossed, her head resting on
+a cushion, her lips half parted, her eyes half closed.  She looked
+extraordinarily handsome.
+
+"Ah!  Here you are, Fleur!  Your father is beginning to fuss."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In the picture-gallery.  Go up!"
+
+"What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?"
+
+"To-morrow?  I go up to London with your aunt."
+
+"I thought you might be.  Will you get me a quite plain parasol?"
+What colour?"
+
+"Green.  They're all going back, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, all; you will console your father.  Kiss me, then."
+
+Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead, and
+went out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in the other
+corner.  She ran up-stairs.
+
+Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the
+regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard
+imposed upon herself.  She claimed to regulate her own life, not
+those of others; besides, an unerring instinct for what was likely to
+advantage her own case was already at work.  In a disturbed domestic
+atmosphere the heart she had set on Jon would have a better chance.
+None the less was she offended, as a flower by a crisping wind.  If
+that man had really been kissing her mother it was--serious, and her
+father ought to know.  "Demain!"  "All right!"  And her mother going
+up to Town!  She turned into her bedroom and hung out of the window
+to cool her face, which had suddenly grown very hot.  Jon must be at
+the station by now!  What did her father know about Jon?  Probably
+everything--pretty nearly!
+
+She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time,
+and ran up to the gallery.
+
+Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens--the
+picture he loved best.  He did not turn at the sound of the door, but
+she knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt.  She came up softly
+behind him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his
+shoulder till her cheek lay against his.  It was an advance which had
+never yet failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst.
+"Well," he said stonily, "so you've come!"
+
+"Is that all," murmured Fleur, "from a bad parent?" And she rubbed
+her cheek against his.
+
+Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.
+
+"Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and
+off?"
+
+"Darling, it was very harmless."
+
+"Harmless!  Much you know what's harmless and what isn't."
+
+Fleur dropped her arms.
+
+"Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it."
+
+And she went over to the window-seat.
+
+Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet.
+He looked very grey.  'He has nice small feet,' she thought, catching
+his eye, at once averted from her.
+
+"You're my only comfort," said Soames suddenly, "and you go on like
+this."
+
+Fleur's heart began to beat.
+
+"Like what, dear?"
+
+Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it,
+might have been called furtive.
+
+"You know what I told you," he said.  "I don't choose to have
+anything to do with that branch of our family."
+
+"Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't.
+
+Soames turned on his heel.
+
+"I'm not going into the reasons," he said; "you ought to trust me,
+Fleur!"
+
+The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon,
+and was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot.  Unconsciously
+she had assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of
+the other, with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her
+chest, and its hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her
+that was not involuted, and yet--in spite of all--she retained a
+certain grace.
+
+"You knew my wishes," Soames went on, "and yet you stayed on there
+four days.  And I suppose that boy came with you to-day."
+
+Fleur kept her eyes on him.
+
+"I don't ask you anything," said Soames; "I make no inquisition where
+you're concerned."
+
+Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on
+her hands.  The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched,
+quite still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-
+balls mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack
+Cardigan had turned the light up.
+
+"Will it make you any happier," she said suddenly, "if I promise you
+not to see him for say--the next six weeks?" She was not prepared for
+a sort of tremble in the blankness of his voice.
+
+"Six weeks?  Six years--sixty years more like.  Don't delude
+yourself, Fleur; don't delude yourself!"
+
+Fleur turned in alarm.
+
+"Father, what is it?"
+
+Soames came close enough to see her face.
+
+"Don't tell me," he said, "that you're foolish enough to have any
+feeling beyond caprice.  That would be too much!"  And he laughed.
+
+Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it is
+deep!  Oh! what is it?'  And putting her hand through his arm she
+said lightly:
+
+"No, of course; caprice.  Only, I like my caprices and I don't like
+yours, dear."
+
+"Mine!" said Soames bitterly, and turned away.
+
+The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the
+river.  The trees had lost all gaiety of colour.  She felt a sudden
+hunger for Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again
+on hers.  And pressing her arms tight across her breast she forced
+out a little light laugh.
+
+"O la! la!  What a small fuss! as Profond would say.  Father, I don't
+like that man."
+
+She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.
+
+"You don't?" he said.  "Why?"
+
+"Nothing," murmured Fleur; "just caprice!"
+
+"No," said Soames; "not caprice!" And he tore what was in his hands
+across.  "You're right.  I don't like him either!"
+
+"Look!" said Fleur softly.  "There he goes!  I hate his shoes; they
+don't make any noise."
+
+Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his
+side pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced
+up at the sky, as if saying: "I don't think much of that small moon."
+
+Fleur drew back.  "Isn't he a great cat?" she whispered; and the
+sharp click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had
+capped the cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: "In off the
+red!"
+
+Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in
+his beard.  What was it?  Oh! yes, from "Rigoletto": "Donna a
+mobile."  Just what he would think!  She squeezed her father's arm.
+
+"Prowling!" she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house.  It
+was past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and night-
+still and lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent
+clinging on the riverside air.  A blackbird suddenly burst out.  Jon
+would be in London by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the
+Serpentine, thinking of her!  A little sound beside her made her turn
+her eyes; her father was again tearing the paper in his hands.  Fleur
+saw it was a cheque.
+
+"I shan't sell him my Gauguin," he said.  "I don't know what your
+aunt and Imogen see in him."
+
+"Or Mother."
+
+"Your mother!" said Soames.
+
+'Poor Father!' she thought.  'He never looks happy--not really happy.
+I don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have to, when
+Jon comes back.  Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'
+
+"I'm going to dress," she said.
+
+In her room she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress.  It was of
+gold tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the
+ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes,
+and a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold
+bells, especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she
+pealed.  When she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could
+not see her; it even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man
+Michael Mont would not have a view.  But the gong had sounded, and
+she went down.
+
+She made a sensation in the drawing-room.  Winifred thought it "Most
+amusing."  Imogen was enraptured.  Jack Cardigan called it
+"stunning," "ripping," "topping," and "corking.
+
+Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: "That's a nice small
+dress!"  Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at her, and
+said nothing.  It remained for her father to apply the test of common
+sense.  "What did you put on that thing for?  You're not going to
+dance."
+
+Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.
+
+"Caprice!"
+
+Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred.
+Jack Cardigan took her mother.  Prosper Profond took Imogen.  Fleur
+went in by herself, with her bells jingling....
+
+The "small" moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft
+and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the
+billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men
+and women.  Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white
+shoulder, fit as a flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for
+anything but baby's slumber.  For so many lay awake, or dreamed,
+teased by the criss-cross of the world.
+
+The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
+meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see;
+and the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones.  Pheasants in the
+tall trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above
+the gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and
+the sparrows of Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by
+the lack of wind.  The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new
+quarters, scraped at her straw a little; and the few night-flitting
+things--bats, moths, owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but
+the peace of night lay in the brain of all day-time Nature,
+colourless and still.  Men and women, alone, riding the hobby-horses
+of anxiety or love, burned their wavering tapers of dream and thought
+into the lonely hours.
+
+Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled
+chime of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an
+aspen's leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the
+distant rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which
+none can put a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of
+uncatalogued emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or,
+maybe, from departed Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night
+strolls back into a world which had once suited their embodied
+spirits.  But Fleur heeded not these sounds; her spirit, far from
+disembodied, fled with swift wing from railway-carriage to flowery
+hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious of his forbidden image, and the
+sound of his voice, which was taboo.  And she crinkled her nose,
+retrieving from the perfume of the riverside night that moment when
+his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her cheek.  Long she
+leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings at life's
+candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the
+lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there
+is no open flame.  But at last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting
+her bells, drew quickly in.
+
+Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
+wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken
+from stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear
+such sounds.
+
+'Caprice!' he thought.  'I can't tell.  She's wilful.  What shall I
+do?  Fleur!'
+
+And long into the "small" night he brooded.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+I
+
+MOTHER AND SON
+
+
+To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly
+would scarcely have been adequate.  He went as a well-natured dog
+goes for a walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on
+the lawn.  He went looking back at it.  Forsytes deprived of their
+mutton-bones are wont to sulk.  But Jon had little sulkiness in his
+composition.  He adored his mother, and it was his first travel.
+Spain had become Italy by his simply saying: "I'd rather go to Spain,
+Mum; you've been to Italy so many times; I'd like it new to both of
+us."
+
+The fellow was subtle besides being naive.  He never forgot that he
+was going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
+therefore show no sign of wishing to do so.  For one with so enticing
+a mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
+companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food,
+and thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most
+travelled Englishman.  Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was
+profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or
+fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and
+tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing
+cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats,
+olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages,
+watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and
+swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.
+
+It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
+Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not
+English, was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own
+countrymen.  He felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more
+practical view of things than himself.  He confided to his mother
+that he must be an unsociable beast--it was jolly to be away from
+everybody who could talk about the things people did talk about.  To
+which Irene had replied simply:
+
+"Yes, Jon, I know."
+
+In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating
+what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's
+love.  Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt,
+unduly sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for
+her type of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called
+Spanish, but which he now perceived to be no such thing.  Her beauty
+was neither English, French, Spanish, nor Italian--it was special!
+He appreciated, too, as never before, his mother's subtlety of
+instinct.  He could not tell, for instance, whether she had noticed
+his absorption in that Goya picture, "La Vendimia," or whether she
+knew that he had slipped back there after lunch and again next
+morning, to stand before it full half an hour, a second and third
+time.  It was not Fleur, of course, but like enough to give him
+heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her standing at the foot of
+his bed with her hand held above her head.  To keep a postcard
+reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at
+became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
+themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy.  And his
+mother's were sharpened by all three.  In Granada he was fairly
+caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented
+garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at
+the view.  His mother, he had thought, was examining the potted
+stocks between the polled acacias, when her voice said:
+
+"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"
+
+He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school
+to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."
+
+"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol'
+Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them
+when he was in Spain in '92."
+
+In '92--nine years before he had been born!  What had been the
+previous existences of his father and his mother?  If they had a
+right to share in his future, surely he had a right to share in their
+pasts.  He looked up at her.  But something in her face--a look of
+life hard-lived, the mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and
+suffering-seemed, with its incalculable depth, its purchased
+sanctity, to make curiosity impertinent.  His mother must have had a
+wonderfully interesting life; she was so beautiful, and so--so--but
+he could not frame what he felt about her.  He got up, and stood
+gazing down at the town, at the plain all green with crops, and the
+ring of mountains glamorous in sinking sunlight.  Her life was like
+the past of this old Moorish city, full, deep, remote--his own life
+as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly ignorant and innocent!
+They said that in those mountains to the West, which rose sheer from
+the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea, Phoenicians had dwelt--a
+dark, strange, secret race, above the land!  His mother's life was as
+unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past was to the town
+down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played and
+clamoured so gaily, day in, day out.  He felt aggrieved that she
+should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she
+loved him and his father, and was beautiful.  His callow ignorance--
+he had not even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody
+else!--made him small in his own eyes.
+
+That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the
+roof of the town--as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and
+gold; and, long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the
+sentry as the hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:
+
+     "Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
+     Spanish city darkened under her white stars!
+
+     What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
+     Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
+     Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
+
+     No!  Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
+     Just his cry: 'How long?'"
+
+The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but
+"bereaved" was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-
+long came to him, which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart
+is weeping."  It was past two by the time he had finished it, and
+past three before he went to sleep, having said it over to himself at
+least twenty-four times.  Next day he wrote it out and enclosed it in
+one of those letters to Fleur which he always finished before he went
+down, so as to have his mind free and companionable.
+
+About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he
+felt a sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in
+the eyes, and sickness.  The sun had touched him too affectionately.
+The next three days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled,
+aching indifference to all except the feel of ice on his forehead and
+his mother's smile.  She never moved from his room, never relaxed her
+noiseless vigilance, which seemed to Jon angelic.  But there were
+moments when he was extremely sorry for himself, and wished terribly
+that Fleur could see him.  Several times he took a poignant imaginary
+leave of her and of the earth, tears oozing out of his eyes.  He even
+prepared the message he would send to her by his mother--who would
+regret to her dying day that she had ever sought to separate them--
+his poor mother!  He was not slow, however, in perceiving that he had
+now his excuse for going home.
+
+Toward half-past six each evening came a "gasgacha" of bells--a
+cascade of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling
+back chime on chime.  After listening to them on the fourth day he
+said suddenly:
+
+"I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot."
+
+"Very well, darling.  As soon as you're fit to travel"  And at once
+he felt better, and--meaner.
+
+They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home.  Jon's
+head was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a
+hat lined by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk and
+he still walked from choice in the shade.  As the long struggle of
+discretion between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more
+whether she could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had
+brought him away from.  Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a
+day in Madrid between their trains, it was but natural to go again to
+the Prado.  Jon was elaborately casual this time before his Goya
+girl.  Now that he was going back to her, he could afford a lesser
+scrutiny.  It was his mother who lingered before the picture, saying:
+
+"The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite."
+
+Jon heard her uneasily.  Did she understand?  But he felt once more
+that he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety.  She
+could, in some supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret,
+feel the pulse of his thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped
+and feared and wished.  It made him terribly uncomfortable and
+guilty, having, beyond most boys, a conscience.  He wished she would
+be frank with him, he almost hoped for an open struggle.  But none
+came, and steadily, silently, they travelled north.  Thus did he
+first learn how much better than men women play a waiting game.  In
+Paris they had again to pause for a day.  Jon was grieved because it
+lasted two, owing to certain matters in connection with a dressmaker;
+as if his mother, who looked beautiful in anything, had any need of
+dresses!  The happiest moment of his travel was that when he stepped
+on to the Folkestone boat.
+
+Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said
+
+"I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon.  But you've been very
+sweet to me."
+
+Jon squeezed her arm.
+
+"Oh I yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately."
+
+And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of
+glamour over the past weeks--a kind of painful pleasure, such as he
+had tried to screw into those lines about the voice in the night
+crying; a feeling such as he had known as a small boy listening
+avidly to Chopin, yet wanting to cry.  And he wondered why it was
+that he couldn't say to her quite simply what she had said to him:
+
+"You were very sweet to me."  Odd--one never could be nice and
+natural like that!  He substituted the words: "I expect we shall be
+sick."
+
+They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away
+six weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject
+which had hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
+
+
+Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found
+the solitude at Robin Hill intolerable.  A philosopher when he has
+all that he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not.
+Accustomed, however, to the idea, if not to the reality of
+resignation, he would perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter
+June.  He was a "lame duck" now, and on her conscience.  Having
+achieved--momentarily--the rescue of an etcher in low circumstances,
+which she happened to have in hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a
+fortnight after Irene and Jon had gone.  June was living now in a
+tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick.  A Forsyte of the best
+period, so far as the lack of responsibility was concerned, she had
+overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a manner satisfactory
+to herself and her father.  The rent of the Gallery off Cork Street
+which he had bought for her and her increased income tax happening to
+balance, it had been quite simpl--she no longer paid him the rent.
+The Gallery might be expected now at any time, after eighteen years
+of barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her father
+would not feel it.  Through this device she still had twelve hundred
+a year, and by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians
+in a poor way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically the
+same surplus for the relief of genius.  After three days at Robin
+Hill she carried her father back with her to Town.  In those three
+days she had stumbled on the secret he had kept for two years, and
+had instantly decided to cure him.  She knew, in fact, the very man.
+He had done wonders with.  Paul Post--that painter a little in
+advance of Futurism; and she was impatient with her father because
+his eyebrows would go up, and because he had heard of neither.  Of
+course, if he hadn't "faith" he would never get well!  It was absurd
+not to have faith in the man who had healed Paul Post so that he had
+only just relapsed, from having overworked, or overlived, himself
+again.  The great thing about this healer was that he relied on
+Nature.  He had made a special study of the symptoms of Nature--when
+his patient failed in any natural symptom he supplied the poison
+which caused it--and there you were!  She was extremely hopeful.  Her
+father had clearly not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and
+she intended to provide the symptoms.  He was--she felt--out of touch
+with the times, which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating.
+In the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian--a grateful soul,
+so devoted to June for rescuing her that she was in danger of decease
+from overwork--stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him
+for his cure.  But they could not keep his eyebrows down; as, for
+example, when the Austrian woke him at eight o'clock just as he was
+going to sleep, or June took The Times away from him, because it was
+unnatural to read "that stuff" when he ought to be taking an interest
+in "life."  He never failed, indeed, to be astonished at her
+resource, especially in the evenings.  For his benefit, as she
+declared, though he suspected that she also got something out of it,
+she assembled the Age so far as it was satellite to genius; and with
+some solemnity it would move up and down the studio before him in the
+Fox-trot, and that more mental form of dancing--the One-step--which
+so pulled against the music, that Jolyon's eyebrows would be almost
+lost in his hair from wonder at the strain it must impose on the
+dancer's will-power.  Aware that, hung on the line in the Water
+Colour Society, he was a back number to those with any pretension to
+be called artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he could find,
+and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he had been raised.
+And when June brought some girl or young man up to him, he would rise
+humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and think: 'Dear
+me!  This is very dull for them!'  Having his father's perennial
+sympathy with Youth, he used to get very tired from entering into
+their points of view.  But it was all stimulating, and he never
+failed in admiration of his daughter's indomitable spirit.  Even
+genius itself attended these gatherings now and then, with its nose
+on one side; and June always introduced it to her father.  This, she
+felt, was exceptionally good for him, for genius was a natural
+symptom he had never had--fond as she was of him.
+
+Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often
+wondered whence she got herself--her red-gold hair, now greyed into a
+special colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own
+rather folded and subtilised countenance, her little lithe figure,
+when he and most of the Forsytes were tall.  And he would dwell on
+the origin of species, and debate whether she might be Danish or
+Celtic.  Celtic, he thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in
+fillets and djibbahs.  It was not too much to say that he preferred
+her to the Age with which she was surrounded, youthful though, for
+the greater part, it was.  She took, however, too much interest in
+his teeth, for he still had some of those natural symptoms.  Her
+dentist at once found "Staphylococcus aureus present in pure culture"
+(which might cause boils, of course), and wanted to take out all the
+teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of unnatural
+symptoms.  Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in the studio
+that evening he developed his objections.  He had never had any
+boils, and his own teeth would last his time.  Of course--June
+admitted--they would last his time if he didn't have them out!  But
+if he had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would
+be longer.  His recalcitrance--she said--was a symptom of his whole
+attitude; he was taking it lying down.  He ought to be fighting.
+When was he going to see the man who had cured Paul Post?  Jolyon was
+very sorry, but the fact was he was not going to see him.  June
+chafed.  Pondridge--she said--the healer, was such a fine man, and he
+had such difficulty in making two ends meet, and getting his theories
+recognised.  It was just such indifference and prejudice as her
+father manifested which was keeping him back.  It would be so
+splendid for both of them!
+
+"I perceive," said Jolyon, "that you are trying to kill two birds
+with one stone."
+
+"To cure, you mean!" cried June.
+
+"My dear, it's the same thing."
+
+June protested.  It was unfair to say that without a trial.
+
+Jolyon thought he might not have the chance, of saying it after.
+
+"Dad!" cried June, "you're hopeless."
+
+"That," said Jolyon, "is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as
+long as possible.  I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child.  They are
+quiet at present."
+
+"That's not giving science a chance," cried June.  "You've no idea
+how devoted Pondridge is.  He puts his science before everything."
+
+"Just," replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he was
+reduced, "as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh?  Art for Art's sake--
+Science for the sake of Science.  I know those enthusiastic egomaniac
+gentry.  They vivisect you without blinking.  I'm enough of a Forsyte
+to give them the go-by, June."
+
+"Dad," said June, "if you only knew how old-fashioned that sounds!
+Nobody can afford to be half-hearted nowadays."
+
+"I'm afraid," murmured Jolyon, with his smile, "that's the only
+natural symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me.  We are
+born to be extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though, if you'll
+forgive my saying so, half the people nowadays who believe they're
+extreme are really very moderate.  I'm getting on as well as I can
+expect, and I must leave it at that."
+
+June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable
+character of her father's amiable obstinacy so far as his own freedom
+of action was concerned.
+
+How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain puzzled
+Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion.  After she
+had brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp discussion, during
+which he perceived to the full the fundamental opposition between her
+active temperament and his wife's passivity.  He even gathered that a
+little soreness still remained from that generation-old struggle
+between them over the body of Philip Bosinney, in which the passive
+had so signally triumphed over the active principle.
+
+According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the past
+from Jon.  Sheer opportunism, she called it.
+
+"Which," Jolyon put in mildly, "is the working principle of real
+life, my dear."
+
+"Oh!" cried June, "you don't really defend her for not telling Jon,
+Dad.  If it were left to you, you would."
+
+"I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will be
+worse than if we told him."
+
+"Then why don't you tell him?  It's just sleeping dogs again."
+
+"My dear," said Jolyon, "I wouldn't for the world go against Irene's
+instinct.  He's her boy."
+
+"Yours too," cried June.
+
+"What is a man's instinct compared with a mother's?"
+
+"Well, I think it's very weak of you."
+
+"I dare say," said Jolyon, "I dare say."
+
+And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her
+brain.  She could not bear sleeping dogs.  And there stirred in her a
+tortuous impulse to push the matter toward decision.  Jon ought to be
+told, so that either his feeling might be nipped in the bud, or,
+flowering in spite of the past, come to fruition.  And she determined
+to see Fleur, and judge for herself.  When June determined on
+anything, delicacy became a somewhat minor consideration.  After all,
+she was Soames' cousin, and they were both interested in pictures.
+She would go and tell him that he ought to buy a Paul Post, or
+perhaps a piece of sculpture by Boris Strumolowski, and of course she
+would say nothing to her father.  She went on the following Sunday,
+looking so determined that she had some difficulty in getting a cab
+at Reading station.  The river country was lovely in those days of
+her own month, and June ached at its loveliness.  She who had passed
+through this life without knowing what union was had a love of
+natural beauty which was almost madness.  And when she came to that
+choice spot where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her cab,
+because, business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water and
+the woods.  She appeared at his front door, therefore, as a mere
+pedestrian, and sent in her card.  It was in June's character to know
+that when her nerves were fluttering she was doing something worth
+while.  If one's nerves did not flutter, she was taking the line of
+least resistance, and knew that nobleness was not obliging her.  She
+was conducted to a drawing-room, which, though not in her style,
+showed every mark of fastidious elegance.  Thinking, 'Too much taste-
+-too many knick-knacks,' she saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the
+figure of a girl coming in from the verandah.  Clothed in white, and
+holding some white roses in her hand, she had, reflected in that
+silvery-grey pool of glass, a vision-like appearance, as if a pretty
+ghost had come out of the green garden.
+
+"How do you do?" said June, turning round.  "I'm a cousin of your
+father's."
+
+"Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner's."
+
+"With my young stepbrother.  Is your father in?"
+
+"He will be directly.  He's only gone for a little walk."
+
+June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided chin.
+
+"Your name's Fleur, isn't it?  I've heard of you from Holly.  What do
+you think of Jon?"
+
+The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered
+calmly:
+
+"He's quite a nice boy."
+
+"Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+'She's cool,' thought June.
+
+And suddenly the girl said: "I wish you'd tell me why our families
+don't get on?"
+
+Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer,
+June was silent; whether because this girl was trying to get
+something out of her, or simply because what one would do
+theoretically is not always what one will do when
+it comes to the point.
+
+"You know," said the girl, "the surest way to make people find out
+the worst is to keep them ignorant.  My father's told me it was a
+quarrel about property.  But I don't believe it; we've both got
+heaps.  They wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that."
+
+June flushed.  The word applied to her grandfather and father
+offended her.
+
+"My grandfather," she said, "was very generous, and my father is,
+too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois."
+
+"Well, what was it then?" repeated the girl: Conscious that this
+young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined
+to prevent her, and to get something for herself instead.
+
+"Why do you want to know?"
+
+The girl smelled at her roses.  "I only want to know because they
+won't tell me."
+
+"Well, it was about property, but there's more than one kind."
+
+"That makes it worse.  Now I really must know."
+
+June's small and resolute face quivered.  She was wearing a round
+cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it.  She looked quite young
+at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.
+
+"You know," she said, "I saw you drop your handkerchief.  Is there
+anything between you and Jon?  Because, if so, you'd better drop that
+too."
+
+The girl grew paler, but she smiled.
+
+"If there were, that isn't the way to make me."
+
+At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.
+
+"I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have.  We may as
+well be frank."
+
+"Did you come down to tell him that?"
+
+June laughed.  "No; I came down to see you."
+
+"How delightful of you."
+
+This girl could fence.
+
+"I'm two and a half times your age," said June, "but I quite
+sympathize.  It's horrid not to have one's own way."
+
+The girl smiled again.  "I really think you might tell me."
+
+How the child stuck to her point
+
+"It's not my secret.  But I'll see what I can do, because I think
+both you and Jon ought to be told.  And now I'll say good-bye."
+
+"Won't you wait and see Father?"
+
+June shook her head.  "How can I get over to the other side?"
+
+"I'll row you across."
+
+"Look!" said June impulsively, "next time you're in London, come and
+see me.  This is where I live.  I generally have young people in the
+evening.  But I shouldn't tell your father that you're coming."
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's awfully
+pretty and well made.  I never thought Soames would have a daughter
+as  pretty as this.  She and Jon would make a lovely couple.
+
+The instinct to couple, starved within herself,  was always at work
+in June.  She stood watching  Fleur row back; the girl took her hand
+off a scull  to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between
+the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart.  Youth to
+youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the
+sun warming them through and through.  Her  youth!  So long ago--when
+Phil and she--And since?  Nothing--no one had been quite what she had
+wanted.  And so she had missed it all.  But  what a coil was round
+those two young things, if they really were in love, as Holly would
+have it--as her father, and Irene, and Soames himself seemed to
+dread.  What a coil, and what a barrier!  And the itch for the
+future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast, which forms
+the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever believed
+that what one wanted was more important than what other people did
+not want.  From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer stillness, she
+watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the fishes rising;
+sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how she could
+force everybody to be happy.  Jon and Fleur!  Two little lame ducks--
+charming callow yellow little ducks!  A great pity!  Surely something
+could be done!  One must not take such situations lying down.  She
+walked on, and reached a station, hot and cross.
+
+That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which
+made many people avoid her, she said to her father:
+
+"Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur.  I think she's very
+attractive.  It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?"
+
+The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began crumbling
+his bread.
+
+"It's what you appear to be doing," he said.  "Do you realise whose
+daughter she is?"
+
+"Can't the dead past bury its dead?"
+
+Jolyon rose.
+
+"Certain things can never be buried."
+
+"I disagree," said June.  "It's that which stands in the way of all
+happiness and progress.  You don't understand the Age, Dad.  It's got
+no use for outgrown things.  Why do you think it matters so terribly
+that Jon should know about his mother?  Who pays any attention to
+that sort of thing now?  The marriage laws are just as they were when
+Soames and Irene couldn't get a divorce, and you had to come in.
+We've moved, and they haven't.  So nobody cares.  Marriage without a
+decent chance of relief is only a sort of slave-owning; people
+oughtn't to own each other.  Everybody sees that now.  If Irene broke
+such laws, what does it matter?"
+
+"It's not for me to disagree there," said Jolyon; "but that's all
+quite beside the mark.  This is a matter of human feeling."
+
+"Of course it is," cried June, "the human feeling of those two young
+things."
+
+"My dear," said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; "you're talking
+nonsense."
+
+"I'm not.  If they prove to be really fond of each other, why should
+they be made unhappy because of the past?"
+
+"You haven't lived that past.  I have--through the feelings of my
+wife; through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is
+devoted can."
+
+June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.
+
+"If," she said suddenly, "she were the daughter of Philip Bosinney, I
+could understand you better.  Irene loved him, she never loved
+Soames."
+
+Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant
+woman utters to her mule.  His heart had begun beating furiously, but
+he paid no attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.
+
+"That shows how little you understand.  Neither I nor Jon, if I know
+him, would mind a love-past.  It's the brutality of a union without
+love.  This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's
+mother as a negro-slave was owned.  You can't lay that ghost; don't
+try to, June!  It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and
+blood of the man who possessed Jon's mother against her will.  It's
+no good mincing words; I want it clear once for all.  And now I
+mustn't talk any more, or I shall have to sit up with this all
+night."  And, putting his hand over his heart, Jolyon turned his back
+on his daughter and stood looking at the river Thames.
+
+June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her
+head into it, was seriously alarmed.  She came and slipped her arm
+through his.  Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong,
+because that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed
+by the obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him.  She
+rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, and said nothing.
+
+After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once,
+but pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine.  The peaceful
+beauty of the afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to
+the vague and poetic.  In the field beyond the bank where her skiff
+lay up, a machine drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of
+hay.  She watched the grass cascading over and behind the light
+wheels with fascination--it looked so cool and fresh.  The click and
+swish blended with the rustle of the willows and the poplars, and the
+cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true river song.  Alongside, in the
+deep green water, weeds, like yellow snakes, were writhing and nosing
+with the current; pied cattle on the farther side stood in the shade
+lazily swishing their tails.  It was an afternoon to dream.  And she
+took out Jon's letters--not flowery effusions, but haunted in their
+recital of things seen and done by a longing very agreeable to her,
+and all ending "Your devoted J."  Fleur was not sentimental, her
+desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but what poetry there
+was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly in those
+weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon.  They all
+belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water.  She
+enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose.  The stars
+could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of
+the map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy
+sparkle and promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon
+personified to her.
+
+Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his
+letters, followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with
+just so much water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey
+destroyers.  Fleur thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and
+pulled up to the landing-stage.  Crossing the lawn, she wondered
+whether she should tell her father of June's visit.  If he learned of
+it from the butler, he might think it odd if she did not.  It gave
+her, too, another chance to startle out of him the reason of the
+feud.  She went, therefore, up the road to meet him.
+
+Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
+Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with weak
+lungs.  Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part in
+local affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going up.
+He could not, however, remain indifferent to this new and dangerous
+scheme.  The site was not half a mile from his own house.  He was
+quite of opinion that the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but
+this was not the place.  It should be done farther away.  He took,
+indeed, an attitude common to all true Forsytes, that disability of
+any sort in other people was not his affair, and the State should do
+its business without prejudicing in any way the natural advantages
+which he had acquired or inherited.  Francie, the most free-spirited
+Forsyte of his generation (except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had
+once asked him in her malicious way: "Did you ever see the name
+Forsyte in a subscription list, Soames?  "That was as it might be,
+but a Sanatorium would depreciate the neighbourhood, and he should
+certainly sign the petition which was being got up against it.
+Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw Fleur coming.
+
+She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time down
+here with her in this summer weather had been making him feel quite
+young; Annette was always running up to Town for one thing or
+another, so that he had Fleur to himself almost as much as he could
+wish.  To be sure, young Mont had formed a habit of appearing on his
+motor-cycle almost every other day.  Thank goodness, the young fellow
+had shaved off his half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a
+mountebank!  With a girl friend of Fleur's who was staying in the
+house, and a neighbouring youth or so, they made two couples after
+dinner, in the hall, to the music of the electric pianola, which
+performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a surprised shine on its
+expressive surface.  Annette, even, now and then passed gracefully up
+and down in the arms of one or other of the young men.  And Soames,
+coming to the drawing-room door, would lift his nose a little
+sideways, and watch them, waiting to catch a smile from Fleur; then
+move back to his chair by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The
+Times or some other collector's price list.  To his ever-anxious eyes
+Fleur showed no signs of remembering that caprice of hers.
+
+When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand within
+her arm.
+
+"Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad?  She couldn't wait!
+Guess!"
+
+"I never guess," said Soames uneasily.  "Who?"
+
+"Your cousin, June Forsyte."
+
+Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm.  "What did she want?"
+
+"I don't know.  But it was rather breaking through the feud, wasn't
+it?"
+
+"Feud?  What feud?"
+
+"The one that exists in your imagination, dear."
+
+Soames dropped her arm.  Was she mocking, or trying to draw him on?
+
+"I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture," he said at last.
+
+"I don't think so.  Perhaps it was just family affection."
+
+"She's only a first cousin once removed," muttered Soames.
+
+"And the daughter of your enemy."
+
+"What d'you mean by that?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was."
+
+"Enemy!" repeated Soames.  "It's ancient history.  I don't know where
+you get your notions."
+
+"From June Forsyte."
+
+It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew, or
+were on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.
+
+Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and tenacity.
+
+"If you know," he said coldly, "why do you plague me?"
+
+Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.
+
+"I don't want to plague you, darling.  As you say, why want to know
+more?  Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery--Je m'en
+fiche, as Profond says?"
+
+"That chap!" said Soames profoundly.
+
+That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this
+summer--for he had not turned up again.  Ever since the Sunday when
+Fleur had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had
+thought of him a good deal, and always in connection with Annette,
+for no reason, except that she was looking handsomer than for some
+time past.  His possessive instinct, subtle, less formal, more
+elastic since the War, kept all misgiving underground.  As one looks
+on some American river, quiet and pleasant, knowing that an alligator
+perhaps is lying in the mud with his snout just raised and
+indistinguishable from a snag of wood--so Soames looked on the river
+of his own existence, subconscious of Monsieur Profond, refusing to
+see more than the suspicion of his snout.  He had at this epoch in
+his life practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy as his
+nature would permit.  His senses were at rest; his affections found
+all the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well
+known, his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a
+touch of liver now and again; he had not yet begun to worry seriously
+about what would happen after death, inclining to think that nothing
+would happen.  He resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and
+to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would
+be, he felt instinctively, perverse and retrogressive.  Those two
+crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout,
+would level away if he lay on them industriously.
+
+That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested
+Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands.  Her father came down to
+dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.
+
+"I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and ran upstairs.  In the
+sachet where she sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--
+there were two compartments: one held ,handkerchiefs; the other was
+buttoned, and contained something flat and hard.  By some childish
+impulse Fleur unbuttoned it.  There was a frame and in it a
+photograph of herself as a little girl.  She gazed at it, fascinated,
+as one is by one's own presentment.  It slipped under her fidgeting
+thumb, and she saw that another photograph was behind.  She pressed
+her own down further, and perceived a face, which she seemed to know,
+of a young woman, very good-looking, in a very old style of evening
+dress.  Slipping her own photograph up over it again, she took out a
+handkerchief and went down.  Only on the stairs did she identify that
+face.  Surely--surely Jon's mother!  The conviction came as a shock.
+And she stood still in a flurry of thought.  Why, of course!  Jon's
+father had married the woman her father had wanted to marry, had
+cheated him out of her, perhaps.  Then, afraid of showing by her
+manner that she had lighted on his secret, she refused to think
+further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief, entered the dining-
+room.
+
+"I chose the softest, Father."
+
+"H'm!" said Soames; "I only use those after a cold.  Never mind!"
+
+That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together;
+recalling the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop--a
+look strange and coldly intimate, a queer look.  He must have loved
+that woman very much to have kept her photograph all this time, in
+spite of having lost her.  Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind
+darted to his relations with her own mother.  Had he ever really
+loved her?  She thought not.  Jon was the son of the woman he had
+really loved.  Surely, then, he ought not to mind his daughter loving
+him; it only wanted getting used to.  And a sigh of sheer relief was
+caught in the folds of her nightgown slipping over her head.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MEETINGS
+
+
+Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts.  Jon, for one, had
+never really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain.  The
+face of the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock--
+it looked so wan and old.  His father's mask had been forced awry by
+the emotion of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how
+much he must have felt their absence.  He summoned to his aid the
+thought: 'Well, I didn't want to go!'  It was out of date for Youth
+to defer to Age.  But Jon was by no means typically modern.  His
+father had always been "so jolly" to him, and to feel that one meant
+to begin again at once the conduct which his father had suffered six
+weeks' loneliness to cure was not agreeable.
+
+At the question, "Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike you?"
+his conscience pricked him badly.  The great Goya only existed
+because he had created a face which resembled Fleur's.
+
+On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction; but
+awoke full of anticipation.  It was only the fifth of July, and no
+meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth.  He was to have three
+days at home before going back to farm.  Somehow he must contrive to
+see her!
+
+In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for
+trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny.  On the second day,
+therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by
+ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face
+toward Piccadilly.  Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined
+Devonshire House.  It would be the merest chance that she should be
+at her Club.  But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart,
+noticing the superiority of all other young men to himself.  They
+wore their clothes with such an air; they had assurance; they were
+old.  He was suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must
+have forgotten him.  Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these
+weeks, he had mislaid that possibility.  The corners of his mouth
+drooped, his hands felt clammy.  Fleur with the pick of youth at the
+beck of her smile-Fleur incomparable!  It was an evil moment.  Jon,
+however, had a great idea that one must be able to face anything.
+And he braced himself with that dour refection in front of a bric-a-
+brac shop.  At this high-water mark of what was once the London
+season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except a grey
+top hat or two, and the sun.  Jon moved on, and turning the corner
+into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club,
+to which he had just been elected.
+
+"Hallo!  young man!  Where are you off to?"
+
+Jon gushed.  "I've just been to my tailor's."
+
+Val looked him up and down.  "That's good!  I'm going in here to
+order some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch."
+
+Jon thanked him.  He might get news of her from Val!
+
+The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men,
+was seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's which they
+now entered.
+
+"Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with.
+Bless me!  Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from--let me see--
+the year Melton won the Derby.  One of my very best customers he
+was."  A faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face.  "Many's the
+tip he's given me, to be sure!  I suppose he took a couple of hundred
+of these every week, year in, year out, and never changed his
+cigarette.  Very affable gentleman, brought me a lot of custom.  I
+was sorry he met with that accident.  One misses an old customer like
+him."
+
+Val smiled.  His father's decease had closed an account which had
+been running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke
+puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again
+his father's face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy,
+in the only halo it had earned.  His father had his fame here,
+anyway--a man who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could
+give tips, and run accounts for ever!  To his tobacconist a hero!
+Even that was some distinction to inherit!
+
+"I pay cash," he said; "how much?"
+
+"To his son, sir, and cash--ten and six.  I shall never forget Mr.
+Montague Dartie.  I've known him stand talkin' to me half an hour.
+We don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry.  The
+War was bad for manners, sir--it was bad for manners.  You were in
+it, I see."
+
+"No," said Val, tapping his knee, "I got this in the war before.
+Saved my life, I expect.  Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?"
+
+Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, "I don't smoke, you know," and saw the
+tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say "Good
+God!" or "Now's your chance, sir!"
+
+"That's right," said Val; "keep off it while you can.  You'll want it
+when you take a knock.  This is really the same tobacco, then?"
+
+"Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all.  Wonderful staying
+power--the British Empire, I always say."
+
+"Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it
+monthly.  Come on, Jon."
+
+Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity.  Except to lunch now and then
+at the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London
+Club.  The Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could
+not, so long as George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his
+culinary acumen was almost the controlling force.  The Club had made
+a stand against the newly rich, and it had taken all George Forsyte's
+prestige, and praise of him as a "good sportsman," to bring in
+Prosper Profond.
+
+The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law entered
+the dining-room, and attracted by George's forefinger, sat down at
+their table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with
+solemn lips and an attractive shyness in his glance.  There was an
+air of privilege around that corner table, as though past masters
+were eating there.  Jon was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere.
+The waiter, lean in the chaps, pervaded with such free-masonical
+deference.  He seemed to hang on George Forsyte's lips, to watch the
+gloat in his eye with a kind of sympathy, to follow the movements of
+the heavy club-marked silver fondly.  His liveried arm and
+confidential voice alarmed Jon, they came so secretly over his
+shoulder.
+
+Except for George's "Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a deuced
+good judge of a cigar!" neither he nor the other past master took any
+notice of him, and he was grateful for this.  The talk was all about
+the breeding, points, and prices of horses, and he listened to it
+vaguely at first, wondering how it was possible to retain so much
+knowledge in a head.  He could not take his eyes off the dark past
+master--what he said was so deliberate and discouraging--such heavy,
+queer, smiled-out words.  Jon was thinking of butterflies, when he
+heard him say:
+
+"I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses."
+
+"Old Soames!  He's too dry a file!"
+
+With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past
+master went on.
+
+"His daughter's an attractive small girl.  Mr. Soames Forsyde is a
+bit old-fashioned.  I want to see him have a pleasure some day."
+George Forsyte grinned.
+
+"Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as he looks.  He'll never
+show he's enjoying anything--they might try and take it from him.
+Old Soames!  Once bit, twice shy!"
+
+"Well, Jon," said Val, hastily, "if you've finished, we'll go and
+have coffee."
+
+"Who were those?" Jon asked, on the stairs.  "I didn't quite---"
+
+"Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's and of my
+Uncle Soames.  He's always been here.  The other chap, Profond, is a
+queer fish.  I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you ask me!"
+
+Jon looked at him, startled.  "But that's awful," he said: "I mean--
+for Fleur."
+
+"Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very up-to-date."
+
+"Her mother!"
+
+"You're very green, Jon."
+
+Jon grew red.  "Mothers," he stammered angrily, "are different."
+
+"You're right," said Val suddenly; "but things aren't what they were
+when I was your age.  There's a 'To-morrow we die' feeling.  That's
+what old George meant about my Uncle Soames.  He doesn't mean to die
+to-morrow."
+
+Jon said, quickly: "What's the matter between him and my father?"
+
+"Stable secret, Jon.  Take my advice, and bottle up.  You'll do no
+good by knowing.  Have a liqueur?"
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+"I hate the way people keep things from one," he muttered, "and then
+sneer at one for being green."
+
+"Well, you can ask Holly.  If she won't tell you, you'll believe it's
+for your own good, I suppose."
+
+Jon got up.  "I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch."
+
+Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused.  The boy looked so
+upset.
+
+"All right!  See you on Friday."
+
+"I don't know," murmured Jon.
+
+And he did not.  This conspiracy of silence made him desperate.  It
+was humiliating to be treated like a child!  He retraced his moody
+steps to Stratton Street.  But he would go to her Club now, and find
+out the worst!  To his enquiry the reply was that Miss Forsyte was
+not in the Club. She might be in perhaps later.  She was often in on
+Monday--they could not say.  Jon said he would call again, and,
+crossing into the Green Park, flung himself down under a tree.  The
+sun was bright, and a breeze fluttered the leaves of the young lime-
+tree beneath which he lay; but his heart ached.  Such darkness seemed
+gathered round his happiness.  He heard Big Ben chime "Three" above
+the traffic.  The sound moved something in him, and, taking out a
+piece of paper, he began to scribble on it with a pencil.  He had
+jotted a stanza, and was searching the grass for another verse, when
+something hard touched his shoulder-a green parasol.  There above him
+stood Fleur!
+
+"They told me you'd been, and were coming back.  So I thought you
+might be out here; and you are--it's rather wonderful!"
+
+"Oh, Fleur!  I thought you'd have forgotten me."
+
+"When I told you that I shouldn't!"
+
+Jon seized her arm.
+
+"It's too much luck!  Let's get away from this side."  He almost
+dragged her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to find
+some cover where they could sit and hold each other's hands.
+
+"Hasn't anybody cut in?" he said, gazing round at her lashes, in
+suspense above her cheeks.
+
+"There is a young idiot, but he doesn't count."
+
+Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.
+
+"You know I've had sunstroke; I didn't tell you."
+
+"Really!  Was it interesting?"
+
+"No.  Mother was an angel.  Has anything happened to you?"
+
+"Nothing.  Except that I think I've found out what's wrong between
+our families, Jon."
+
+His heart began beating very fast.
+
+"I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father got
+her instead."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me.
+Of course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him
+pretty mad, wouldn't it?"
+
+Jon thought for a minute.  "Not if she loved my father best."
+
+"But suppose they were engaged?"
+
+"If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I might
+go cracked, but I shouldn't grudge it you."
+
+"I should.  You mustn't ever do that with me, Jon.
+
+"My God!  Not much!"
+
+"I don't believe that he's ever really cared for my mother."
+
+Jon was silent.  Val's words--the two past masters in the Club!
+
+"You see, we don't know," went on Fleur; "it may have been a great
+shock.  She may have behaved badly to him.  People do."
+
+"My mother wouldn't."
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders.  "I don't think we know much about our
+fathers and mothers.  We just see them in the light of the way they
+treat us; but they've treated other people, you know, before we were
+born-plenty, I expect.  You see, they're both old. Look at your
+father, with three separate families!"
+
+"Isn't there any place," cried Jon, "in all this beastly London where
+we can be alone?"
+
+"Only a taxi."
+
+"Let's get one, then."
+
+When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: "Are you going back
+to Robin Hill?  I should like to see where you live, Jon.  I'm
+staying with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for
+dinner.  I wouldn't come to the house, of course."
+
+Jon gazed at her enraptured.
+
+"Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan't meet anybody.
+There's a train at four."
+
+The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured,
+official, commercial, or professional, like the working classes,
+still worked their seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth
+generation travelled down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class
+carriage, dusty and sun-warmed, of that too early train.  They
+travelled in blissful silence, holding each other's hands.
+
+At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two
+unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and
+honeysuckle.
+
+For Jon--sure of her now, and without separation before him--it was a
+miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along
+the river Thames.  It was love-in-a-mist--one of those illumined
+pages of Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they
+gave each other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and
+flowers and birds scrolled in among the text--a happy communing,
+without afterthought, which lasted thirty-seven minutes.  They
+reached the coppice at the milking hour.  Jon would not take her as
+far as the farmyard; only to where she could see the field leading up
+to the gardens, and the house beyond.  They turned in among the
+larches, and suddenly, at the winding of the path, came on Irene,
+sitting on an old log seat.
+
+There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves;
+to moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal
+dignity.  This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his
+mother.  He became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate
+thing.  To have brought Fleur down openly--yes!  But to sneak her in
+like this!  Consumed with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his
+nature would permit.
+
+Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother's startled face was
+changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious.  It was she who
+uttered the first words:
+
+"I'm very glad to see you.  It was nice of Jon to think of bringing
+you down to us."
+
+"We weren't coming to the house," Jon blurted out.  "I just wanted
+Fleur to see where I lived."
+
+His mother said quietly:
+
+"Won't you come up and have tea?"
+
+Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard
+Fleur answer:
+
+"Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner.  I met Jon by
+accident, and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his
+home."
+
+How self-possessed she was!
+
+"Of course; but you must have tea.  We'll send you down to the
+station.  My husband will enjoy seeing you."
+
+The expression of his mother's eyes, resting on him for a moment,
+cast Jon down level with the ground--a true worm.  Then she led on,
+and Fleur followed her.  He felt like a child, trailing after those
+two, who were talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the
+house up there beyond the trees and the grassy slope.  He watched the
+fencing of their eyes, taking each other in--the two beings he loved
+most in the world.
+
+He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered in
+advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that
+tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant;
+already he could feel the faint irony which would come into his voice
+and smile.
+
+"This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the
+house.  Let's have tea at once--she has to catch a train.  Jon, tell
+them, dear, and telephone to the Dragon for a car."
+
+To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his
+mother had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up
+into the house.  Now he would not see Fleur alone again--not for a
+minute, and they had arranged no further meeting!  When he returned
+under cover of the maids and teapots, there was not a trace of
+awkwardness beneath the tree; it was all within himself, but not the
+less for that.  They were talking of the Gallery off Cork Street.
+
+"We back numbers," his father was saying, "are awfully anxious to
+find out why we can't appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must tell
+us."
+
+"It's supposed to be satiric, isn't it?" said Fleur.
+
+He saw his father's smile.
+
+"Satiric?  Oh! I think it's more than that.  What do you say, Jon?"
+
+"I don't know at all," stammered Jon.  His father's face had a sudden
+grimness.
+
+"The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals.  Off with their
+heads, they say--smash their idols!  And let's get back to-nothing!
+And, by Jove, they've done it!  Jon's a poet.  He'll be going in,
+too, and stamping on what's left of us.  Property, beauty, sentiment-
+-all smoke.  We mustn't own anything nowadays, not even our feelings.
+They stand in the way of--Nothing."
+
+Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father's words,
+behind which he felt a meaning that he could not reach.  He didn't
+want to stamp on anything!
+
+"Nothing's the god of to-day," continued Jolyon; "we're back where
+the Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism."
+
+"No, Dad," cried Jon suddenly, "we only want to live, and we don't
+know how, because of the Past--that's all!"
+
+"By George!" said Jolyon, "that's profound, Jon.  Is it your own?
+The Past!  Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath.  Let's
+have cigarettes."
+
+Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly,
+as if to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes.  He lighted his
+father's and Fleur's, then one for himself.  Had he taken the knock
+that Val had spoken of?  The smoke was blue when he had not puffed,
+grey when he had; he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense
+of equality it gave him.  He was glad no one said: "So you've begun!"
+He felt less young.
+
+Fleur looked at her watch, and rose.  His mother went with her into
+the house.  Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.
+
+"See her into the car, old man," said Jolyon; "and when she's gone,
+ask your mother to come back to me."
+
+Jon went.  He waited in the hall.  He saw her into the car.  There
+was no chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand.  He
+waited all that evening for something to be said to him.  Nothing was
+said.  Nothing might have happened.  He went up to bed, and in the
+mirror on his dressing-table met himself.  He did not speak, nor did
+the image; but both looked as if they thought the more.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN GREEN STREET
+
+
+Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous
+should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a
+remark of Fleur's: "He's like the hosts of Midian--he prowls and
+prowls around"; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: "What's
+the use of keepin' fit?" or, more simply, to the fact that he was a
+foreigner, or alien as it was now called.  Certain, that Annette was
+looking particularly handsome, and that Soames--had sold him a
+Gauguin and then torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself
+had said: "I didn't get that small picture I bought from Mr.
+Forsyde."
+
+However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's
+evergreen little house in Green Street, with a good-natured
+obtuseness which no one mistook for naiv ete, a word hardly
+applicable to Monsieur Prosper Profond.  Winifred still found him
+"amusing," and would write him little notes saying: "Come and have a
+'jolly' with us"--it was breath of life to her to keep up with the
+phrases of the day.
+
+The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
+having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in
+it--which was unnatural.  The English type of disillusionment was
+familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable
+circles.  It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got
+something out of it.  But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose,
+but because there was nothing in anything, was not English; and that
+which was not English one could not help secretly feeling dangerous,
+if not precisely bad form.  It was like having the mood which the War
+had left, seated--dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent--in your Empire
+chair; it was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink
+lips above a little diabolic beard.  It was, as Jack Cardigan
+expressed it--for the English character at large--"a bit too thick"--
+for if nothing was really worth getting excited about, there were
+always games, and one could make it so!  Even Winifred, ever a
+Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of such a
+mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be there.
+Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country which
+decently veiled such realities.
+
+When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to
+dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of
+Winifred's little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with
+an air of seeing nothing in it.  And Fleur gazed promptly into the
+fireplace with an air of seeing a fire which was not there.
+
+Monsieur Profond came from the window.  He was in full fig, with a
+white waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.
+
+"Well, Miss Forsyde," he said, "I'm awful pleased to see you.  Mr.
+Forsyde well?  I was sayin' to-day I want to see him have some
+pleasure.  He worries."
+
+"You think so?" said Fleur shortly.
+
+"Worries," repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r's.
+
+Fleur spun round.  "Shall I tell you," she said, "what would give him
+pleasure?"  But the words, "To hear that you had cleared out," died
+at the expression on his face.  All his fine white teeth were
+showing.
+
+"I was hearin' at the Club to-day about his old trouble."
+Fleur opened her eyes.  "What do you mean?"
+
+Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his
+statement.
+
+"Before you were born," he said; "that small business."
+
+Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share
+in her father's worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush of
+nervous curiosity.  "Tell me what you heard."
+
+"Why!" murmured Monsieur Profond, "you know all that."
+
+"I expect I do.  But I should like to know that you haven't heard it
+all wrong."
+
+"His first wife," murmured Monsieur Profond.
+
+Choking back the words, "He was never married before," she said:
+"Well, what about her?"
+
+"Mr. George Forsyde was tellin' me about your father's first wife
+marryin' his cousin Jolyon afterward.  It was a small bit unpleasant,
+I should think.  I saw their boy--nice boy!"
+
+Fleur looked up.  Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical,
+before her.  That--the reason!  With the most heroic effort of her
+life so far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure.  She could
+not tell whether he had noticed.  And just then Winifred came in.
+
+"Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most
+amusing afternoon at the Babies' bazaar."
+
+"What babies?" said Fleur mechanically.
+
+"The 'Save the Babies.'  I got such a bargain, my dear.  A piece of
+old Armenian work--from before the Flood.  I want your opinion on it,
+Prosper."
+
+"Auntie," whispered Fleur suddenly.
+
+At the tone in the girl's voice Winifred closed in on her.'
+
+"What's the matter?  Aren't you well?"
+
+Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was
+practically out of hearing.
+
+"Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before.  Is it
+true that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte's father?"
+
+Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had
+Winifred felt more seriously embarrassed.  Her niece's face was so
+pale, her eyes so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.
+
+"Your father didn't wish you to hear," she said, with all the aplomb
+she could muster.  "These things will happen.  I've often told him he
+ought to let you know."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her
+shoulder--a firm little shoulder, nice and white!  She never could
+help an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who
+would have to be married, of course--though not to that boy Jon.
+
+"We've forgotten all about it years and years ago," she said
+comfortably.  "Come and have dinner!"
+
+"No, Auntie.  I don't feel very well.  May I go upstairs?"
+
+"My dear!" murmured Winifred, concerned, "you're not taking this to
+heart?  Why, you haven't properly come out yet!  That boy's a child!"
+
+"What boy?  I've only got a headache.  But I can't stand that man to-
+night."
+
+"Well, well," said Winifred, "go and lie down.  I'll send you some
+bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond.  What business had he
+to gossip?  Though I must say I think it's much better you should
+know."
+
+Fleur smiled.  "Yes," she said, and slipped from the room.
+
+She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a
+guttered frightened feeling in her breast.  Never in her life as yet
+had she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what
+she had set her heart on.  The sensations of the afternoon had been
+full and poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of
+them had really made her head ache.  No wonder her father had hidden
+that photograph, so secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept
+it!  But could he hate Jon's mother and yet keep her photograph?  She
+pressed her hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly.
+Had they told Jon--had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell
+him?  Everything now turned on that!  She knew, they all knew,
+except--perhaps--Jon!
+
+She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard.
+Jon loved his mother.  If they had told him, what would he do?  She
+could not tell.  But if they had not told him, should she not--could
+she not get him for herself--get married to him, before he knew?  She
+searched her memories of Robin Hill.  His mother's face so passive--
+with its dark eyes and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile--
+baffled her; and his father's--kindly, sunken, ironic.  Instinctively
+she felt they would shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from
+hurting him--for of course it would hurt him awfully to know!
+
+Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew.  So long
+as neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still
+a chance--freedom to cover one's tracks, and get what her heart was
+set on.  But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation.  Every
+one's hand was against her--every one's!  It was as Jon had said--he
+and she just wanted to live and the past was in their way, a past
+they hadn't shared in, and didn't understand!  Oh! What a shame!  And
+suddenly she thought of June.  Would she help them?  For somehow June
+had left on her the impression that she would be sympathetic with
+their love, impatient of obstacle.  Then, instinctively, she thought:
+'I won't give anything away, though, even to her.  I daren't.  I mean
+to have Jon; against them all.'
+
+Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred's pet headache
+cachets.  She swallowed both.  Then Winifred herself appeared.  Fleur
+opened her campaign with the words:
+
+"You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn't think I'm in love with
+that boy.  Why, I've hardly seen him!"
+
+Winifred, though experienced, was not "fine."  She accepted the
+remark with considerable relief.  Of course, it was not pleasant for
+the girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to
+minimise the matter, a task for which she was eminently qualified,
+"raised" fashionably under a comfortable mother and a father whose
+nerves might not be shaken, and for many years the wife of Montague
+Dartie.  Her description was a masterpiece of understatement.
+Fleur's father's first wife had been very foolish.  There had been a
+young man who had got run over, and she had left Fleur's father.
+Then, years after, when it might all have come--right again, she had
+taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of course, her father had
+been obliged to have a divorce.  Nobody remembered anything of it
+now, except just the family.  And, perhaps, it had all turned out for
+the best; her father had Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had been quite
+happy, they said, and their boy was a nice boy.  "Val having Holly,
+too, is a sort of plaster, don't you know?"  With these soothing
+words, Winifred patted her niece's shoulder; thought: 'She's a nice,
+plump little thing!' and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite
+of his indiscretion, was very "amusing" this evening.
+
+For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under
+influence of bromide material and spiritual.  But then reality came
+back.  Her aunt had left out all that mattered--all the feeling, the
+hate, the love, the unforgivingness of passionate hearts.  She, who
+knew so little of life, and had touched only the fringe of love, was
+yet aware by instinct that words have as little relation to fact and
+feeling as coin to the bread it buys.  'Poor Father!' she thought.
+'Poor me!  Poor Jon!  But I don't care, I mean to have him!'  From
+the window of her darkened room she saw "that man" issue from the
+door below and "prowl" away.  If he and her mother--how would that
+affect her chance?  Surely it must make her father cling to her more
+closely, so that he would consent in the end to anything she wanted,
+or become reconciled the sooner to what she did without his
+knowledge.
+
+She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with all
+her might flung it after that disappearing figure.  It fell short,
+but the action did her good.
+
+And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of
+petrol, not sweet.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
+
+
+Soames, coming up to the City, with the intention of calling in at
+Green Street at the end of his day and taking Fleur back home with
+him, suffered from rumination.  Sleeping partner that he was, he
+seldom visited the City now, but he still had a room of his own at
+Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte's, and one special clerk and a half
+assigned to the management of purely Forsyte affairs.  They were
+somewhat in flux just now--an auspicious moment for the disposal of
+house property.  And Soames was unloading the estates of his father
+and Uncle Roger, and to some extent of his Uncle Nicholas.  His
+shrewd and matter-of-course probity in all money concerns had made
+him something of an autocrat in connection with these trusts.  If
+Soames thought this or thought that, one had better save oneself the
+bother of thinking too.  He guaranteed, as it were, irresponsibility
+to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth generations.  His fellow
+trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas, his cousins-in-law
+Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely's husband, all trusted
+him; he signed first, and where he signed first they signed after,
+and nobody was a penny the worse.  Just now they were all a good many
+pennies the better, and Soames was beginning to see the close of
+certain trusts, except for distribution of the income from securities
+as gilt-edged as was compatible with the period.
+
+Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect
+backwater in London, he ruminated.  Money was extraordinarily tight;
+and morality extraordinarily loose!  The War had done it.  Banks were
+not lending; people breaking contracts all over the place.  There was
+a feeling in the air and a look on faces that he did not like.  The
+country seemed in for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies.  There
+was satisfaction in the thought that neither he nor his trusts had an
+investment which could be affected by anything less maniacal than
+national repudiation or a levy on capital.  If Soames had faith, it
+was in what he called "English common sense"--or the power to have
+things, if not one way then another.  He might--like his father James
+before him--say he didn't know what things were coming to, but he
+never in his heart believed they were.  If it rested with him, they
+wouldn't--and, after all, he was only an Englishman like any other,
+so quietly tenacious of what he had that he knew he would never
+really part with it without something more or less equivalent in
+exchange.  His mind was essentially equilibristic in material
+matters, and his way of putting the national situation difficult to
+refute in a world composed of human beings.  Take his own case, for
+example!  He was well off.  Did that do anybody harm?  He did not eat
+ten meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much as, a poor
+man.  He spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no more
+water to speak of than the mechanic or the porter.  He certainly had
+pretty things about him, but they had given employment in the making,
+and somebody must use them.  He bought pictures, but Art must be
+encouraged.  He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which
+money flowed, employing labour.  What was there objectionable in
+that?  In his charge money was in quicker and more useful flux than
+it would be in charge of the State and a lot of slow-fly money-
+sucking officials.  And as to what he saved each year--it was just as
+much in flux as what he didn't save, going into Water Board or
+Council Stocks, or something sound and useful.  The State paid him no
+salary for being trustee of his own or other people's money he did
+all that for nothing.  Therein lay the whole case against
+nationalisation--owners of private property were unpaid, and yet had
+every incentive to quicken up the flux.  Under nationalisation--just
+the opposite!  In a country smarting from officialism he felt that he
+had a strong case.
+
+It particularly annoyed him, entering that backwater of perfect
+peace, to think that a lot of unscrupulous Trusts and Combinations
+had been cornering the market in goods of all kinds, and keeping
+prices at an artificial height.  Such abusers of the individualistic
+system were the ruffians who caused all the trouble, and it was some
+satisfaction to see them getting into a stew at fast lest the whole
+thing might come down with a run--and land them in the soup.
+
+The offices of Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte occupied the ground and
+first floors of a house on the right-hand side; and, ascending to his
+room, Soames thought: 'Time we had a coat of paint.'
+
+His old clerk Gradman was seated, where he always was, at a huge
+bureau with countless pigeonholes.  Half-the-clerk stood beside him,
+with a broker's note recording investment of the proceeds from sale
+of the Bryanston Square house, in Roger Forsyte's estate.  Soames
+took it, and said:
+
+"Vancouver City Stock.  H'm.  It's down today!"
+
+With a sort of grating ingratiation old Gradman answered him:
+
+"Ye-es; but everything's down, Mr. Soames."  And half-the-clerk
+withdrew.
+
+Soames skewered the document on to a number of other papers and hung
+up his hat.
+
+"I want to look at my Will and Marriage Settlement, Gradman."
+
+Old Gradman, moving to the limit of his swivel chair, drew out two
+drafts from the bottom lefthand drawer.  Recovering his body, he
+raised his grizzle-haired face, very red from stooping.
+
+"Copies, Sir."
+
+Soames took them.  It struck him suddenly how like Gradman was to the
+stout brindled yard dog they had been wont to keep on his chain at
+The Shelter, till one day Fleur had come and insisted it should be
+let loose, so that it had at once bitten the cook and been destroyed.
+If you let Gradman off his chain, would he bite the cook?
+
+Checking this frivolous fancy, Soames unfolded his Marriage
+Settlement.  He had not looked at it for over eighteen years, not
+since he remade his Will when his father died and Fleur was born.  He
+wanted to see whether the words "during coverture" were in.  Yes,
+they were--odd expression, when you thought of it, and derived
+perhaps from horse-breeding!  Interest on fifteen thousand pounds
+(which he paid her without deducting income tax) so long as she
+remained his wife, and afterward during widowhood "dum casta"--old-
+fashioned and rather pointed words, put in to insure the conduct of
+Fleur's mother.  His Will made it up to an annuity of a thousand
+under the same conditions.  All right!  He returned the copies to
+Gradman, who took them without looking up, swung the chair, restored
+the papers to their drawer, and went on casting up.
+
+"Gradman! I don't like the condition of the country; there are a lot
+of people about without any common sense.  I want to find a way by
+which I can safeguard Miss Fleur against anything which might arise."
+
+Gradman wrote the figure "2" on his blotting-paper.
+
+"Ye-es," he said; "there's a nahsty spirit."
+
+"The ordinary restraint against anticipation doesn't meet the case."
+
+"Nao," said Gradman.
+
+"Suppose those Labour fellows come in, or worse!  It's these people
+with fixed ideas who are the danger.  Look at Ireland!"
+
+"Ah!" said Gradman.
+
+"Suppose I were to make a settlement on her at once with myself as
+beneficiary for life, they couldn't take anything but the interest
+from me, unless of course they alter the law."
+
+Gradman moved his head and smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "they wouldn't do tha-at!"
+
+"I don't know," muttered Soames; "I don't trust them."
+
+"It'll take two years, sir, to be valid against death duties."
+
+Soames sniffed.  Two years!  He was only sixty-five!
+
+"That's not the point.  Draw a form of settlement that passes all my
+property to Miss Fleur's children in equal shares, with antecedent
+life-interests first to myself and then to her without power of
+anticipation, and add a clause that in the event of anything
+happening to divert her life-interest, that interest passes to the
+trustees, to apply for her benefit, in their absolute discretion."
+
+Gradman grated: "Rather extreme at your age, sir; you lose control."
+
+"That's my business," said Soames sharply.
+
+Gradman wrote on a piece of paper: "Life-interest--anticipation--
+divert interest--absolute discretion...." and said:
+
+"What trustees?  There's young Mr. Kingson; he's a nice steady young
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, he might do for one.  I must have three.  There isn't a Forsyte
+now who appeals to me."
+
+"Not young Mr. Nicholas?  He's at the Bar.  We've given 'im briefs."
+
+"He'll never set the Thames on fire," said Soames.
+
+A smile oozed out on Gradman's face, greasy from countless mutton-
+chops, the smile of a man who sits all day.
+
+"You can't expect it, at his age, Mr. Soames."
+
+"Why?  What is he?  Forty?"
+
+"Ye-es, quite a young fellow."
+
+"Well, put him in; but I want somebody who'll take a personal
+interest.  There's no one that I can see."
+
+"What about Mr. Valerius, now he's come home?"
+
+"Val Dartie?  With that father?"
+
+"We-ell," murmured Gradman, "he's been dead seven years--the Statute
+runs against him."
+
+"No," said Soames.  "I don't like the connection."  He rose.  Gradman
+said suddenly:
+
+"If they were makin' a levy on capital, they could come on the
+trustees, sir.  So there you'd be just the same.  I'd think it over,
+if I were you."
+
+"That's true," said Soames.  "I will.  What have you done about that
+dilapidation notice in Vere Street?"
+
+"I 'aven't served it yet.  The party's very old.  She won't want to
+go out at her age."
+
+"I don't know.  This spirit of unrest touches every one."
+
+"Still, I'm lookin' at things broadly, sir.  She's eighty-one."
+
+"Better serve it," said Soames, "and see what she says.  Oh! and Mr.
+Timothy?  Is everything in order in case of--"
+
+"I've got the inventory of his estate all ready; had the furniture
+and pictures valued so that we know what reserves to put on.  I shall
+be sorry when he goes, though.  Dear me!  It is a time since I first
+saw Mr. Timothy!"
+
+"We can't live for ever," said Soames, taking down his hat.
+
+"Nao," said Gradman; "but it'll be a pity--the last of the old
+family!  Shall I take up the matter of that nuisance in Old Compton
+Street?  Those organs--they're nahsty things."
+
+"Do.  I must call for Miss Fleur and catch the four o'clock.  Good-
+day, Gradman."
+
+"Good-day, Mr. Soames.  I hope Miss Fleur--"
+
+"Well enough, but gads about too much."
+
+"Ye-es," grated Gradman; "she's young."
+
+Soames went out, musing: "Old Gradman!  If he were younger I'd put
+him in the trust.  There's nobody I can depend on to take a real
+interest.
+
+Leaving the bilious and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous
+peace of that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture!  Why
+can't they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-
+working Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which
+could provoke so unpatriotic a thought.  But there it was!  One never
+got a moment of real peace.  There was always something at the back
+of everything!  And he made his way toward Green Street.
+
+Two hours later by his watch, Thomas Gradman, stirring in his swivel
+chair, closed the last drawer of his bureau, and putting into his
+waistcoat pocket a bunch of keys so fat that they gave him a
+protuberance on the liver side, brushed his old top hat round with
+his sleeve, took his umbrella, and descended.  Thick, short, and
+buttoned closely into his old frock coat, he walked toward Covent
+Garden market.  He never missed that daily promenade to the Tube for
+Highgate, and seldom some critical transaction on the way in
+connection with vegetables and fruit.  Generations might be born, and
+hats might change, wars be fought, and Forsytes fade away, but Thomas
+Gradman, faithful and grey, would take his daily walk and buy his
+daily vegetable.  Times were not what they were, and his son had lost
+a leg, and they never gave him those nice little plaited baskets to
+carry the stuff in now, and these Tubes were convenient things--still
+he mustn't complain; his health was good considering his time of
+life, and after fifty-four years in the Law he was getting a round
+eight hundred a year and a little worried of late, because it was
+mostly collector's commission on the rents, and with all this
+conversion of Forsyte property going on, it looked like drying up,
+and the price of living still so high; but it was no good worrying--"
+The good God made us all"--as he was in the habit of saying; still,
+house property in London--he didn't know what Mr. Roger or Mr. James
+would say if they could see it being sold like this--seemed to show a
+lack of faith; but Mr. Soames--he worried.  Life and lives in being
+and twenty-one years after--beyond that you couldn't go; still, he
+kept his health wonderfully--and Miss Fleur was a pretty little
+thing--she was; she'd marry; but lots of people had no children
+nowadays--he had had his first child at twenty-two; and Mr. Jolyon,
+married while he was at Cambridge, had his child the same year--
+gracious Peter!  That was back in '69, a long time before old Mr.
+Jolyon--fine judge of property--had taken his Will away from Mr.
+James--dear, yes!  Those were the days when they were buyin' property
+right and left, and none of this khaki and fallin' over one another
+to get out of things; and cucumbers at twopence; and a melon--the old
+melons, that made your mouth water!  Fifty years since he went into
+Mr. James' office, and Mr. James had said to him: "Now, Gradman,
+you're only a shaver--you pay attention, and you'll make your five
+hundred a year before you've done."  And he had, and feared God, and
+served the Forsytes, and kept a vegetable diet at night.  And, buying
+a copy of Jobn Bull--not that he approved of it, an extravagant
+affair--he entered the Tube elevator with his mere brown-paper
+parcel, and was borne down into the bowels of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE
+
+
+On his way to Green Street it occurred to Soames that he ought to go
+into Dumetrius' in Suffolk Street about the possibility of the
+Bolderby Old Crome.  Almost worth while to have fought the war to
+have the Bolderby Old Crome, as it were, in flux!  Old Bolderby had
+died, his son and grandson had been killed--a cousin was coming into
+the estate, who meant to sell it, some said because of the condition
+of England, others said because he had asthma.
+
+If Dumetrius once got hold of it the price would become prohibitive;
+it was necessary for Soames to find out whether Dumetrius had got it,
+before he tried to get it himself.  He therefore confined himself to
+discussing with Dumetrius whether Monticellis would come again now
+that it was the fashion for a picture to be anything except a
+picture; and the future of Johns, with a side-slip into Buxton
+Knights.  It was only when leaving that he added: "So they're not
+selling the Bolderby Old Crome, after all?  "In sheer pride of racial
+superiority, as he had calculated would be the case, Dumetrius
+replied:
+
+"Oh! I shall get it, Mr. Forsyte, sir!"
+
+The flutter of his eyelid fortified Soames in a resolution to write
+direct to the new Bolderby, suggesting that the only dignified way of
+dealing with an Old Crome was to avoid dealers.  He therefore said,
+"Well, good-day!" and went, leaving Dumetrius the wiser.
+
+At Green Street he found that Fleur was out and would be all the
+evening; she was staying one more night in London.  He cabbed on
+dejectedly, and caught his train.
+
+He reached his house about six o'clock.  The air was heavy, midges
+biting, thunder about.  Taking his letters he went up to his
+dressing-room to cleanse himself of London.
+
+An uninteresting post.  A receipt, a bill for purchases on behalf of
+Fleur.  A circular about an exhibition of etchings.  A letter
+beginning:
+
+"SIR,
+"I feel it my duty..."
+
+That would be an appeal or something unpleasant.  He looked at once
+for the signature.  There was none! Incredulously he turned the page
+over and examined each corner.  Not being a public man, Soames had
+never yet had an anonymous letter, and his first impulse was to tear
+it up, as a dangerous thing; his second to read it, as a thing still
+more dangerous.
+
+"SIR,
+"I feel it my duty to inform you that having no interest in the
+matter your lady is carrying on with a foreigner--"
+
+Reaching that word Soames stopped mechanically and examined the
+postmark.  So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in
+which the Post Office had wrapped it, there was something with a
+"sea" at the end and a "t" in it.  Chelsea?  No! Battersea?  Perhaps!
+He read on.
+
+"These foreigners are all the same.  Sack the lot.  This one meets
+your lady twice a week.  I know it of my own knowledge--and to see an
+Englishman put on goes against the grain.  You watch it and see if
+what I say isn't true.  I shouldn't meddle if it wasn't a dirty
+foreigner that's in it.  Yours obedient."
+
+The sensation with which Soames dropped the letter was similar to
+that he would have had entering his bedroom and finding it full of
+black-beetles.  The meanness of anonymity gave a shuddering obscenity
+to the moment.  And the worst of it was that this shadow had been at
+the back of his mind ever since the Sunday evening when Fleur had
+pointed down at Prosper Profond strolling on the lawn, and said:
+"Prowling cat!"  Had he not in connection therewith, this very day,
+perused his Will and Marriage Settlement?  And now this anonymous
+ruffian, with nothing to gain, apparently, save the venting of his
+spite against foreigners, had wrenched it out of the obscurity in
+which he had hoped and wished it would remain.  To have such
+knowledge forced on him, at his time of life, about Fleur's mother I
+He picked the letter up from the carpet, tore it across, and then,
+when it hung together by just the fold at the back, stopped tearing,
+and reread it.  He was taking at that moment one of the decisive
+resolutions of his life.  He would not be forced into another
+scandal.  No!  However he decided to deal with this matter--and it
+required the most far-sighted and careful consideration he would do
+nothing that might injure Fleur. That resolution taken, his mind
+answered the helm again, and he made his ablutions.  His hands
+trembled as he dried them.  Scandal he would not have, but something
+must be done to stop this sort of thing!  He went into his wife's
+room and stood looking around him.  The idea of searching for
+anything which would incriminate, and entitle him to hold a menace
+over her, did not even come to him.  There would be nothing--she was
+much too practical.  The idea of having her watched had been
+dismissed before it came--too well he remembered his previous
+experience of that.  No!  He had nothing but this torn-up letter from
+some anonymous ruffian, whose impudent intrusion into his private
+life he so violently resented.  It was repugnant to him to make use
+of it, but he might have to.  What a mercy Fleur was not at home to-
+night!  A tap on the door broke up his painful cogitations.
+
+"Mr. Michael Mont, sir, is in the drawing-room.  Will you see him?"
+
+"No," said Soames; "yes.  I'll come down."
+
+Anything that would take his mind off for a few minutes!
+
+Michael Mont in flannels stood on the verandah smoking a cigarette.
+He threw it away as Soames came up, and ran his hand through his
+hair.
+
+Soames' feeling toward this young man was singular.  He was no doubt
+a rackety, irresponsible young fellow according to old standards, yet
+somehow likeable, with his extraordinarily cheerful way of blurting
+out his opinions.
+
+"Come in," he said; "have you had tea?"
+
+Mont came in.
+
+"I thought Fleur would have been back, sir; but I'm glad she isn't.
+The fact is, I--I'm fearfully gone on her; so fearfully gone that I
+thought you'd better know.  It's old-fashioned, of course, coming to
+fathers first, but I thought you'd forgive that.  I went to my own
+Dad, and he says if I settle down he'll see me through.  He rather
+cottons to the idea, in fact.  I told him about your Goya."
+
+"Oh!" said Soames, inexpressibly dry.  "He rather cottons?"
+
+"Yes, sir; do you?"
+
+Soames smiled faintly.
+
+"You see," resumed Mont, twiddling his straw hat, while his hair,
+ears, eyebrows, all seemed to stand up from excitement, "when you've
+been through the War you can't help being in a hurry."
+
+"To get married; and unmarried afterward," said Soames slowly.
+
+"Not from Fleur, sir.  Imagine, if you were me!"
+
+Soames cleared his throat.  That way of putting it was forcible
+enough.
+
+"Fleur's too young," he said.
+
+"Oh! no, sir.  We're awfully old nowadays.  My Dad seems to me a
+perfect babe; his thinking apparatus hasn't turned a hair.  But he's
+a Baronight, of course; that keeps him back."
+
+"Baronight," repeated Soames; "what may that be?"
+
+"Bart, sir.  I shall be a Bart some day.  But I shall live it down,
+you know."
+
+"Go away and live this down," said Soames.
+
+Young Mont said imploringly: "Oh! no, sir.  I simply must hang
+around, or I shouldn't have a dog's chance.  You'll let Fleur do what
+she likes, I suppose, anyway.  Madame passes me."
+
+"Indeed!" said Soames frigidly.
+
+"You don't really bar me, do you?" and the young man looked so
+doleful that Soames smiled.
+
+"You may think you're very old," he said; "but you strike me as
+extremely young.  To rattle ahead of everything is not a proof of
+maturity."
+
+"All right, sir; I give you our age.  But to show you I mean
+business--I've got a job."
+
+"Glad to hear it."
+
+"Joined a publisher; my governor is putting up the stakes."
+
+Soames put his hand over his mouth--he had so very nearly said: "God
+help the publisher!"  His grey eyes scrutinised the agitated young
+man.
+
+"I don't dislike you, Mr. Mont, but Fleur is everything to me:
+Everything--do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I know; but so she is to me."
+
+"That's as may be.  I'm glad you've told me, however.  And now I
+think there's nothing more to be said."
+
+"I know it rests with her, sir."
+
+"It will rest with her a long time, I hope."
+
+"You aren't cheering," said Mont suddenly.
+
+"No," said Soames, "my experience of life has not made me anxious to
+couple people in a hurry.  Good-night, Mr. Mont.  I shan't tell Fleur
+what you've said."
+
+"Oh!" murmured Mont blankly; "I really could knock my brains out for
+want of her.  She knows that perfectly well."
+
+"I dare say."  And Soames held out his hand.  A distracted squeeze, a
+heavy sigh, and soon after sounds from the young man's motor-cycle
+called up visions of flying dust and broken bones.
+
+'The younger generation!' he thought heavily, and went out on to the
+lawn.  The gardeners had been mowing, and there was still the smell
+of fresh-cut grass--the thundery air kept all scents close to earth.
+The sky was of a purplish hue--the poplars black.  Two or three boats
+passed on the river, scuttling, as it were, for shelter before the
+storm.  'Three days' fine weather,' thought Soames, 'and then a
+storm!'  Where was Annette?  With that chap, for all he knew--she was
+a young woman!  Impressed with the queer charity of that thought, he
+entered the summerhouse and sat down.  The fact was--and he admitted
+it--Fleur was so much to him that his wife was very little--very
+little; French--had never been much more than a mistress, and he was
+getting indifferent to that side of things!  It was odd how, with all
+this ingrained care for moderation and secure investment, Soames ever
+put his emotional eggs into one basket.  First Irene--now Fleur.  He
+was dimly conscious of it, sitting there, conscious of its odd
+dangerousness.  It had brought him to wreck and scandal once, but
+now--now it should save him!  He cared so much for Fleur that he
+would have no further scandal.  If only he could get at that
+anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not to meddle and stir up
+mud at the bottom of water which he wished should remain stagnant!...
+A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain spattered on
+the thatch above him.  He remained indifferent, tracing a pattern
+with his finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table.
+Fleur's future! 'I want fair sailing for her,' he thought.  'Nothing
+else matters at my time of life.'  A lonely business--life!  What you
+had you never could keep to yourself!  As you warned one off, you let
+another in.  One could make sure of nothing!  He reached up and
+pulled a red rambler rose from a cluster which blocked the window.
+Flowers grew and dropped--Nature was a queer thing!  The thunder
+rumbled and crashed, travelling east along a river, the paling
+flashes flicked his eyes; the poplar tops showed sharp and dense
+against the sky, a heavy shower rustled and rattled and veiled in the
+little house wherein he sat, indifferent, thinking.
+
+When the storm was over, he left his retreat and went down the wet
+path to the river bank.
+
+Two swans had come, sheltering in among the reeds.  He knew the birds
+well, and stood watching the dignity in the curve of those white
+necks and formidable snake-like heads.  'Not dignified--what I have
+to do!' he thought.  And yet it must be tackled, lest worse befell.
+Annette must be back by now from wherever she had gone, for it was
+nearly dinner-time, and as the moment for seeing her approached, the
+difficulty of knowing what to say and how to say it had increased.  A
+new and scaring thought occurred to him.  Suppose she wanted her
+liberty to marry this fellow!  Well, if she did, she couldn't have
+it.  He had not married her for that.  The image of Prosper Profond
+dawdled before him reassuringly.  Not a marrying man!  No, no!  Anger
+replaced that momentary scare.  'He had better not come my way,' he
+thought.  The mongrel represented---!  But what did Prosper Profond
+represent?  Nothing that mattered surely.  And yet something real
+enough in the world--unmorality let off its chain, disillusionment on
+the prowl!  That expression Annette had caught from him: "Je m'en
+fiche!  "A fatalistic chap!  A continental--a cosmopolitan--a product
+of the age!  If there were condemnation more complete, Soames felt
+that he did not know it.
+
+The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into some
+distance of their own.  One of them uttered a little hiss, wagged its
+tail, turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam away.  The other
+followed.  Their white bodies, their stately necks, passed out of his
+sight, and he went toward the house.
+
+Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he thought
+as he went up-stairs 'Handsome is as handsome does.'  Handsome!
+Except for remarks about the curtains in the drawing-room, and the
+storm, there was practically no conversation during a meal
+distinguished by exactitude of quantity and perfection of quality.
+Soames drank nothing.  He followed her into the drawing-room
+afterward, and found her smoking a cigarette on the sofa between the
+two French windows.  She was leaning back, almost upright, in a low
+black frock, with her knees crossed and her blue eyes half-closed;
+grey-blue smoke issued from her red, rather full lips, a fillet bound
+her chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk stockings, and shoes
+with very high heels showing off her instep.  A fine piece in any
+room!  Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep into
+the side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
+
+"I'm going to shut the window; the damp's lifting in."
+
+He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the cream-
+panelled wall close by.
+
+What was she thinking of?  He had never understood a woman in his
+life--except Fleur--and Fleur not always!  His heart beat fast.  But
+if he meant to do it, now was the moment.  Turning from the David
+Cox, he took out the torn letter.
+
+"I've had this."
+
+Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
+
+Soames handed her the letter.
+
+"It's torn, but you can read it."  And he turned back to the David
+Cox--a sea-piece, of good tone--but without movement enough.  'I
+wonder what that chap's doing at this moment?' he thought.  'I'll
+astonish him yet.'  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Annette
+holding the letter rigidly; her eyes moved from side to side under
+her darkened lashes and frowning darkened eyes.  She dropped the
+letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and said:
+
+"Dirrty!"
+
+"I quite agree," said Soames; "degrading.  Is it true?"
+
+A tooth fastened on her red lower lip.  "And what if it were?"
+
+She was brazen!
+
+"Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"No."
+
+
+"Well, speak out!"
+
+"What is the good of talking?"
+
+Soames said icily: "So you admit it?"
+
+"I admit nothing.  You are a fool to ask.  A man like you should not
+ask.  It is dangerous."
+
+Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, halting in front of her, "what you were
+when I married you?  Working at accounts in a restaurant."
+
+"Do you remember that I was not half your age?"
+
+Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to
+the David Cox.
+
+"I am not going to bandy words.  I require you to give up this--
+friendship.  I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur."
+
+"Ah!--Fleur!"
+
+"Yes," said Soames stubbornly; "Fleur.  She is your child as well as
+mine."
+
+"It is kind to admit that!"
+
+"Are you going to do what I say?"
+
+"I refuse to tell you."
+
+"Then I must make you."
+
+Annette smiled.
+
+"No, Soames," she said.  "You are helpless.  Do not say things that
+you will regret."
+
+Anger swelled the veins on his forehead.  He opened his mouth to vent
+that emotion, and could not.  Annette went on:
+
+"There shall be no more such letters, I promise you.  That is
+enough."
+
+Soames writhed.  He had a sense of being treated like a child by this
+woman who had deserved he did not know what.
+
+"When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had
+better be quiet about each other.  There are things one does not drag
+up into the light for people to laugh at.  You will be quiet, then;
+not for my sake for your own.  You are getting old; I am not, yet.
+You have made me ver-ry practical"
+
+Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked,
+repeated dully:
+
+"I require you to give up this friendship."
+
+"And if I do not?"
+
+"Then--then I will cut you out of my Will."
+
+Somehow it did not seem to meet the case.  Annette laughed.
+
+"You will live a long time, Soames."
+
+"You--you are a bad woman," said Soames suddenly.
+
+Annette shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I do not think so.  Living with you has killed things in me, it is
+true; but I am not a bad woman.  I am sensible--that is all.  And so
+will you be when you have thought it over."
+
+"I shall see this man," said Soames sullenly, "and warn him off."
+
+"Mon cher, you are funny.  You do not want me, you have as much of me
+as you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead.  I admit
+nothing, but I am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had
+better be quiet, I tell you.  I myself will make no scandal; none.
+Now, I am not saying any more, whatever you do."
+
+She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened
+it.  Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings.  The
+thought of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a
+revelation of their relationship, startling to one little given to
+introspective philosophy.  Without saying another word he went out
+and up to the picture-gallery.  This came of marrying a Frenchwoman!
+And yet, without her there would have been no Fleur! She had served
+her purpose.
+
+'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing.  I don't even know that
+there's anything in it.'  The instinct of self-preservation warned
+him to batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air.
+Unless one believed there was something in a thing, there wasn't.
+
+That night he went into her room.  She received him in the most
+matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them.  And
+he returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace.  If one
+didn't choose to see, one needn't.  And he did not choose--in future
+he did not choose.  There was nothing to be gained by it--nothing!
+Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the
+framed photograph of Fleur.  When he had looked at it a little he
+slipped it down, and there was that other one--that old one of Irene.
+An owl hooted while he stood in his window gazing at it.  The owl
+hooted, the red climbing roses seemed to deepen in colour, there came
+a scent of lime-blossom.  God!  That had been a different thing!
+Passion--Memory!  Dust!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+JUNE TAKES A HAND
+
+
+One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York,
+an egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June
+Forsyte's studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick.  On the
+evening of July 6, Boris Strumolowski--several of whose works were on
+show there because they were as yet too advanced to be on show
+anywhere else--had begun well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like
+silence which admirably suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned
+countenance framed in bright hair banged like a girl's.  June had
+known him three weeks, and he still seemed to her the principal
+embodiment of genius, and hope of the future; a sort of Star of the
+East which had strayed into an unappreciative West.  Until that
+evening he had conversationally confined himself to recording his
+impressions of the United States, whose dust he had just shaken from
+off his feet--a country, in his opinion, so barbarous in every way
+that he had sold practically nothing there, and become an object of
+suspicion to the police; a country, as he said, without a race of its
+own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity, without principles,
+traditions, taste, without--in a word--a soul.  He had left it for
+his own good, and come to the only other country where he could live
+well.  June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments,
+standing before his creations--frightening, but powerful and symbolic
+once they had been explained!  That he, haloed by bright hair like an
+early Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion
+of all else--the only sign of course by which real genius could be
+told--should still be a "lame duck" agitated her warm heart almost to
+the exclusion of Paul Post.  And she had begun to take steps to clear
+her Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces.  She
+had at once encountered trouble.  Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch
+had stung.  With all the emphasis of a genius which she did not as
+yet deny them, they had demanded another six weeks at least of her
+Gallery.  The American stream, still flowing in, would soon be
+flowing out.  The American stream was their right, their only hope,
+their salvation--since nobody in this "beastly" country cared for
+Art.  June had yielded to the demonstration.  After all Boris would
+not mind their having the full benefit of an American stream, which
+he himself so violently despised.
+
+This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present,
+except Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy
+Portugal, editor of the Neo-Artist.  She had put it to him with that
+sudden confidence which continual contact with the neo-artistic world
+had never been able to dry up in her warm and generous nature.  He
+had not broken his Christ-like silence, however, for more than two
+minutes before she began to move her blue eyes from side to side, as
+a cat moves its tail.  This--he said--was characteristic of England,
+the most selfish country in the world; the country which sucked the
+blood of other countries; destroyed the brains and hearts of
+Irishmen, Hindus, Egyptians, Boers, and Burmese, all the best races
+in the world; bullying, hypocritical England!  This was what he had
+expected, coming to, such a country, where the climate was all fog,
+and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in
+profiteering and the grossest materialism.  Conscious that Hannah
+Hobdey was murmuring, "Hear, hear!" and Jimmy Portugal sniggering,
+June grew crimson, and suddenly rapped out:
+
+"Then why did you ever come?  We didn't ask you."
+
+The remark was so singularly at variance with all she had led him to
+expect from her, that Strumolowski stretched out his hand and took a
+cigarette.
+
+"England never wants an idealist," he said.
+
+But in June something primitively English was thoroughly upset; old
+Jolyon's sense of justice had risen, as it were, from bed.  "You come
+and sponge on us," she said, "and then abuse us.  If you think that's
+playing the game, I don't."
+
+She now discovered that which others had discovered before her--the
+thickness of hide beneath which the sensibility of genius is
+sometimes veiled.  Strumolowski's young and ingenuous face became the
+incarnation of a sneer.
+
+"Sponge, one does not sponge, one takes what is owing--a tenth part
+of what is owing.  You will repent to say that, Miss Forsyte."
+
+"Oh, no," said June, "I shan't."
+
+"Ah!  We know very well, we artists--you take us to get what you can
+out of us.  I want nothing from you"--and he blew out a cloud of
+June's smoke.
+
+Decision rose in an icy puff from the turmoil of insulted shame
+within her.  "Very well, then, you can take your things away."
+
+And, almost in the same moment, she thought: 'Poor boy!  He's only
+got a garret, and probably not a taxi fare.  In front of these
+people, too; it's positively disgusting!'
+
+Young Strumolowski shook his head violently; his hair, thick, smooth,
+close as a golden plate, did not fall off.
+
+"I can live on nothing," he said shrilly; "I have often had to for
+the sake of my Art.  It is you bourgeois who force us to spend
+money."
+
+The words hit June like a pebble, in the ribs.  After all she had
+done for Art, all her identification with its troubles and lame
+ducks.  She was struggling for adequate words when the door was
+opened, and her Austrian murmured:
+
+"A young lady, gnadiges Fraulein."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the little meal-room."
+
+With a glance at Boris Strumolowski, at Hannah Hobdey, at Jimmy
+Portugal, June said nothing, and went out, devoid of equanimity.
+Entering the "little meal-room," she perceived the young lady to be
+Fleur--looking very pretty, if pale.  At this disenchanted moment a
+little lame duck of her own breed was welcome to June, so
+homoeopathic by instinct.
+
+The girl must have come, of course, because of Jon; or, if not, at
+least to get something out of her.  And June felt just then that to
+assist somebody was the only bearable thing.
+
+"So you've remembered to come," she said.
+
+"Yes.  What a jolly little duck of a house!  But please don't let me
+bother you, if you've got people."
+
+"Not at all," said June.  "I want to let them stew in their own juice
+for a bit.  Have you come about Jon?"
+
+"You said you thought we ought to be told.  Well, I've found out."
+
+"Oh!" said June blankly.  "Not nice, is it?"
+
+They were standing one on each side of the little bare table at which
+June took her meals.  A vase on it was full of Iceland poppies; the
+girl raised her hand and touched them with a gloved finger.  To her
+new-fangled dress, frilly about the hips and tight below the knees,
+June took a sudden liking--a charming colour, flax-blue.
+
+'She makes a picture,' thought June.  Her little room, with its
+whitewashed walls, its floor and hearth of old pink brick, its black
+paint, and latticed window athwart which the last of the sunlight was
+shining, had never looked so charming, set off by this young figure,
+with the creamy, slightly frowning face.  She remembered with sudden
+vividness how nice she herself had looked in those old days when her
+heart was set on Philip Bosinney, that dead lover, who had broken
+from her to destroy for ever Irene's allegiance to this girl's
+father.  Did Fleur know of that, too?
+
+"Well," she said, "what are you going to do?"
+
+It was some seconds before Fleur answered.
+
+"I don't want Jon to suffer.  I must see him once more to put an end
+to it."
+
+"You're going to put an end to it!"
+
+"What else is there to do?"
+
+The girl seemed to June, suddenly, intolerably spiritless.
+
+"I suppose you're right," she muttered.  "I know my father thinks so;
+but--I should never have done it myself.  I can't take things lying
+down."
+
+How poised and watchful that girl looked; how unemotional her voice
+sounded!
+
+"People will assume that I'm in love."
+
+"Well, aren't you?"
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders.  'I might have known it,' thought June;
+'she's Soames' daughter--fish!  And yet--he!'
+
+"What do you want me to do then?" she said with a sort of disgust.
+
+"Could I see Jon here to-morrow on his way down to Holly's?  He'd
+come if you sent him a line to-night.  And perhaps afterward you'd
+let them know quietly at Robin Hill that it's all over, and that they
+needn't tell Jon about his mother."
+
+"All right!" said June abruptly.  "I'll write now, and you can post
+it.  Half-past two tomorrow.  I shan't be in, myself."
+
+She sat down at the tiny bureau which filled one corner.  When she
+looked round with the finished note Fleur was still touching the
+poppies with her gloved finger.
+
+June licked a stamp.  "Well, here it is.  If you're not in love, of
+course, there's no more to be said.  Jon's lucky."
+
+Fleur took the note.  "Thanks awfully!"
+
+'Cold-blooded little baggage!'  thought June.  Jon, son of her
+father, to love, and not to be loved by the daughter of--Soames!  It
+was humiliating!
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+Fleur nodded; her frills shook and trembled as she swayed toward the
+door.
+
+"Good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye!...  Little piece of fashion!" muttered June, closing the
+door.  "That family!"  And she marched back toward her studio.  Boris
+Strumolowski had regained his Christ-like silence and Jimmy Portugal
+was damning everybody, except the group in whose behalf he ran the
+Neo-Artist.  Among the condemned were Eric Cobbley, and several other
+"lame-duck" genii who at one time or another had held first place in
+the repertoire of June's aid and adoration.  She experienced a sense
+of futility and disgust, and went to the window to let the river-wind
+blow those squeaky words away.
+
+But when at length Jimmy Portugal had finished, and gone with Hannah
+Hobdey, she sat down and mothered young Strumolowski for half an
+hour, promising him a month, at least, of the American stream; so
+that he went away with his halo in perfect order.  'In spite of all,'
+June thought, 'Boris is wonderful'
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
+
+
+To know that your hand is against every one's is--for some natures--
+to experience a sense of moral release.  Fleur felt no remorse when
+she left June's house.  Reading condemnatory resentment in her little
+kinswoman's blue eyes-she was glad that she had fooled her, despising
+June because that elderly idealist had not seen what she was after.
+
+End it, forsooth!  She would soon show them all that she was only
+just beginning.  And she smiled to herself on the top of the bus
+which carried her back to Mayfair.  But the smile died, squeezed out
+by spasms of anticipation and anxiety.  Would she be able to manage
+Jon?  She had taken the bit between her teeth, but could she make him
+take it too?  She knew the truth and the real danger of delay--he
+knew neither; therein lay all the difference in the world.
+
+'Suppose I tell him,' she thought; 'wouldn't it really be safer?'
+This hideous luck had no right to spoil their love; he must see that!
+They could not let it!  People always accepted an accomplished fact
+in time!  From that piece of philosophy--profound enough at her age--
+she passed to another consideration less philosophic.  If she
+persuaded Jon to a quick and secret marriage, and he found out
+afterward that she had known the truth.  What then?  Jon hated
+subterfuge.  Again, then, would it not be better to tell him?  But
+the memory of his mother's face kept intruding on that impulse.
+Fleur was afraid.  His mother had power over him; more power perhaps
+than she herself.  Who could tell?  It was too great a risk.  Deep-
+sunk in these instinctive calculations she was carried on past Green
+Street as far as the Ritz Hotel.  She got down there, and walked back
+on the Green Park side.  The storm had washed every tree; they still
+dripped.  Heavy drops fell on to her frills, and to avoid them she
+crossed over under the eyes of the Iseeum Club.  Chancing to look up
+she saw Monsieur Profond with a tall stout man in the bay window.
+Turning into Green Street she heard her name called, and saw "that
+prowler" coming up.  He took off his hat--a glossy "bowler" such as
+she particularly detested.
+
+"Good evenin'!  Miss Forsyde.  Isn't there a small thing I can do for
+you?"
+
+"Yes, pass by on the other side."
+
+"I say!  Why do you dislike me?"
+
+"Do I?"
+
+"It looks like it."
+
+"Well, then, because you make me feel life isn't worth living."
+
+Monsieur Profond smiled.
+
+"Look here, Miss Forsyde, don't worry.  It'll be all right.  Nothing
+lasts."
+
+"Things do last," cried Fleur; "with me anyhow--especially likes and
+dislikes."
+
+"Well, that makes me a bit un'appy."
+
+"I should have thought nothing could ever make you happy or unhappy."
+
+"I don't like to annoy other people.  I'm goin' on my yacht."
+
+Fleur looked at him, startled.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Small voyage to the South Seas or somewhere," said Monsieur Profond.
+
+Fleur suffered relief and a sense of insult.  Clearly he meant to
+convey that he was breaking with her mother.  How dared he have
+anything to break, and yet how dared he break it?
+
+"Good-night, Miss Forsyde!  Remember me to Mrs. Dartie.  I'm not so
+bad really.  Good-night!"  Fleur left him standing there with his hat
+raised.  Stealing a look round, she saw him stroll--immaculate and
+heavy--back toward his Club.
+
+'He can't even love with conviction,' she thought.  'What will Mother
+do?'
+
+Her dreams that night were endless and uneasy; she rose heavy and
+unrested, and went at once to the study of Whitaker's Almanac.  A
+Forsyte is instinctively aware that facts are the real crux of any
+situation.  She might conquer Jon's prejudice, but without exact
+machinery to complete their desperate resolve, nothing would happen.
+>From the invaluable tome she learned that they must each be twenty-
+one; or some one's consent would be necessary, which of course was
+unobtainable; then she became lost in directions concerning licenses,
+certificates, notices, districts, coming finally to the word
+"perjury."   But that was nonsense!  Who would really mind their
+giving wrong ages in order to be married for love!  She ate hardly
+any breakfast, and went back to Whitaker.  The more she studied the
+less sure she became; till, idly turning the pages, she came to
+Scotland.  People could be married there without any of this
+nonsense.  She had only to go and stay there twenty-one days, then
+Jon could come, and in front of two people they could declare
+themselves married.  And what was more--they would be!  It was far
+the best way; and at once she ran over her schoolfellows.  There was
+Mary Lambe who lived in Edinburgh and was "quite a sport!"
+
+She had a brother too.  She could stay with Mary Lambe, who with her
+brother would serve for witnesses.  She well knew that some girls
+would think all this unnecessary, and that all she and Jon need do
+was to go away together for a weekend and then say to their people:
+"We are married by Nature, we must now be married by Law."  But Fleur
+was Forsyte enough to feel such a proceeding dubious, and to dread
+her father's face when he heard of it.  Besides, she did not believe
+that Jon would do it; he had an opinion of her such as she could not
+bear to diminish.  No!  Mary Lambe was preferable, and it was just
+the time of year to go to Scotland.  More at ease now she packed,
+avoided her aunt, and took a bus to Chiswick.  She was too early, and
+went on to Kew Gardens.  She found no peace among its flower-beds,
+labelled trees, and broad green spaces, and having lunched off
+anchovy-paste sandwiches and coffee, returned to Chiswick and rang
+June's bell.  The Austrian admitted her to the "little meal-room."
+Now that she knew what she and Jon were up against, her longing for
+him had increased tenfold, as if he were a toy with sharp edges or
+dangerous paint such as they had tried to take from her as a child.
+If she could not have her way, and get Jon for good and all, she felt
+like dying of privation.  By hook or crook she must and would get
+him!  A round dim mirror of very old glass hung over the pink brick
+hearth.  She stood looking at herself reflected in it, pale, and
+rather dark under the eyes; little shudders kept passing through her
+nerves.  Then she heard the bell ring, and, stealing to the window,
+saw him standing on the doorstep smoothing his hair and lips, as if
+he too were trying to subdue the fluttering of his nerves.
+
+She was sitting on one of the two rush-seated chairs, with her back
+to the door, when he came in, and she said at once
+
+"Sit down, Jon, I want to talk seriously."
+
+Jon sat on the table by her side, and without looking at him she went
+on:
+
+"If you don't want to lose me, we must get married."
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+"Why?  Is there anything new?"
+
+"No, but I felt it at Robin Hill, and among my people."
+
+"But--" stammered Jon, "at Robin Hill--it was all smooth--and they've
+said nothing to me."
+
+"But they mean to stop us.  Your mother's face was enough.  And my
+father's."
+
+"Have you seen him since?"
+
+Fleur nodded.  What mattered a few supplementary lies?
+
+"But," said Jon eagerly, "I can't see how they can feel like that
+after all these years."
+
+Fleur looked up at him.
+
+"Perhaps you don't love me enough."
+"Not love you enough!  Why--!"
+
+"Then make sure of me."
+
+"Without telling them?"
+
+"Not till after."
+
+Jon was silent.  How much older he looked than on that day, barely
+two months ago, when she first saw him--quite two years older!
+
+"It would hurt Mother awfully," he said.
+
+Fleur drew her hand away.
+
+"You've got to choose."
+
+Jon slid off the table on to his knees.
+
+"But why not tell them?  They can't really stop us, Fleur!"
+
+"They can!  I tell you, they can."
+
+"How?"
+
+"We're utterly dependent--by putting money pressure, and all sorts of
+other pressure.  I'm not patient, Jon."
+
+"But it's deceiving them."
+
+Fleur got up.
+
+"You can't really love me, or you wouldn't hesitate.  'He either
+fears his fate too much!'"
+
+Lifting his hands to her waist, Jon forced her to sit down again.
+She hurried on:
+
+"I've planned it all out.  We've only to go to Scotland.  When we're
+married they'll soon come round.  People always come round to facts.
+Don't you see, Jon?"
+
+"But to hurt them so awfully!"
+
+So he would rather hurt her than those people of his!  "All right,
+then; let me go!"
+
+Jon got up and put his back against the door.
+
+"I expect you're right," he said slowly; "but I want to think it
+over."
+
+She could see that he was seething with feelings he wanted to
+express; but she did not mean to help him.  She hated herself at this
+moment and almost hated him.  Why had she to do all the work to
+secure their love?  It wasn't fair.  And then she saw his eyes,
+adoring and distressed.
+
+"Don't look like that!  I only don't want to lose you, Jon."
+
+"You can't lose me so long as you want me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can."
+
+Jon put his hands on her shoulders.
+
+"Fleur, do you know anything you haven't told me?"
+
+It was the point-blank question she had dreaded.  She looked straight
+at him, and answered: "No."  She had burnt her boats; but what did it
+matter, if she got him?  He would forgive her.  And throwing her arms
+round his neck, she kissed him on the lips.  She was winning!  She
+felt it in the beating of his heart against her, in the closing of
+his eyes.  "I want to make sure!  I want to make sure!" she
+whispered.  "Promise!"
+
+Jon did not answer.  His face had the stillness of extreme trouble.
+At last he said:
+
+"It's like hitting them.  I must think a little, Fleur.  I really
+must."
+
+Fleur slipped out of his arms.
+
+"Oh! Very well!" And suddenly she burst into tears of disappointment,
+shame, and overstrain.  Followed five minutes of acute misery.  Jon's
+remorse and tenderness knew no bounds; but he did not promise.
+Despite her will to cry, "Very well, then, if you don't love me
+enough-goodbye!" she dared not.  From birth accustomed to her own
+way, this check from one so young, so tender, so devoted, baffled and
+surprised her.  She wanted to push him away from her, to try what
+anger and coldness would do, and again she dared not.  The knowledge
+that she was scheming to rush him blindfold into the irrevocable
+weakened everything--weakened the sincerity of pique, and the
+sincerity of passion; even her kisses had not the lure she wished for
+them.  That stormy little meeting ended inconclusively.
+
+"Will you some tea, gnadiges Fraulein?"
+
+Pushing Jon from her, she cried out:
+
+"No-no, thank you!  I'm just going."
+
+And before he could prevent her she was gone.
+
+She went stealthily, mopping her gushed, stained cheeks, frightened,
+angry, very miserable.  She had stirred Jon up so fearfully, yet
+nothing definite was promised or arranged!  But the more uncertain
+and hazardous the future, the more "the will to have" worked its
+tentacles into the flesh of her heart--like some burrowing tick!
+
+No one was at Green Street.  Winifred had gone with Imogen to see a
+play which some said was allegorical, and others "very exciting,
+don't you know."  It was because of what others said that Winifred
+and Imogen had gone.  Fleur went on to Paddington.  Through the
+carriage the air from the brick-kilns of West Drayton and the late
+hayfields fanned her still gushed cheeks.  Flowers had seemed to be
+had for the picking; now they were all thorned and prickled.  But the
+golden flower within the crown of spikes seemed to her tenacious
+spirit all the fairer and more desirable.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE FAT IN THE FIRE
+
+
+On reaching home Fleur found an atmosphere so peculiar that it
+penetrated even the perplexed aura of her own private life.  Her
+mother was inaccessibly entrenched in a brown study; her father
+contemplating fate in the vinery.  Neither of them had a word to
+throw to a dog.  'Is it because of me?' thought Fleur.  'Or because
+of Profond?'  To her mother she said:
+
+"What's the matter with Father?"
+
+Her mother answered with a shrug of her shoulders.
+
+To her father:
+
+"What's the matter with Mother?"
+
+Her father answered:
+
+"Matter?  What should be the matter?" and gave her a sharp look.
+
+"By the way," murmured Fleur, "Monsieur Profond is going a 'small'
+voyage on his yacht, to the South Seas."
+
+Soames examined a branch on which no grapes were growing.
+
+"This vine's a failure," he said.  "I've had young Mont here.  He
+asked me something about you."
+
+"Oh! How do you like him, Father?"
+
+"He--he's a product--like all these young people."
+
+"What were you at his age, dear?"
+
+Soames smiled grimly.
+
+"We went to work, and didn't play about--flying and motoring, and
+making love."
+
+"Didn't you ever make love?"
+
+She avoided looking at him while she said that, but she saw him well
+enough.  His pale face had reddened, his eyebrows, where darkness was
+still mingled with the grey, had come close together.
+
+"I had no time or inclination to philander."
+
+"Perhaps you had a grand passion."
+
+Soames looked at her intently.
+
+"Yes--if you want to know--and much good it did me."  He moved away,
+along by the hot-water pipes.  Fleur tiptoed silently after him.
+
+"Tell me about it, Father!"
+
+Soames became very still.
+
+"What should you want to know about such things, at your age?"
+
+"Is she alive?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And married?" Yes."
+
+"It's Jon Forsyte's mother, isn't it?  And she was your wife first."
+
+It was said in a flash of intuition.  Surely his opposition came from
+his anxiety that she should not know of that old wound to his pride.
+But she was startled.  To see some one so old and calm wince as if
+struck, to hear so sharp a note of pain in his voice!
+
+"Who told you that?  If your aunt!  I can't bear the affair talked
+of."
+
+"But, darling," said Fleur, softly, "it's so long ago."
+
+"Long ago or not, I...."
+
+Fleur stood stroking his arm.
+
+"I've tried to forget," he said suddenly; "I don't wish to be
+reminded."  And then, as if venting some long and secret irritation,
+he added: "In these days people don't understand.  Grand passion,
+indeed!  No one knows what it is."
+
+"I do," said Fleur, almost in a whisper.
+
+Soames, who had turned his back on her, spun round.
+
+"What are you talking of--a child like you!"
+
+"Perhaps I've inherited it, Father."
+
+"What?"
+
+"For her son, you see."
+
+He was pale as a sheet, and she knew that she was as bad.  They stood
+staring at each other in the steamy heat, redolent of the mushy scent
+of earth, of potted geranium, and of vines coming along fast.
+
+"This is crazy," said Soames at last, between dry lips.
+
+Scarcely moving her own, she murmured:
+
+"Don't be angry, Father.  I can't help it."
+
+But she could see he wasn't angry; only scared, deeply scared.
+
+"I thought that foolishness," he stammered, "was all forgotten."
+
+"Oh, no!  It's ten times what it was."
+
+Soames kicked at the hot-water pipe.  The hapless movement touched
+her, who had no fear of her father--none.
+
+"Dearest!" she said.  "What must be, must, you know."
+
+"Must!" repeated Soames.  "You don't know what you're talking of.
+Has that boy been told?"
+
+The blood rushed into her cheeks.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+He had turned from her again, and, with one shoulder a little raised,
+stood staring fixedly at a joint in the pipes.
+
+"It's most distasteful to me," he said suddenly; "nothing could be
+more so.  Son of that fellow!  It's--it's--perverse!"
+
+She had noted, almost unconsciously, that he did not say "son of that
+woman," and again her intuition began working.
+
+Did the ghost of that grand passion linger in some corner of his
+heart?
+
+She slipped her hand under his arm.
+
+"Jon's father is quite ill and old; I saw him."
+
+"You--?"
+
+"Yes, I went there with Jon; I saw them both."
+
+"Well, and what did they say to you?"
+
+"Nothing.  They were very polite."
+
+"They would be."  He resumed his contemplation of the pipe-joint, and
+then said suddenly:
+
+"I must think this over--I'll speak to you again to-night."
+
+She knew this was final for the moment, and stole away, leaving him
+still looking at the pipe-joint.  She wandered into the fruit-garden,
+among the raspberry and currant bushes, without impetus to pick and
+eat.  Two months ago--she was light-hearted!  Even two days ago--
+light-hearted, before Prosper Profond told her.  Now she felt tangled
+in a web-of passions, vested rights, oppressions and revolts, the
+ties of love and hate.  At this dark moment of discouragement there
+seemed, even to her hold-fast nature, no way out.  How deal with it--
+how sway and bend things to her will, and get her heart's desire?
+And, suddenly, round the corner of the high box hedge, she came plump
+on her mother, walking swiftly, with an open letter in her hand.  Her
+bosom was heaving, her eyes dilated, her cheeks flushed.  Instantly
+Fleur thought: 'The yacht!  Poor Mother!'
+
+Annette gave her a wide startled look, and said:
+
+"J'ai la migraine."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, Mother."
+
+"Oh, yes!  you and your father--sorry!"
+
+"But, Mother--I am.  I know what it feels like."
+
+Annette's startled eyes grew wide, till the whites showed above them.
+
+"Poor innocent!" she said.
+
+Her mother--so self-possessed, and commonsensical--to look and speak
+like this!  It was all frightening!  Her father, her mother, herself!
+And only two months back they had seemed to have everything they
+wanted in this world.
+
+Annette crumpled the letter in her hand.  Fleur knew that she must
+ignore the sight.
+
+"Can't I do anything for your head, Mother?"
+
+Annette shook that head and walked on, swaying her hips.
+
+'It's cruel,' thought Fleur, 'and I was glad!  That man!  What do men
+come prowling for, disturbing everything!  I suppose he's tired of
+her.  What business has he to be tired of my mother?  What business!'
+And at that thought, so natural and so peculiar, she uttered a little
+choked laugh.
+
+She ought, of course, to be delighted, but what was there to be
+delighted at?  Her father didn't really care!  Her mother did,
+perhaps?  She entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree.
+A breeze sighed in the higher boughs; the sky seen through their
+green was very blue and very white in cloud--those heavy white clouds
+almost always present in river landscape.  Bees, sheltering out of
+the wind, hummed softly, and over the lush grass fell the thick shade
+from those fruit-trees planted by her father five-and-twenty, years
+ago.  Birds were almost silent, the cuckoos had ceased to sing, but
+wood-pigeons were cooing.  The breath and drone and cooing of high
+summer were not for long a sedative to her excited nerves.  Crouched
+over her knees she began to scheme.  Her father must be made to back
+her up.  Why should he mind so long as she was happy?  She had not
+lived for nearly nineteen years without knowing that her future was
+all he really cared about.  She had, then, only to convince him that
+her future could not be happy without Jon.  He thought it a mad
+fancy.  How foolish the old were, thinking they could tell what the
+young felt!  Had not he confessed that he--when young--had loved with
+a grand passion?  He ought to understand!  'He piles up his money for
+me,' she thought; 'but what's the use, if I'm not going to be happy?'
+Money, and all it bought, did not bring happiness.  Love only brought
+that.  The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard, which gave it such a
+moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour.  'They
+oughtn't to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if they didn't mean me
+to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.'  Nothing real stood in
+the way, like poverty, or disease--sentiment only, a ghost from the
+unhappy past!  Jon was right.  They wouldn't let you live, these old
+people!  They made mistakes, committed crimes, and wanted their
+children to go on paying!  The breeze died away; midges began to
+bite.  She got up, plucked a piece of honeysuckle, and went in.
+
+It was hot that night.  Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale
+low frocks.  The dinner flowers were pale.  Fleur was struck with the
+pale look of everything; her father's face, her mother's shoulders;
+the pale panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-
+shade, even the soup was pale.  There was not one spot of colour in
+the room, not even wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it.
+What was not pale was black--her father's clothes, the butler's
+clothes, her retriever stretched out exhausted in the window, the
+curtains black with a cream pattern.  A moth came in, and that was
+pale.  And silent was that half-mourning dinner in the heat.
+
+Her father called her back as she was following her mother out.
+
+She sat down beside him at the table, and, unpinning the pale
+honeysuckle, put it to her nose.
+
+"I've been thinking," he said.
+
+"Yes, dear?"
+
+"It's extremely painful for me to talk, but there's no help for it.
+I don't know if you understand how much you are to me I've never
+spoken of it, I didn't think it necessary; but--but you're
+everything.  Your mother--" he paused, staring at his finger-bowl of
+Venetian glass.
+
+"Yes?"'
+
+"I've only you to look to.  I've never had--never wanted anything
+else, since you were born."
+
+"I know," Fleur murmured.
+
+Soames moistened his lips.
+
+"You may think this a matter I can smooth over and arrange for you.
+You're mistaken.  I'm helpless."
+
+Fleur did not speak.
+
+"Quite apart from my own feelings," went on Soames with more
+resolution, "those two are not amenable to anything I can say.  They-
+-they hate me, as people always hate those whom they have injured."
+"But he--Jon--"
+
+"He's their flesh and blood, her only child.  Probably he means to
+her what you mean to me.  It's a deadlock."
+
+"No," cried Fleur, "no, Father!"
+
+Soames leaned back, the image of pale patience, as if resolved on the
+betrayal of no emotion.
+
+"Listen!" he said.  "You're putting the feelings of two months--two
+months--against the feelings of thirty-five years!  What chance do
+you think you have?  Two months--your very first love affair, a
+matter of half a dozen meetings, a few walks and talks, a few kisses-
+-against, against what you can't imagine, what no one could who
+hasn't been through it.  Come, be reasonable, Fleur! It's midsummer
+madness!"
+
+Fleur tore the honeysuckle into little, slow bits.
+
+"The madness is in letting the past spoil it all.
+
+What do we care about the past?  It's our lives, not yours."
+
+Soames raised his hand to his forehead, where suddenly she saw
+moisture shining.
+
+"Whose child are you?" he said.  "Whose child is he?  The present is
+linked with the past, the future with both.  There's no getting away
+from that."
+
+She had never heard philosophy pass those lips before.  Impressed
+even in her agitation, she leaned her elbows on the table, her chin
+on her hands.
+
+"But, Father, consider it practically.  We want each other.  There's
+ever so much money, and nothing whatever in the way but sentiment.
+Let's bury the past, Father."
+
+His answer was a sigh.
+
+"Besides," said Fleur gently, "you can't prevent us."
+
+"I don't suppose," said Soames, "that if left to myself I should try
+to prevent you; I must put up with things, I know, to keep your
+affection.  But it's not I who control this matter.  That's what I
+want you to realise before it's too late.  If you go on thinking you
+can get your way and encourage this feeling, the blow will be much
+heavier when you find you can't."
+
+"Oh!" cried Fleur, "help me, Father; you can help me, you know."
+
+Soames made a startled movement of negation.  "I?" he said bitterly.
+"Help?  I am the impediment--the just cause and impediment--isn't
+that the jargon?  You have my blood in your veins."
+
+He rose.
+
+"Well, the fat's in the fire.  If you persist in your wilfulness
+you'll have yourself to blame.  Come!  Don't be foolish, my child--my
+only child!"
+
+Fleur laid her forehead against his shoulder.
+
+All was in such turmoil within her.  But no good to show it!  No good
+at all!  She broke away from him, and went out into the twilight,
+distraught, but unconvinced.  All was indeterminate and vague within
+her, like the shapes and shadows in the garden, except--her will to
+have.  A poplar pierced up into the dark-blue sky and touched a white
+star there.  The dew wetted her shoes, and chilled her bare
+shoulders.  She went down to the river bank, and stood gazing at a
+moonstreak on the darkening water.  Suddenly she smelled tobacco
+smoke, and a white figure emerged as if created by the moon.  It was
+young Mont in flannels, standing in his boat.  She heard the tiny
+hiss of his cigarette extinguished in the water.
+
+"Fleur," came his voice, "don't be hard on a poor devil!  I've been
+waiting hours."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"Come in my boat!"
+
+"Not I."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I'm not a water-nymph."
+
+"Haven't you any romance in you?  Don't be modern, Fleur!"
+
+He appeared on the path within a yard of her.
+
+"Go away!"
+
+"Fleur, I love you.  Fleur!"
+
+Fleur uttered a short laugh.
+
+"Come again," she said, "when I haven't got my wish."
+
+"What is your wish?"
+
+"Ask another."
+
+"Fleur," said Mont, and his voice sounded strange, "don't mock me!
+Even vivisected dogs are worth decent treatment before they're cut up
+for good."
+
+Fleur shook her head; but her lips were trembling.
+
+"Well, you shouldn't make me jump.  Give me a cigarette."
+
+Mont gave her one, lighted it, and another for himself.
+
+"I don't want to talk rot," he said, "but please imagine all the rot
+that all the lovers that ever were have talked, and all my special
+rot thrown in."
+
+"Thank you, I have imagined it.  Good-night!"  They stood for a
+moment facing each other in the shadow of an acacia-tree with very
+moonlit blossoms, and the smoke from their cigarettes mingled in the
+air between them.
+
+"Also ran: 'Michael Mont'?" he said.  Fleur turned abruptly toward
+the house.  On the lawn she stopped to look back.  Michael Mont was
+whirling his arms above him; she could see them dashing at his head;
+then waving at the moonlit blossoms of the acacia.  His voice just
+reached her.  "Jolly-jolly!"  Fleur shook herself.  She couldn't help
+him, she had too much trouble of her own!  On the verandah she
+stopped very suddenly again.  Her mother was sitting in the drawing-
+room at her writing bureau, quite alone.  There was nothing
+remarkable in the expression of her face except its utter immobility.
+But she looked desolate!  Fleur went upstairs.  At the door of her
+room she paused.  She could hear her father walking up and down, up
+and down the picture-gallery.
+
+'Yes,' she thought, jolly!  Oh, Jon!'
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+DECISION
+
+
+When Fleur left him Jon stared at the Austrian.  She was a thin woman
+with a dark face and the concerned expression of one who has watched
+every little good that life once had slip from her, one by one.
+"No tea?" she said.
+
+Susceptible to the disappointment in her voice, Jon murmured:
+
+"No, really; thanks."
+
+"A lil cup--it ready.  A lil cup and cigarette."
+
+Fleur was gone!  Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him!  And
+with a heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, and said:
+
+"Well--thank you!"
+
+She brought in a little pot of tea with two little cups, and a silver
+box of cigarettes on a little tray.
+
+"Sugar?  Miss Forsyte has much sugar--she buy my sugar, my friend's
+sugar also.  Miss Forsyte is a veree kind lady.  I am happy to serve
+her.  You her brother?"
+
+"Yes," said Jon, beginning to puff the second cigarette of his life.
+
+"Very young brother," said the Austrian, with a little anxious smile,
+which reminded him of the wag of a dog's tail.
+
+"May I give you some?" he said.  "And won't you sit down, please?"
+
+The Austrian shook her head.
+
+"Your father a very nice old man--the most nice old man I ever see.
+Miss Forsyte tell me all about him.  Is he better?"
+
+Her words fell on Jon like a reproach.  "Oh Yes, I think he's all
+right."
+
+"I like to see him again," said the Austrian, putting a hand on her
+heart; "he have veree kind heart."
+
+"Yes," said Jon.  And again her words seemed to him a reproach.
+
+"He never give no trouble to no one, and smile so gentle."
+
+"Yes, doesn't he?"
+
+"He look at Miss Forsyte so funny sometimes.  I tell him all my
+story; he so sympatisch.  Your mother--she nice and well?"
+
+"Yes, very."
+
+"He have her photograph on his dressing-table.  Veree beautiful"
+
+Jon gulped down his tea.  This woman, with her concerned face and her
+reminding words, was like the first and second murderers.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "I must go now.  May--may I leave this with
+you?"
+
+He put a ten-shilling note on the tray with a doubting hand and
+gained the door.  He heard the Austrian gasp, and hurried out.  He
+had just time to catch his train, and all the way to Victoria looked
+at every face that passed, as lovers will, hoping against hope.  On
+reaching Worthing he put his luggage into the local train, and set
+out across the Downs for Wansdon, trying to walk off his aching
+irresolution.  So long as he went full bat, he could enjoy the beauty
+of those green slopes, stopping now and again to sprawl on the grass,
+admire the perfection of a wild rose or listen to a lark's song.  But
+the war of motives within him was but postponed--the longing for
+Fleur, and the hatred of deception.  He came to the old chalk-pit
+above Wansdon with his mind no more made up than when he started.  To
+see both sides of a question vigorously was at once Jon's strength
+and weakness.  He tramped in, just as the first dinner-bell rang.
+His things had already been brought up.  He had a hurried bath and
+came down to find Holly alone--Val had gone to Town and would not be
+back till the last train.
+
+Since Val's advice to him to ask his sister what was the matter
+between the two families, so much had happened--Fleur's disclosure in
+the Green Park, her visit to Robin Hill, to-day's meeting--that there
+seemed nothing to ask.  He talked of Spain, his sunstroke, Val's
+horses, their father's health.  Holly startled him by saying that she
+thought their father not at all well.  She had been twice to Robin
+Hill for the week-end.  He had seemed fearfully languid, sometimes
+even in pain, but had always refused to talk about himself.
+
+"He's awfully dear and unselfish--don't you think, Jon?"
+
+Feeling far from dear and unselfish himself, Jon answered: "Rather!"
+
+"I think, he's been a simply perfect father, so long as I can
+remember."
+
+"Yes," answered Jon, very subdued.
+
+"He's never interfered, and he's always seemed to understand.  I
+shall never forget his letting me go to South Africa in the Boer War
+when I was in love with Val."
+
+"That was before he married Mother, wasn't it?" said Jon suddenly.
+
+"Yes.  Why?"
+
+"Oh! nothing.  Only, wasn't she engaged to Fleur's father first?"
+
+Holly put down the spoon she was using, and raised her eyes.  Her
+stare was circumspect.  What did the boy know?  Enough to make it
+better to tell him?  She could not decide.  He looked strained and
+worried, altogether older, but that might be the sunstroke.
+
+"There was something," she said.  "Of course we were out there, and
+got no news of anything."  She could not take the risk.
+
+It was not her secret.  Besides, she was in the dark about his
+feelings now.  Before Spain she had made sure he was in love; but
+boys were boys; that was seven weeks ago, and all Spain between.
+
+She saw that he knew she was putting him off, and added:
+
+"Have you heard anything of Fleur?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+His face told her, then, more than the most elaborate explanations.
+So he had not forgotten!
+
+She said very quietly: "Fleur is awfully attractive, Jon, but you
+know--Val and I don't really like her very much."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"We think she's got rather a 'having' nature."
+
+"'Having'?  I don't know what you mean.  She--she--" he pushed his
+dessert plate away, got up, and went to the window.
+
+Holly, too, got up, and put her arm round his waist.
+
+"Don't be angry, Jon dear.  We can't all see people in the same
+light, can we?  You know, I believe each of us only has about one or
+two people who can see the best that's in us, and bring it out.  For
+you I think it's your mother.  I once saw her looking at a letter of
+yours; it was wonderful to see her face.  I think she's the most
+beautiful woman I ever saw--Age doesn't seem to touch her."
+
+Jon's face softened; then again became tense.  Everybody--everybody
+was against him and Fleur!  It all strengthened the appeal of her
+words: "Make sure of me--marry me, Jon!"
+
+Here, where he had passed that wonderful week with her--the tug of
+her enchantment, the ache in his heart increased with every minute
+that she was not there to make the room, the garden, the very air
+magical.  Would he ever be able to live down here, not seeing her?
+And he closed up utterly, going early to bed.  It would not make him
+healthy, wealthy, and wise, but it closeted him with memory of Fleur
+in her fancy frock.  He heard Val's arrival--the Ford discharging
+cargo, then the stillness of the summer night stole back--with only
+the bleating of very distant sheep, and a night-Jar's harsh purring.
+He leaned far out.  Cold moon--warm air--the Downs like silver!
+Small wings, a stream bubbling, the rambler roses!  God--how empty
+all of it without her!  In the Bible it was written: Thou shalt leave
+father and mother and cleave to--Fleur!
+
+Let him have pluck, and go and tell them!  They couldn't stop him
+marrying her--they wouldn't want to stop him when they knew how he
+felt.  Yes!  He would go! Bold and open--Fleur was wrong!
+
+The night-jar ceased, the sheep were silent; the only sound in the
+darkness was the bubbling of the stream.  And Jon in his bed slept,
+freed from the worst of life's evils--indecision.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
+
+
+On the day of the cancelled meeting at the National Gallery began the
+second anniversary of the resurrection of England's pride and glory--
+or, more shortly, the top hat.  " Lord's"--that festival which the
+War had driven from the field--raised its light and dark blue flags
+for the second time, displaying almost every feature of a glorious
+past.  Here, in the luncheon interval, were all species of female and
+one species of male hat, protecting the multiple types of face
+associated with "the classes."  The observing Forsyte might discern
+in the free or unconsidered seats a certain number of the squash-
+hatted, but they hardly ventured on the grass; the old school--or
+schools--could still rejoice that the proletariat was not yet paying
+the necessary half-crown.  Here was still a close borough, the only
+one left on a large scale--for the papers were about to estimate the
+attendance at ten thousand.  And the ten thousand, all animated by
+one hope, were asking each other one question: "Where are you
+lunching?"  Something wonderfully uplifting and reassuring in that
+query and the sight of so many people like themselves voicing it!
+What reserve power in the British realm--enough pigeons, lobsters,
+lamb, salmon mayonnaise, strawberries, and bottles of champagne to
+feed the lot!  No miracle in prospect--no case of seven loaves and a
+few fishes--faith rested on surer foundations.  Six thousand top
+hats, four thousand parasols would be doffed and furled, ten thousand
+mouths all speaking the same English would be filled.  There was life
+in the old dog yet!  Tradition!  And again Tradition!  How strong and
+how elastic!  Wars might rage, taxation prey, Trades Unions take
+toll, and Europe perish of starvation; but the ten thousand would be
+fed; and, within their ring fence, stroll upon green turf, wear their
+top hats, and meet--themselves.  The heart was sound, the pulse still
+regular.  E-ton!  E-ton!  Har-r-o-o-o-w!
+
+Among the many Forsytes, present on a hunting-ground theirs, by
+personal prescriptive right, or proxy, was Soames with his wife and
+daughter.  He had not been at either school, he took no interest in
+cricket, but he wanted Fleur to show her frock, and he wanted to wear
+his top hat parade it again in peace and plenty among his peers.  He
+walked sedately with Fleur between him and Annette.  No women
+equalled them, so far as he could see.  They could walk, and hold
+themselves up; there was substance in their good looks; the modern
+woman had no build, no chest, no anything!  He remembered suddenly
+with what intoxication of pride he had walked round with Irene in the
+first years of his first marriage.  And how they used to lunch on the
+drag which his mother would make his father have, because it was so
+"chic"--all drags and carriages in those days, not these lumbering
+great Stands!  And how consistently Montague Dartie had drunk too
+much.  He supposed that people drank too much still, but there was
+not the scope for it there used to be.  He remembered George Forsyte-
+-whose brothers Roger and Eustace had been at Harrow and Eton--
+towering up on the top of the drag waving a light-blue flag with one
+hand and a dark-blue flag with the other, and shouting "Etroow-
+Harrton!"  Just when everybody was silent, like the buffoon he had
+always been; and Eustace got up to the nines below, too dandified to
+wear any colour or take any notice.  H'm!  Old days, and Irene in
+grey silk shot with palest green.  He looked, sideways, at Fleur's
+face.  Rather colourless-no light, no eagerness!  That love affair
+was preying on her--a bad business!  He looked beyond, at his wife's
+face, rather more touched up than usual, a little disdainful--not
+that she had any business to disdain, so far as he could see.  She
+was taking Profond's defection with curious quietude; or was his
+"small" voyage just a blind?  If so, he should refuse to see it!
+Having promenaded round the pitch and in front of the pavilion, they
+sought Winifred's table in the Bedouin Club tent.  This Club--a new
+"cock and hen"--had been founded in the interests of travel, and of a
+gentleman with an old Scottish name, whose father had somewhat
+strangely been called Levi.  Winifred had joined, not because she had
+travelled, but because instinct told her that a Club with such a name
+and such a founder was bound to go far; if one didn't join at once
+one might never have the chance.  Its tent, with a text from the
+Koran on an orange ground, and a small green camel embroidered over
+the entrance, was the most striking on the ground.  Outside it they
+found Jack Cardigan in a dark blue tie (he had once played for
+Harrow), batting with a Malacca cane to show how that fellow ought to
+have hit that ball.  He piloted them in.  Assembled in Winifred's
+corner were Imogen, Benedict with his young wife, Val Dartie without
+Holly, Maud and her husband, and, after Soames and his two were
+seated, one empty place.
+
+"I'm expecting Prosper," said Winifred, "but he's so busy with his
+yacht."
+
+Soames stole a glance.  No movement in his wife's face!  Whether that
+fellow were coming or not, she evidently knew all about it.  It did
+not escape him that Fleur, too, looked at her mother.  If Annette
+didn't respect his feelings, she might think of Fleur's!  The
+conversation, very desultory, was syncopated by Jack Cardigan talking
+about "mid-off."  He cited all the "great mid-offs" from the
+beginning of time, as if they had been a definite racial entity in
+the composition of the British people.  Soames had finished his
+lobster, and was beginning on pigeon-pie, when he heard the words,
+"I'm a small bit late, Mrs. Dartie," and saw that there was no longer
+any empty place.  That fellow was sitting between Annette and Imogen.
+Soames ate steadily on, with an occasional word to Maud and Winifred.
+Conversation buzzed around him.  He heard the voice of Profond say:
+
+"I think you're mistaken, Mrs. Forsyde; I'll--I'll bet Miss Forsyde
+agrees with me."
+
+"In what?" came Fleur's clear voice across the table.
+
+"I was sayin', young gurls are much the same as they always were--
+there's very small difference."
+
+"Do you know so much about them?"
+
+
+That sharp reply caught the ears of all, and Soames moved uneasily on
+his thin green chair.
+
+"Well, I don't know, I think they want their own small way, and I
+think they always did."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Oh, but--Prosper,"Winifred interjected comfortably, "the girls in
+the streets--the girls  who've been in munitions, the little flappers
+in  the shops; their manners now really quite hit you in the eye."
+
+At the word "hit" Jack Cardigan stopped his disquisition; and in the
+silence Monsieur Profond  said:
+
+"It was inside before, now it's outside; that's  all."
+
+"But their morals!" cried Imogen.
+
+"Just as moral as they ever were, Mrs. Cardigan, but they've got more
+opportunity."
+
+The saying, so cryptically cynical, received a  little laugh from
+Imogen, a slight opening of Jack Cardigan's mouth, and a creak from
+Soames' chair.
+
+Winifred said: "That's too bad, Prosper."
+
+"What do you say, Mrs. Forsyde; don't you think human nature's always
+the same?"
+
+Soames subdued a sudden longing to get up and kick the fellow.  He
+heard his wife reply:
+
+"Human nature is not the same in England as anywhere else."  That was
+her confounded mockery!
+
+"Well, I don't know much about this small country"--'No, thank God!'
+thought Soames--"but I should say the pot was boilin' under the lid
+everywhere.  We all want pleasure, and we always did."
+
+Damn the fellow!  His cynicism was--was outrageous!
+
+When lunch was over they broke up into couples for the digestive
+promenade.  Too proud to notice, Soames knew perfectly that Annette
+and that fellow had gone prowling round together.  Fleur was with
+Val; she had chosen him, no doubt, because he knew that boy.  He
+himself had Winifred for partner.  They walked in the bright,
+circling stream, a little flushed and sated, for some minutes, till
+Winifred sighed:
+
+"I wish we were back forty years, old boy!"
+
+Before the eyes of her spirit an interminable procession of her own
+"Lord's" frocks was passing, paid for with the money of her father,
+to save a recurrent crisis.  "It's been very amusing, after all.
+Sometimes I even wish Monty was back.  What do you think of people
+nowadays, Soames?"
+
+"Precious little style.  The thing began to go to pieces with
+bicycles and motor-cars; the War has finished it."
+
+"I wonder what's coming?" said Winifred in a voice dreamy from
+pigeon-pie.  "I'm not at all sure we shan't go back to crinolines and
+pegtops.  Look at that dress!"
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+"There's money, but no faith in things.  We don't lay by for the
+future.  These youngsters--it's all a short life and a merry one with
+them."
+
+"There's a hat!" said Winifred.  "I don't know--when you come to
+think of the people killed and all that in the War, it's rather
+wonderful, I think.  There's no other country--Prosper says the rest
+are all bankrupt, except America; and of course her men always took
+their style in dress from us."
+
+"Is that chap," said Soames, "really going to the South Seas?"
+
+"Oh! one never knows where Prosper's going!"
+
+"He's a sign of the times," muttered Soames, "if you like."
+
+Winifred's hand gripped his arm.
+
+"Don't turn your head," she said in a low voice, "but look to your
+right in the front row of the Stand."
+
+Soames looked as best he could under that limitation.  A man in a
+grey top hat, grey-bearded, with thin brown, folded cheeks, and a
+certain elegance of posture, sat there with a woman in a lawn-
+coloured frock, whose dark eyes were fixed on himself.  Soames looked
+quickly at his feet.  How funnily feet moved, one after the other
+like that!  Winifred's voice said in his ear:
+
+"Jolyon looks very ill; but he always had style.  She doesn't change-
+-except her hair."
+
+"Why did you tell Fleur about that business?"
+
+"I didn't; she picked it up.  I always knew she would."
+
+"Well, it's a mess.  She's set her heart upon their boy."
+
+"The little wretch," murmured Winifred.  "She tried to take me in
+about that.  What shall you do, Soames?"
+
+"Be guided by events."
+
+They moved on, silent, in the almost solid crowd.
+
+"Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate.  Only
+that's so old-fashioned.  Look! there are George and Eustace!"
+
+George Forsyte's lofty bulk had halted before them.
+
+"Hallo, Soames!" he said.  "Just met Profond and your wife.  You'll
+catch 'em if you put on pace.  Did you ever go to see old Timothy?"
+
+Soames nodded, and the streams forced them apart.
+
+"I always liked old George," said Winifred.  "He's so droll."
+
+"I never did," said Soames.  "Where's your seat?  I shall go to mine.
+Fleur may be back there."
+
+Having seen Winifred to her seat, he regained his own, conscious of
+small, white, distant figures running, the click of the bat, the
+cheers and counter-cheers.  No Fleur, and no Annette!  You could
+expect nothing of women nowadays!  They had the vote.  They were
+"emancipated," and much good it was doing them!  So Winifred would go
+back, would she, and put up with Dartie all over again?  To have the
+past once more--to be sitting here as he had sat in '83 and '84,
+before he was certain that his marriage with Irene had gone all
+wrong, before her antagonism had become so glaring that with the best
+will in the world he could not overlook it.  The sight of her with
+that fellow had brought all memory back.  Even now he could not
+understand why she had been so impracticable.  She could love other
+men; she had it in her!  To himself, the one person she ought to have
+loved, she had chosen to refuse her heart.  It seemed to him,
+fantastically, as he looked back, that all this modern relaxation of
+marriage--though its forms and laws were the same as when he married
+her--that all this modern looseness had come out of her revolt; it
+seemed to him, fantastically, that she had started it, till all
+decent ownership of anything had gone, or was on the point of going.
+All came from her!  And now--a pretty state of things!  Homes!  How
+could you have them without mutual ownership?  Not that he had ever
+had a real home!  But had that been his fault?  He had done his best.
+And his rewards were--those two sitting in that Stand, and this
+affair of Fleur's!
+
+And overcome by loneliness he thought: 'Shan't wait any longer!  They
+must find their own way back to the hotel--if they mean to come!'
+Hailing a cab outside the ground, he said:
+
+"Drive me to the Bayswater Road."  His old aunts had never failed
+him.  To them he had meant an ever-welcome visitor.  Though they were
+gone, there, still, was Timothy!
+
+Smither was standing in the open doorway.
+
+"Mr. Soames!  I was just taking the air.  Cook will be so pleased."
+
+"How is Mr. Timothy?"
+
+"Not himself at all these last few days, sir; he's been talking a
+great deal.  Only this morning he was saying: 'My brother James, he's
+getting old.'  His mind wanders, Mr. Soames, and then he will talk of
+them.  He troubles about their investments.  The other day he said:
+'There's my brother Jolyon won't look at Consols'--he seemed quite
+down about it.  Come in, Mr. Soames, come in!  It's such a pleasant
+change!"
+
+"Well," said Soames, "just for a few minutes."
+
+"No," murmured Smither in the hall, where the air had the singular
+freshness of the outside day, "we haven't been very satisfied with
+him, not all this week.  He's always been one to leave a titbit to
+the end; but ever since Monday he's been eating it first.  If you
+notice a dog, Mr. Soames, at its dinner, it eats the meat first.
+We've always thought it such a good sign of Mr. Timothy at his age to
+leave it to the last, but now he seems to have lost all his self-
+control; and, of course, it makes him leave the rest.  The doctor
+doesn't make anything of it, but"--Smither shook her head--"he seems
+to think he's got to eat it first, in case he shouldn't get to it.
+That and his talking makes us anxious."
+
+"Has he said anything important?"
+
+"I shouldn't like to say that, Mr. Soames; but he's turned against
+his Will.  He gets quite pettish--and after having had it out every
+morning for years, it does seem funny.  He said the other day: 'They
+want my money.'  It gave me such a turn, because, as I said to him,
+nobody wants his money, I'm sure.  And it does seem a pity he should
+be thinking about money at his time of life.  I took my courage in my
+'ands.  'You know, Mr. Timothy,' I said, 'my dear mistress'--that's
+Miss Forsyte, Mr. Soames, Miss Ann that trained me--'she never
+thought about money,' I said, 'it was all character with her.'  He
+looked at me, I can't tell you how funny, and he said quite dry:
+'Nobody wants my character.'  Think of his saying a thing like that!
+But sometimes he'll say something as sharp and sensible as anything."
+
+Soames, who had been staring at an old print by the hat-rack,
+thinking, 'That's got value!'  murmured: "I'll go up and see him,
+Smither."
+
+"Cook's with him," answered Smither above her corsets; "she will be
+pleased to see you."
+
+He mounted slowly, with the thought: 'Shan't care to live to be that
+age.'
+
+On the second floor, he paused, and tapped.  The door was opened, and
+he saw the round homely face of a woman about sixty.
+
+"Mr. Soames!" she said: "Why!  Mr. Soames!"
+
+Soames nodded.  "All right, Cook!" and entered.
+
+Timothy was propped up in bed, with his hands joined before his
+chest, and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where a fly was standing
+upside down.  Soames stood at the foot of the bed, facing him.
+
+"Uncle Timothy," he said, raising his voice.  "Uncle Timothy!"
+
+Timothy's eyes left the fly, and levelled themselves on his visitor.
+Soames could see his pale tongue passing over his darkish lips.
+
+"Uncle Timothy," he said again, "is there anything I can do for you?
+Is there anything you'd like to say?"
+
+"Ha!" said Timothy.
+
+"I've come to look you up and see that everything's all right."
+
+Timothy nodded.  He seemed trying to get used to the apparition
+before him.
+
+"Have you got everything you want?"
+
+"No," said Timothy.
+
+"Can I get you anything?"
+
+"No," said Timothy.
+
+"I'm Soames, you know; your nephew, Soames Forsyte.  Your brother
+James' son."
+
+Timothy nodded.
+
+"I shall be delighted to do anything I can for you."
+
+Timothy beckoned.  Soames went close to him:
+
+"You--" said Timothy in a voice which seemed to have outlived tone,
+"you tell them all from me--you tell them all--" and his finger
+tapped on Soames' arm, "to hold on--hold on--Consols are goin' up,"
+and he nodded thrice.
+
+"All right!" said Soames; "I will."
+
+"Yes," said Timothy, and, fixing his eyes again on the ceiling, he
+added: "That fly!"
+
+Strangely moved, Soames looked at the Cook's pleasant fattish face,
+all little puckers from staring at fires.
+
+"That'll do him a world of good, sir," she said.
+
+A mutter came from Timothy, but he was clearly speaking to himself,
+and Soames went out with the cook.
+
+"I wish I could make you a pink cream, Mr. Soames, like in old days;
+you did so relish them.  Good-bye, sir; it has been a pleasure."
+
+"Take care of him, Cook, he is old."
+
+And, shaking her crumpled hand, he went down-stairs.  Smither was
+still taking the air in the doorway.
+
+"What do you think of him, Mr. Soames?"
+
+"H'm!" Soames murmured: "He's lost touch."
+
+"Yes," said Smither, "I was afraid you'd think that coming fresh out
+of the world to see him like."
+
+"Smither," said Soames, "we're all indebted to you."
+
+"Oh, no, Mr. Soames, don't say that!  It's a pleasure--he's such a
+wonderful man."
+
+"Well, good-bye!" said Soames, and got into his taxi.
+
+'Going up!' he thought; 'going up!'
+
+Reaching the hotel at Knightsbridge he went to their sitting-room,
+and rang for tea.  Neither of them were in.  And again that sense of
+loneliness came over him.  These hotels.  What monstrous great places
+they were now!  He could remember when there was nothing bigger than
+Long's or Brown's, Morley's or the Tavistock, and the heads that were
+shaken over the Langham and the Grand.  Hotels and Clubs--Clubs and
+Hotels; no end to them now!  And Soames, who had just been watching
+at Lord's a miracle of tradition and continuity, fell into reverie
+over the changes in that London where he had been born five-and-sixty
+years before.  Whether Consols were going up or not, London had
+become a terrific property.  No such property in the world, unless it
+were New York!  There was a lot of hysteria in the papers nowadays;
+but any one who, like himself, could remember London sixty years ago,
+and see it now, realised the fecundity and elasticity of wealth.
+They had only to keep their heads, and go at it steadily.  Why! he
+remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the floor of your cab.
+And old Timothy--what could be not have told them, if he had kept his
+memory!  Things were unsettled, people in a funk or in a hurry, but
+here were London and the Thames, and out there the British Empire,
+and the ends of the earth.  "Consols are goin' up!"  He should n't be
+a bit surprised.  It was the breed that counted.  And all that was
+bull-dogged in Soames stared for a moment out of his grey eyes, till
+diverted by the print of a Victorian picture on the walls.  The hotel
+had bought three dozen of that little lot!  The old hunting or
+"Rake's Progress" prints in the old inns were worth looking at--but
+this sentimental stuff--well, Victorianism had gone!  "Tell them to
+hold on!" old Timothy had said.  But to what were they to hold on in
+this modern welter of the "democratic principle"?  Why, even privacy
+was threatened!  And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames
+pushed back his teacup and went to the window.  Fancy owning no more
+of Nature than the crowd out there owned of the flowers and trees and
+waters of Hyde Park!  No, no! Private possession underlay everything
+worth having.  The world had slipped its sanity a bit, as dogs now
+and again at full moon slipped theirs and went off for a night's
+rabbiting; but the world, like the dog, knew where its bread was
+buttered and its bed warm, and would come back sure enough to the
+only home worth having--to private ownership.  The world was in its
+second childhood for the moment, like old Timothy--eating its titbit
+first!
+
+He heard a sound behind him, and saw that his wife and daughter had
+come in.
+
+"So you're back!" he said.
+
+Fleur did not answer; she stood for a moment looking at him and her
+mother, then passed into her bedroom.  Annette poured herself out a
+cup of tea.
+
+"I am going to Paris, to my mother, Soames."  "Oh! To your mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For how long?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"And when are you going?"
+
+"On Monday."
+
+Was she really going to her mother?  Odd, how indifferent he felt!
+Odd, how clearly she had perceived the indifference he would feel so
+long as there was no scandal.  And suddenly between her and himself
+he saw distinctly the face he had seen that afternoon--Irene's.
+
+"Will you want money?"
+
+"Thank you; I have enough."
+
+"Very well.  Let us know when you are coming back."
+
+Annette put down the cake she was fingering, and, looking up through
+darkened lashes, said:
+
+"Shall I give Maman any message?"
+
+"My regards."
+
+Annette stretched herself, her hands on her waist, and said in
+French:
+
+"What luck that you have never loved me, Soames!"  Then rising, she
+too left the room.  Soames was glad she had spoken it in French--it
+seemed to require no dealing with.  Again that other face--pale,
+dark-eyed, beautiful still!  And there stirred far down within him
+the ghost of warmth, as from sparks lingering beneath a mound of
+flaky ash.  And Fleur infatuated with her boy!  Queer chance!  Yet,
+was there such a thing as chance?  A man went down a street, a brick
+fell on his head.  Ah! that was chance, no doubt.  But this!
+"Inherited," his girl had said.  She--she was "holding on"!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+I
+
+OLD JOLYON WALKS
+
+
+Twofold impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast
+"Let's go up to Lord's!"
+
+"Wanted"--something to abate the anxiety in which those two had lived
+during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down.  "Wanted"--
+too, that which might assuage the pangs of memory in one who knew he
+might lose them any day!
+
+Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had become an Eton boy, for old Jolyon's
+whim had been that he should be canonised at the greatest possible
+expense.  Year after year he had gone to Lord's from Stanhope Gate
+with a father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed
+without polish in the game of cricket.  Old Jolyon would speak quite
+openly of swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and
+young Jolyon with the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest
+his sire should be overheard.  Only in this supreme matter of cricket
+he had been nervous, for his father--in Crimean whiskers then--had
+ever impressed him as the beau ideal.  Though never canonised
+himself, Old Jolyon's natural fastidiousness and balance had saved
+him from the errors of the vulgar.  How delicious, after howling in a
+top hat and a sweltering heat, to go home with his father in a hansom
+cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the "Disunion" Club, to dine off
+white bait, cutlets, and a tart, and go--two "swells," old and young,
+in lavender kid gloves--to the opera or play.  And on Sunday, when
+the match was over, and his top hat duly broken, down with his father
+in a special hansom to the "Crown and Sceptre," and the terrace above
+the river--the golden sixties when the world was simple, dandies
+glamorous, Democracy not born, and the books of Whyte Melville coming
+thick and fast.
+
+A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-buttonholed with
+corn-flowers--by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at
+a trifle less expense--again Jolyon had experienced the heat and
+counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the
+strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy
+making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and
+grown-up.  Those two days each year he and his son had been alone
+together in the world, one on each side--and Democracy just born!
+
+And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of
+light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and
+train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground.  There, beside her in a
+lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game,
+and felt the old thrill stir within him.
+
+When Soames passed, the day was spoiled.  Irene's face was distorted
+by compression of the lips.  No good to go on sitting here with
+Soames or perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like
+decimals.  And he said:
+
+"Well, dear, if you've had enough--let's go!"
+
+That evening Jolyon felt exhausted.  Not wanting her to see him thus,
+he waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little
+study.  He opened the long window for air, and the door, that he
+might still hear her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's
+old armchair, closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown
+leather.  Like that passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata--so had been
+his life with her, a divine third movement.  And now this business of
+Jon's--this bad business!  Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he
+hardly knew if it were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar,
+and seemed to see his father in the blackness before his closed eyes.
+That shape formed, went, and formed again; as if in the very chair
+where he himself was sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with.
+knees crossed, glasses balanced between thumb and finger; saw the big
+white moustaches, and the deep eyes looking up below a dome of
+forehead and seeming to search his own, seeming to speak.  "Are you
+facing it, Jo?  It's for you to decide.  She's only a woman!"  Ah!
+how well he knew his father in that phrase; how all the Victorian Age
+came up with it!  And his answer "No, I've funked it--funked hurting
+her and Jon and myself.  I've got a heart; I've funked it."  But the
+old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept at it;
+"It's your wife, your son; your past.  Tackle it, my boy!"  Was it a
+message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living
+on within him?  And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old
+saturated leather.  Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put
+the whole thing down in black and white!  And suddenly he breathed
+with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were
+swollen.  He got up and went out into the air.  The stars were very
+bright.  He passed along the terrace round the corner of the house,
+till, through the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the
+piano, with lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into
+herself she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her
+hands idle.  Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her
+breast.  'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of
+her--it's natural!'
+
+And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
+
+Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task.  He wrote with
+difficulty and many erasures.
+
+
+"MY DEAREST BOY,
+
+"You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders
+to give themselves away to their young.  Especially when--like your
+mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but
+young--their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must
+confess.  I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly--
+people in real life very seldom are, I believe--but most persons
+would say we had, and at all events our conduct, righteous or not,
+has found us out.  The truth is, my dear, we both have pasts, which
+it is now my task to make known to you, because they so grievously
+and deeply affect your future.  Many, very many years ago, as far
+back indeed as 1883, when she was only twenty, your mother had the
+great and lasting misfortune to make an unhappy marriage--no, not
+with me, Jon.  Without money of her own, and with only a stepmother--
+closely related to Jezebel--she was very unhappy in her home life.
+It was Fleur's father that she married, my cousin Soames Forsyte.  He
+had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him justice was deeply in
+love with her.  Within a week she knew the fearful mistake she had
+made.  It was not his fault; it was her error of judgment--her
+misfortune."
+
+So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject
+carried him away.
+
+"Jon, I want to explain to you if I can--and it's very hard--how it
+is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about.
+You will of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how could she
+ever have married him?'  You would be right if it were not for one or
+two rather terrible considerations.  From this initial mistake of
+hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and
+so I must make it clear to you if I can.  You see, Jon, in those days
+and even to this day--indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of
+enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise--most girls are married
+ignorant of the sexual side of life.  Even if they know what it means
+they have not experienced it.  That's the crux.  It is this actual
+lack of experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes
+all the difference and all the trouble.  In a vast number of
+marriages-and your mother's was one--girls are not and cannot be
+certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they do not know
+until after that act of union which makes the reality of marriage.
+Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements and
+strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's
+was one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such
+attraction as there was.  There is nothing more tragic in a woman's
+life than such a revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer.
+Coarse-grained and unthinking people are apt to laugh at such a
+mistake, and say, 'What a fuss about nothing!'  Narrow and self-
+righteous people, only capable of judging the lives of others by
+their own, are apt to condemn those who make this tragic error, to
+condemn them for life to the dungeons they have made for themselves.
+You know the expression: 'She has made her bed, she must lie on it!'
+It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or lady in
+the best sense of those words; and I can use no stronger
+condemnation.  I have not been what is called a moral man, but I wish
+to use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly of
+ties or contracts into which you enter.  Heaven forbid!  But with the
+experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the
+victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands
+to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
+understanding to know what they are doing.  But they haven't!  Let
+them go!  They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them.
+I have had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a
+position to judge your mother, and you are very young, without
+experience of what life is.  To go on with the story.  After three
+years of effort to subdue her shrinking--I was going to say her
+loathing and it's not too strong a word, for shrinking soon becomes
+loathing under such circumstances--three years of what to a
+sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother's, Jon, was torment,
+she met a young man who fell in love with her.  He was the architect
+of this very house that we live in now, he was building it for her
+and Fleur's father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in place of
+the one she inhabited with him in London.  Perhaps that fact played
+some part in what came of it.  But in any case she, too, fell in love
+with him.  I know it's not necessary to explain to you that one does
+not precisely choose with whom one will fall in love.  It comes.
+Very well!  It came.  I can imagine--though she never said much to me
+about it--the struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she
+was brought up strictly and was not light in her ideas--not at all.
+However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass that
+they loved in deed as well as in thought.  Then came a fearful
+tragedy.  I must tell you of it because if I don't you will never
+understand the real situation that you have now to face.  The man
+whom she had married--Soames Forsyte, the father of Fleur one night,
+at the height of her passion for this young man, forcibly reasserted
+his rights over her.  The next day she met her lover and told him of
+it.  Whether he committed suicide or whether he was accidentally run
+over in his distraction, we never knew; but so it was.  Think of your
+mother as she was that evening when she heard of his death.  I
+happened to see her.  Your grandfather sent me to help her if I
+could.  I only just saw her, before the door was shut against me by
+her husband.  But I have never forgotten her face, I can see it now.
+I was not in love with her then, not for twelve years after, but I
+have never for gotten.  My dear boy--it is not easy to write like
+this.  But you see, I must.  Your mother is wrapped up in you,
+utterly, devotedly.  I don't wish to write harshly of Soames Forsyte.
+I don't think harshly of him.  I have long been sorry for him;
+perhaps I was sorry even then.  As the world judges she was in error,
+he within his rights.  He loved her--in his way.  She was his
+property.  That is the view he holds of life--of human feelings and
+hearts--property.  It's not his fault--so was he born.  To me it is a
+view that has always been abhorrent--so was I born!  Knowing you as I
+do, I feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you.  Let me go
+on with the story.  Your mother fled from his house that night; for
+twelve years she lived quietly alone without companionship of any
+sort, until in 1899 her husband--you see, he was still her husband,
+for he did not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right
+to divorce him--became conscious, it seems, of the want of children,
+and commenced a long attempt to induce her to go back to him and give
+him a child.  I was her trustee then, under your Grandfather's Will,
+and I watched this going on.  While watching, I became attached to
+her, devotedly attached.  His pressure increased, till one day she
+came to me here and practically put herself under my protection.  Her
+husband, who was kept informed of all her movements, attempted to
+force us apart by bringing a divorce suit, or possibly he really
+meant it, I don't know; but anyway our names were publicly joined.
+That decided us, and we became united in fact.  She was divorced,
+married me, and you were born.  We have lived in perfect happiness,
+at least I have, and I believe your mother also.  Soames, soon after
+the divorce, married Fleur's mother, and she was born.  That is the
+story, Jon.  I have told it you, because by the affection which we
+see you have formed for this man's daughter you are blindly moving
+toward what must utterly destroy your mother's happiness, if not your
+own.  I don't wish to speak of myself, because at my age there's no
+use supposing I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I
+should suffer would be mainly on her account, and on yours.  But what
+I want you to realise is that feelings of horror and aversion such as
+those can never be buried or forgotten. They are alive in her to-day.
+Only yesterday at Lord's we happened to see Soames Forsyte.  Her
+face, if you had seen it, would have convinced you.  The idea that
+you should marry his daughter is a nightmare to her, Jon.  I have
+nothing to say against Fleur save that she is his daughter.  But your
+children, if you married her, would be the grandchildren of Soames,
+as much as of your mother, of a man who once owned your mother as a
+man might own a slave.  Think what that would mean.  By such a
+marriage you enter the camp which held your mother prisoner and
+wherein she ate her heart out.  You are just on the threshold of
+life, you have only known this girl two months, and however deeply
+you think you love her, I appeal to you to break it off at once.
+Don't give your mother this rankling pain and humiliation during the
+rest of her life.  Young though she will always seem to me, she is
+fifty-seven.  Except for us two she has no one in the world.  She
+will soon have only you.  Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away.
+Don't put this cloud and barrier between you.  Don't break her heart!
+Bless you, my dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this
+letter must bring you--we tried to spare it you, but Spain--it seems-
+--was no good.
+
+"Ever your devoted father
+
+"JOLYON FORSYTE."
+
+
+Having finished his confession, Jolyon sat with a thin cheek on his
+hand, re-reading.  There were things in it which hurt him so much,
+when he thought of Jon reading them, that he nearly tore the letter
+up.  To speak of such things at all to a boy--his own boy--to speak
+of them in relation to his own wife and the boy's own mother, seemed
+dreadful to the reticence of his Forsyte soul.  And yet without
+speaking of them how make Jon understand the reality, the deep
+cleavage, the ineffaceable scar?  Without them, how justify this
+stiffing of the boy's love?  He might just as well not write at all!
+
+He folded the confession, and put it in his pocket.  It was--thank
+Heaven!--Saturday; he had till Sunday evening to think it over; for
+even if posted now it could not reach Jon till Monday.  He felt a
+curious relief at this delay, and at the fact that, whether sent or
+not, it was written.
+
+In the rose garden, which had taken the place of the old fernery, he
+could see Irene snipping and pruning, with a little basket on her
+arm.  She was never idle, it seemed to him, and he envied her now
+that he himself was idle nearly all his time.  He went down to her.
+She held up a stained glove and smiled.  A piece of lace tied under
+her chin concealed her hair, and her oval face with its still dark
+brows looked very young.
+
+"The green-fly are awful this year, and yet it's cold.  You look
+tired, Jolyon."
+
+Jolyon took the confession from his pocket.  "I've been writing this.
+I think you ought to see it?"
+
+"To Jon?"  Her whole face had changed, in that instant, becoming
+almost haggard.
+
+"Yes; the murder's out."
+
+He gave it to her, and walked away among the roses.  Presently,
+seeing that she had finished reading and was standing quite still
+with the sheets of the letter against her skirt, he came back to her.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"It's wonderfully put.  I don't see how it could be put better.
+Thank you, dear."
+
+"Is there anything you would like left out?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No; he must know all, if he's to understand."
+
+"That's what I thought, but--I hate it!"
+
+He had the feeling that he hated it more than she--to him sex was so
+much easier to mention between man and woman than between man and
+man; and she had always been more natural and frank, not deeply
+secretive like his Forsyte self.
+
+"I wonder if he will understand, even now, Jolyon?  He's so young;
+and he shrinks from the physical."
+
+"He gets that shrinking from my father, he was as fastidious as a
+girl in all such matters.  Would it be better to rewrite the whole
+thing, and just say you hated Soames?"
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+"Hate's only a word.  It conveys nothing.  No, better as it is."
+
+"Very well.  It shall go to-morrow."
+
+She raised her face to his, and in sight of the big house's many
+creepered windows, he kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CONFESSION
+
+
+Late that same afternoon, Jolyon had a nap in the old armchair.
+Face down on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and
+just before he fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall
+we ever really like the French?  Will they ever really like us!'  He
+himself had always liked the French, feeling at home with their wit,
+their taste, their cooking.  Irene and he had paid many visits to
+France before the War, when Jon had been at his private school.  His
+romance with her had begun in Paris--his last and most enduring
+romance.  But the French--no Englishman could like them who could not
+see them in some sort with the detached aesthetic eye!  And with that
+melancholy conclusion he had nodded off.
+
+When he woke he saw Jon standing between him and the window.  The boy
+had evidently come in from the garden and was waiting for him to
+wake.  Jolyon smiled, still half asleep.  How nice the chap looked--
+sensitive, affectionate, straight!  Then his heart gave a nasty jump;
+and a quaking sensation overcame him.  Jon!  That confession!  He
+controlled himself with an effort.  "Why, Jon, where did you spring
+from?"
+
+Jon bent over and kissed his forehead.
+
+Only then he noticed the look on the boy's face.
+
+"I came home to tell you something, Dad."
+
+With all his might Jolyon tried to get the better of the jumping,
+gurgling sensations within his chest.
+
+"Well, sit down, old man.  Have you seen your mother?"
+
+"No."  The boy's flushed look gave place to pallor; he sat down on
+the arm of the old chair, as, in old days, Jolyon himself used to sit
+beside his own father, installed in its recesses.  Right up to the
+time of the rupture in their relations he had been wont to perch
+there--had he now reached such a moment with his own son?  All his
+life he had hated scenes like poison, avoided rows, gone on his own
+way quietly and let others go on theirs.  But now--it seemed--at the
+very end of things, he had a scene before him more painful than any
+he had avoided.  He drew a visor down over his emotion, and waited
+for his son to speak.
+
+"Father," said Jon slowly, "Fleur and I are engaged."
+
+'Exactly!' thought Jolyon, breathing with difficulty.
+
+"I know that you and Mother don't like the idea.  Fleur says that
+Mother was engaged to her father before you married her.  Of course I
+don't know what happened, but it must be ages ago.  I'm devoted to
+her, Dad, and she says she is to me."
+
+Jolyon uttered a queer sound, half laugh, half groan.
+
+"You are nineteen, Jon, and I am seventy-two.  How are we to
+understand each other in a matter like this, eh?"
+
+"You love Mother, Dad; you must know what we feel.  It isn't fair to
+us to let old things spoil our happiness, is it?"
+
+Brought face to face with his confession, Jolyon resolved to do
+without it if by any means he could.  He laid his hand on the boy's
+arm.
+
+"Look, Jon! I might put you off with talk about your both being too
+young and not knowing your own minds, and all that, but you wouldn't
+listen, besides, it doesn't meet the case--Youth, unfortunately,
+cures itself.  You talk lightly about 'old things like that,' knowing
+nothing--as you say truly--of what happened.  Now, have I ever given
+you reason to doubt my love for you, or my word?"
+
+At a less anxious moment he might have been amused by the conflict
+his words aroused--the boy's eager clasp, to reassure him on these
+points, the dread on his face of what that reassurance would bring
+forth; but he could only feel grateful for the squeeze.
+
+"Very well, you can believe what I tell you.  If you don't give up
+this love affair, you will make Mother wretched to the end of her
+days.  Believe me, my dear, the past, whatever it was, can't be
+buried--it can't indeed."
+
+Jon got off the arm of the chair.
+
+'The girl'--thought Jolyon--'there she goes--starting up before him--
+life itself--eager, pretty, loving!'
+
+"I can't, Father; how can I--just because you say that?  Of course, I
+can't!"
+
+"Jon, if you knew the story you would give this up without
+hesitation; you would have to!  Can't you believe me?"
+
+"How can you tell what I should think?  Father, I love her better
+than anything in the world."
+
+Jolyon's face twitched, and he said with painful slowness:
+
+"Better than your mother, Jon?"
+
+>From the boy's face, and his clenched fists Jolyon realised the
+stress and struggle he was going through.
+
+"I don't know," he burst out, "I don't know!  But to give Fleur up
+for nothing--for something I don't understand, for something that I
+don't believe can really matter half so much, will make me--make me"
+
+"Make you feel us unjust, put a barrier--yes.  But that's better than
+going on with this."
+
+"I can't.  Fleur loves me, and I love her.  You want me to trust you;
+why don't you trust me, Father?  We wouldn't want to know anything--
+we wouldn't let it make any difference.  It'll only make us both love
+you and Mother all the more."
+
+Jolyon put his hand into his breast pocket, but brought it out again
+empty, and sat, clucking his tongue against his teeth.
+
+"Think what your mother's been to you, Jon!  She has nothing but you;
+I shan't last much longer."
+
+"Why not?  It isn't fair to-- Why not?"
+
+"Well," said Jolyon, rather coldly, "because the doctors tell me I
+shan't; that's all."
+
+"Oh, Dad!" cried Jon, and burst into tears.
+
+This downbreak of his son, whom he had not seen cry since he was ten,
+moved Jolyon terribly.  He recognised to the full how fearfully soft
+the boy's heart was, how much he would suffer in this business, and
+in life generally.  And he reached out his hand helplessly--not
+wishing, indeed not daring to get up.
+
+"Dear man," he said, "don't--or you'll make me!"
+
+Jon smothered down his paroxysm, and stood with face averted, very
+still.
+
+'What now?' thought Jolyon.  'What can I say to move him?'
+
+'By the way, don't speak of that to Mother," he said; "she has enough
+to frighten her with this affair of yours.  I know how you feel.
+But, Jon, you know her and me well enough to be sure we wouldn't wish
+to spoil your happiness lightly.  Why, my dear boy, we don't care for
+anything but your happiness--at least, with me it's just yours and
+Mother's and with her just yours.  It's all the future for you both
+that's at stake."
+
+Jon turned.  His face was deadly pale; his eyes, deep in his head,
+seemed to burn.
+
+"What is it?  What is it?  Don't keep me like this!"
+
+Jolyon, who knew that he was beaten, thrust his hand again into his
+breast pocket, and sat for a full minute, breathing with difficulty,
+his eyes closed.  The thought passed through his mind: 'I've had a
+good long innings--some pretty bitter moments--this is the worst!'
+Then he brought his hand out with the letter, and said with a sort of
+fatigue: "Well, Jon, if you hadn't come to-day, I was going to send
+you this.  I wanted to spare you--I wanted to spare your mother and
+myself, but I see it's no good.  Read it, and I think I'll go into
+the garden."  He reached forward to get up.
+
+Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, "No, I'll go"; and was
+gone.
+
+Jolyon sank back in his chair.  A blue-bottle chose that moment to
+come buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely,
+better than nothing....  Where had the boy gone to read his letter?
+The wretched letter--the wretched story!  A cruel business--cruel to
+her--to Soames--to those two children--to himself!...  His heart
+thumped and pained him.  Life--its loves--its work--its beauty--its
+aching, and--its end!  A good time; a fine time in spite of all;
+until--you regretted that you had ever been born.  Life--it wore you
+down, yet did not make you want to die--that was the cunning evil!
+Mistake to have a heart!  Again the blue-bottle came buzzing--
+bringing in all the heat and hum and scent of summer--yes, even the
+scent--as of ripe fruits, dried grasses, sappy shrubs, and the
+vanilla breath of cows.  And out there somewhere in the fragrance Jon
+would be reading that letter, turning and twisting its pages in his
+trouble, his bewilderment and trouble--breaking his heart about it!
+The thought made Jolyon acutely miserable.  Jon was such a tender-
+hearted chap, affectionate to his bones, and conscientious, too--it
+was so unfair, so damned unfair!  He remembered Irene saying to him
+once: "Never was any one born more loving and lovable than Jon."
+Poor little Jon!  His world gone up the spout, all of a summer
+afternoon!  Youth took things so hard!  And stirred, tormented by
+that vision of Youth taking things hard, Jolyon got out of his chair,
+and went to the window.  The boy was nowhere visible.  And he passed
+out.  If one could take any help to him now--one must!
+
+He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden--no Jon!
+Nor where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to swell and
+colour.  He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral, into the
+meadow.  Where had the boy got to?  Had he rushed down to the
+coppice--his old hunting-ground?  Jolyon crossed the rows of hay.
+They would cock it on Monday and be carrying the day after, if rain
+held off.  Often they had crossed this field together--hand in hand,
+when Jon was a little chap.  Dash it!  The golden age was over by the
+time one was ten!  He came to the pond, where flies and gnats were
+dancing over a bright reedy surface; and on into the coppice.  It was
+cool there, fragrant of larches.  Still no Jon!  He called.  No
+answer!  On the log seat he sat down, nervous, anxious, forgetting
+his own physical sensations.  He had been wrong to let the
+boy get away with that letter; he ought to have kept him under his
+eye from the start!  Greatly troubled, he got up to retrace his
+steps.  At the farm-buildings he called again, and looked into the
+dark cow-house.  There in the cool, and the scent of vanilla and
+ammonia, away from flies, the three Alderneys were chewing the quiet
+cud; just milked, waiting for evening, to be turned out again into
+the lower field.  One turned a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon
+could see the slobber on its grey lower lip.  He saw everything with
+passionate clearness, in the agitation of his nerves--all that in his
+time he had adored and tried to paint--wonder of light and shade and
+colour.  No wonder the legend put Christ into a manger--what more
+devotional than the eyes and moon-white horns of a chewing cow in the
+warm dusk!  He called again.  No answer!  And he hurried away out of
+the coppice, past the pond, up the hill.  Oddly ironical--now he came
+to think of it--if Jon had taken the gruel of his discovery down in
+the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those old days had made
+the plunge of acknowledging their love.  Where he himself, on the log
+seat the Sunday morning he came back from Paris, had realised to the
+full that Irene had become the world to him.  That would have been
+the place for Irony to tear the veil from before the eyes of Irene's
+boy!  But he was not here!  Where had he got to?  One must find the
+poor chap!
+
+A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all the
+beauty of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening shadows,
+of the blue, and the white clouds, the scent of the hay, and the
+cooing of the pigeons; and the flower shapes standing tall.  He came
+to the rosery, and the beauty of the roses in that sudden sunlight
+seemed to him unearthly.  "Rose, you Spaniard!"  Wonderful three
+words!  There she had stood by that bush of dark red roses; had stood
+to read and decide that Jon must know it all!  He knew all now!  Had
+she chosen wrong?  He bent and sniffed a rose, its petals brushed his
+nose and trembling lips; nothing so soft as a rose-leaf's velvet,
+except her neck--Irene!  On across the lawn he went, up the slope, to
+the oak-tree.  Its top alone was glistening, for the sudden sun was
+away over the house; the lower shade was thick, blessedly cool--he
+was greatly overheated.  He paused a minute with his hand on the rope
+of the swing--Jolly, Holly--Jon!  The old swing!  And suddenly, he
+felt horribly--deadly ill.  'I've over done it!' he thought: 'by
+Jove! I've overdone it--after all!'  He staggered up toward the
+terrace, dragged himself up the steps, and fell against the wall of
+the house.  He leaned there gasping, his face buried in the honey-
+suckle that he and she had taken such trouble with that it might
+sweeten the air which drifted in.  Its fragrance mingled with awful
+pain.  'My love!' he thought; 'the boy!'  And with a great effort he
+tottered in through the long window, and sank into old Jolyon's
+chair.  The book was there, a pencil in it; he caught it up,
+scribbled a word on the open page....  His hand dropped....  So it
+was like this--was it?...
+
+There was a great wrench; and darkness....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IRENE
+
+
+When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along the
+terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and confusion.
+Leaning against the creepered wall he tore open the letter.  It was
+long--very long!  This added to his fear, and he began reading.  When
+he came to the words: "It was Fleur's father that she married,"
+everything seemed to spin before him.  He was close to a window, and
+entering by it, he passed, through music-room and hall, up to his
+bedroom.  Dipping his face in cold water, he sat on his bed, and went
+on reading, dropping each finished page on the bed beside him.  His
+father's writing was easy to read--he knew it so well, though he had
+never had a letter from him one quarter so long.  He read with a dull
+feeling--imagination only half at work.  He best grasped, on that
+first reading, the pain his father must have had in writing such a
+letter.  He let the last sheet fall, and in a sort of mental, moral
+helplessness began to read the first again.  It all seemed to him
+disgusting--dead and disgusting.  Then, suddenly, a hot wave of
+horrified emotion tingled through him.  He buried his face in his
+hands.  His mother!  Fleur's father!  He took up the letter again,
+and read on mechanically.  And again came the feeling that it was all
+dead and disgusting; his own love so different!  This letter said his
+mother--and her father!  An awful letter!
+
+Property!  Could there be men who looked on women as their property?
+Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him--
+red, stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent
+faces; hundreds, thousands of them!  How could he know what men who
+had such faces thought and did?  He held his head in his hands and
+groaned.  His mother!  He caught up the letter and read on again:
+"horror and aversion-alive in her to-day....  your children....
+grandchildren....  of a man who once owned your mother as a man might
+own a slave...."  He got up from his bed.  This cruel shadowy past,
+lurking there to murder his love and Fleur's, was true, or his father
+could never have written it.  'Why didn't they tell me the first
+thing,' he thought, 'the day I first saw Fleur?  They knew "I'd seen
+her.  They were afraid, and--now--I've--got it!'  Overcome by misery
+too acute for thought or reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the
+room and sat down on the floor.  He sat there, like some unhappy
+little animal.  There was comfort in dusk, and the floor--as if he
+were back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all over
+it.  He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped round
+his knees, for how long he did not know.  He was wrenched from his
+blank wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from his mother's
+room.  The blinds were down over the windows of his room, shut up in
+his absence, and from where he sat he could only hear a rustle, her
+footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her standing before
+his dressing-table.  She had something in her hand. He hardly
+breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go away.  He saw her
+touch things on the table as if they had some virtue in them, then
+face the window-grey from head to foot like a ghost.  The least turn
+of her head, and she must see him!  Her lips moved: "Oh! Jon!"  She
+was speaking to herself; the tone of her voice troubled Jon's heart.
+He saw in her hand a little photograph.  She held it toward the
+light, looking at it--very small.  He knew it--one of himself as a
+tiny boy, which she always kept in her bag.  His heart beat fast.
+And, suddenly as if she had heard it, she turned her eyes and saw
+him.  At the gasp she gave, and the movement of her hands pressing
+the photograph against her breast, he said:
+
+"Yes, it's me."
+
+She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him,
+her hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the sheets of the
+letter which had slipped to the floor.  She saw them, and her hands
+grasped the edge of the bed.  She sat very upright, her dark eyes
+fixed on him.  At last she spoke.
+
+"Well, Jon, you know, I see."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You've seen Father?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a long silence, till she said:
+
+"Oh! my darling!"
+
+"It's all right."  The emotions in him were so, violent and so mixed
+that he dared not move--resentment, despair, and yet a strange
+yearning for the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+There was another long silence, then she got up.  She stood a moment,
+very still, made a little movement with her hand, and said: "My
+darling boy, my most darling boy, don't think of me--think of
+yourself," and, passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her
+room.
+
+Jon turned--curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog--into the
+corner made by the two walls.
+
+He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him.  It
+came from the terrace below.  He got up, scared.  Again came the cry:
+"Jon!"  His mother was calling!  He ran out and down the stairs,
+through the empty dining-room into the study.  She was kneeling
+before the old armchair, and his father was lying back quite white,
+his head on his breast, one of his hands resting on an open book,
+with a pencil clutched in it--more strangely still than anything he
+had ever seen.  She looked round wildly, and said:
+
+"Oh! Jon--he's dead--he's dead!"
+
+Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where
+he had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead.  Icy cold!
+How could--how could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago--!  His
+mother's arms were round the knees; pressing her breast against them.
+"Why--why wasn't I with him?" he heard her whisper.  Then he saw the
+tottering word "Irene" pencilled on the open page, and broke down
+himself.  It was his first sight of human death, and its unutterable
+stillness blotted from him all other emotion; all else, then, was but
+preliminary to this!  All love and life, and joy, anxiety, and
+sorrow, all movement, light and beauty, but a beginning to this
+terrible white stillness.  It made a dreadful mark on him; all seemed
+suddenly little, futile, short.  He mastered himself at last, got up,
+and raised her.
+
+"Mother! don't cry--Mother!"
+
+Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother
+was lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a
+white sheet.  He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had
+never looked angry--always whimsical, and kind.  "To be kind and keep
+your end up--there's nothing else in it," he had once heard his
+father say.  How wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy!  He
+understood now that his father had known for a long time past that
+this would come suddenly--known, and not said a word.  He gazed with
+an awed and passionate reverence.  The loneliness of it--just to
+spare his mother and himself!  His own trouble seemed small while he
+was looking at that face.  The word scribbled on the page!  The
+farewell word!  Now his mother had no one but himself!  He went up
+close to the dead face--not changed at all, and yet completely
+changed.  He had heard his father say once that he did not believe in
+consciousness surviving death, or that if it did it might be just
+survival till the natural age limit of the body had been reached--the
+natural term of its inherent vitality; so that if the body were
+broken by accident, excess, violent disease, consciousness might
+still persist till, in the course of Nature uninterfered with, it
+would naturally have faded out.  It had struck him because he had
+never heard any one else suggest it.  When the heart failed like
+this--surely it was not quite natural!  Perhaps his father's
+consciousness was in the room with him.  Above the bed hung a picture
+of his father's father.  Perhaps his consciousness, too, was still
+alive; and his brother's--his half-brother, who had died in the
+Transvaal.  Were they all gathered round this bed?  Jon kissed the
+forehead, and stole back to his own room.  The door between it and
+his mother's was ajar; she had evidently been in--everything was
+ready for him, even some biscuits and hot milk, and the letter no
+longer on the floor.  He ate and drank, watching the last light fade.
+He did not try to see into the future--just stared at the dark
+branches of the oak-tree, level with his window, and felt as if life
+had stopped.  Once in the night, turning in his heavy sleep, he was
+conscious of something white and still, beside his bed, and started
+up.
+
+His mother's voice said:
+
+"It's only I, Jon dear!"  Her hand pressed his forehead gently back;
+her white figure disappeared.
+
+Alone!  He fell heavily asleep again, and dreamed he saw his mother's
+name crawling on his bed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SOAMES COGITATES
+
+
+The announcement in The Times of his cousin Jolyon's death affected
+Soames quite simply.  So that chap was gone!  There had never been a
+time in their two lives when love had not been lost between them.
+That quick-blooded sentiment hatred had run its course long since in
+Soames' heart, and he had refused to allow any recrudescence, but he
+considered this early decease a piece of poetic justice.  For twenty
+years the fellow had enjoyed the reversion of his wife and house,
+and--he was dead!  The obituary notice, which appeared a little
+later, paid Jolyon--he thought--too much attention.  It spoke of that
+"diligent and agreeable painter whose work we have come to look on as
+typical of the best late-Victorian water-colour art."  Soames, who
+had almost mechanically preferred Mole, Morpin, and Caswell Baye, and
+had always sniffed quite audibly when he came to one of his cousin's
+on the line, turned The Times with a crackle.
+
+He had to go up to Town that morning on Forsyte affairs, and was
+fully conscious of Gradman's glance sidelong over his spectacles.
+The old clerk had about him an aura of regretful congratulation.  He
+smelled, as it were, of old days.  One could almost hear him
+thinking: "Mr. Jolyon, ye-es--just my age, and gone--dear, dear!  I
+dare say she feels it.  She was a mice-lookin' woman.  Flesh is
+flesh!  They've given 'im a notice in the papers.  Fancy!"  His
+atmosphere in fact caused Soames to handle certain leases and
+conversions with exceptional swiftness.
+
+"About that settlement on Miss Fleur, Mr. Soames?"
+
+"I've thought better of that," answered Soames shortly.
+
+"Ah!  I'm glad of that.  I thought you were a little hasty.  The
+times do change."
+
+How this death would affect Fleur had begun to trouble Soames.  He
+was not certain that she knew of it--she seldom looked at the paper,
+never at the births, marriages, and deaths.
+
+He pressed matters on, and made his way to Green Street for lunch.
+Winifred was almost doleful.  Jack Cardigan had broken a splashboard,
+so far as one could make out, and would not be "fit" for some time.
+She could not get used to the idea.
+
+"Did Profond ever get off?" he said suddenly.
+
+"He got off," replied Winifred, "but where--I don't know."
+
+Yes, there it was--impossible to tell anything!  Not that he wanted
+to know.  Letters from Annette were coming from Dieppe, where she and
+her mother were staying.
+
+"You saw that fellow's death, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes," said Winifred.  "I'm sorry for--for his children.  He was very
+amiable."  Soames uttered a rather queer sound.  A suspicion of the
+old deep truth--that men were judged in this world rather by what
+they were than by what they did--crept and knocked resentfully at the
+back doors of his mind.
+
+"I know there was a superstition to that effect," he muttered.
+
+"One must do him justice now he's dead."
+
+"I should like to have done him justice before," said Soames; "but I
+never had the chance.  Have you got a 'Baronetage' here?"
+
+"Yes; in that bottom row."
+
+Soames took out a fat red book, and ran over the leaves.
+
+"Mont-Sir Lawrence, 9th Bt., cr. 1620, e. s. of Geoffrey, 8th Bt.,
+and Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt., of Muskham Hall,
+Shrops: marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq., of
+Condaford Grange, co. Oxon; 1 son, heir Michael Conway, b. 1895, 2
+daurs. Residence: Lippinghall Manor, Folwell, Bucks.  Clubs: Snooks':
+Coffee House: Aeroplane.  See BidIicott."
+
+"H'm!" he said.  "Did you ever know a publisher?"
+
+"Uncle Timothy."
+
+"Alive, I mean."
+
+"Monty knew one at his Club.  He brought him here to dinner once.
+Monty was always thinking of writing a book, you know, about how to
+make money on the turf.  He tried to interest that man."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He put him on to a horse--for the Two Thousand.  We didn't see him
+again.  He was rather smart, if I remember."
+
+"Did it win?"
+
+"No; it ran last, I think.  You know Monty really was quite clever in
+his way."
+
+"Was he?" said Soames.  "Can you see any connection between a sucking
+baronet and publishing?"
+
+"People do all sorts of things nowadays," replied Winifred.  "The
+great stunt seems not to be idle--so different from our time.  To do
+nothing was the thing then.  But I suppose it'll come again."
+
+"This young Mont that I'm speaking of is very sweet on Fleur.  If it
+would put an end to that other affair I might encourage it."
+
+"Has he got style?" asked Winifred.
+
+"He's no beauty; pleasant enough, with some scattered brains.
+There's a good deal of land, I believe.  He seems genuinely attached.
+But I don't know."
+
+"No," murmured Winifred; "it's--very difficult.  I always found it
+best to do nothing.  It is such a bore about Jack; now we shan't get
+away till after Bank Holiday.  Well, the people are always amusing, I
+shall go into the Park and watch them."
+
+"If I were you," said Soames, "I should have a country cottage, and
+be out of the way of holidays and strikes when you want."
+
+"The country bores me," answered Winifred, "and I found the railway
+strike quite exciting."
+
+Winifred had always been noted for sang-froid.
+
+Soames took his leave.  All the way down to Reading he debated
+whether he should tell Fleur of that boy's father's death.  It did
+not alter the situation except that he would be independent now, and
+only have his mother's opposition to encounter.  He would come into a
+lot of money, no doubt, and perhaps the house--the house built for
+Irene and himself--the house whose architect had wrought his domestic
+ruin.  His daughter--mistress of that house!  That would be poetic
+justice!  Soames uttered a little mirthless laugh.  He had designed
+that house to re-establish his failing union, meant it for the seat
+of his descendants, if he could have induced Irene to give him one!
+Her son and Fleur!  Their children would be, in some sort, offspring
+of the union between himself and her!
+
+The theatricality in that thought was repulsive to his sober sense.
+And yet--it would be the easiest and wealthiest way out of the
+impasse, now that Jolyon was gone.  The juncture of two Forsyte
+fortunes had a kind of conservative charm.  And she--Irene-would be
+linked to him once more.  Nonsense!  Absurd!  He put the notion from
+his head.
+
+On arriving home he heard the click of billiard-balls, and through
+the window saw young Mont sprawling over the table.  Fleur, with her
+cue akimbo, was watching with a smile.  How pretty she looked!  No
+wonder that young fellow was out of his mind about her.  A title--
+land!  There was little enough in land, these days; perhaps less in a
+title.  The old Forsytes had always had a kind of contempt for
+titles, rather remote and artificial things--not worth the money they
+cost, and having to do with the Court.  They had all had that feeling
+in differing measure--Soames remembered.  Swithin, indeed, in his
+most expansive days had once attended a Levee.  He had come away
+saying he shouldn't go again--"all that small fry."  It was suspected
+that he had looked too big in knee-breeches.  Soames remembered how
+his own mother had wished to be presented because of the fashionable
+nature of the performance, and how his father had put his foot down
+with unwonted decision.  What did she want with that peacocking--
+wasting time and money; there was nothing in it!
+
+The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the chief
+power in the State, a feeling that their own world was good enough
+and a little better than any other because it was their world, had
+kept the old Forsytes singularly free of "flummery," as Nicholas had
+been wont to call it when he had the gout.  Soames' generation, more
+self-conscious and ironical, had been saved by a sense of Swithin in
+knee-breeches.  While the third and the fourth generation, as it
+seemed to him, laughed at everything.
+
+However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a
+title and estate--a thing one couldn't help.  He entered quietly, as
+Mont missed his shot.  He noted the young man's eyes, fixed on Fleur
+bending over in her turn; and the adoration in them almost touched
+him.
+
+She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand, and
+shook her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
+
+"I shall never do it."
+
+"'Nothing venture.'"
+
+"All right."  The cue struck, the ball rolled.  "There!"
+
+"Bad luck!  Never mind!"
+
+Then they saw him, and Soames said:
+
+"I'll mark for you."
+
+He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and tired,
+furtively studying those two young faces.  When the game was over
+Mont came up to him.
+
+"I've started in, sir.  Rum game, business, isn't it?  I suppose you
+saw a lot of human nature as a solicitor."
+
+"I did."
+
+"Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the wrong
+tack in offering less than they can afford to give; they ought to
+offer more, and work backward."
+
+Soames raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Suppose the more is accepted?"
+
+"That doesn't matter a little bit," said Mont; "it's much more paying
+to abate a price than to increase it.  For instance, say we offer an
+author good terms--he naturally takes them.  Then we go into it, find
+we can't publish at a decent profit and tell him so.  He's got
+confidence in us because we've been generous to him, and he comes
+down like a lamb, and bears us no malice.  But if we offer him poor
+terms at the start, he doesn't take them, so we have to advance them
+to get him, and he thinks us damned screws into the bargain.
+
+"Try buying pictures on that system," said Soames; "an offer accepted
+is a contract--haven't you learned that?"
+
+Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the window.
+
+"No," he said, "I wish I had.  Then there's another thing.  Always
+let a man off a bargain if he wants to be let off."
+
+"As advertisement?" said Soames dryly.
+
+"Of course it is; but I meant on principle."
+
+"Does your firm work on those lines?"
+
+"Not yet," said Mont, "but it'll come."
+
+"And they will go."
+
+"No, really, sir.  I'm making any number of observations, and they
+all confirm my theory.  Human nature is consistently underrated in
+business, people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure and
+profit by that.  Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and open,
+but that's easy if you feel it.  The more human and generous you are
+the better chance you've got in business."
+
+Soames rose.
+
+"Are you a partner?"
+
+"Not for six months, yet."
+
+"The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire."
+
+Mont laughed.
+
+"You'll see," he said.  "There's going to be a big change.  The
+possessive principle has got its shutters up."
+
+"What?" said Soames.
+
+"The house is to let!  Good-bye, sir; I'm off now."
+
+Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the
+squeeze it received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as he
+passed out.  Then she came from the window, trailing her finger along
+the mahogany edge of the billiard-table.  Watching her, Soames knew
+that she was going to ask him something.  Her finger felt round the
+last pocket, and she looked up.
+
+"Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?"
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+"You haven't seen, then?" he said.  "His father died just a week ago
+to-day."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to
+apprehend what this would mean.
+
+"Poor Jon!  Why didn't you tell me, Father?"
+
+"I never know!" said Soames slowly; "you don't confide in me."
+
+"I would, if you'd help me, dear."
+
+"Perhaps I shall."
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.  "Oh! darling--when one wants a thing
+fearfully, one doesn't think of other people.  Don't be angry with
+me."
+
+Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
+
+"I'm cogitating," he said.  What on earth had made him use a word
+like that!  "Has young Mont been bothering you again?"
+
+Fleur smiled.  "Oh! Michael!  He's always bothering; but he's such a
+good sort--I don't mind him."
+
+"Well," said Soames, "I'm tired; I shall go and have a nap before
+dinner."
+
+He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there, and
+closed his eyes.  A terrible responsibility this girl of his--whose
+mother was--ah! what was she?  A terrible responsibility!  Help her--
+how could he help her?  He could not alter the fact that he was her
+father.  Or that Irene--!  What was it young Mont had said--some
+nonsense about the possessive instinct--shutters up-- To let?  Silly!
+
+The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and
+roses, closed on his senses, drowsing them.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE FIXED IDEA
+
+
+The fixed idea," which has outrun more constables than any other form
+of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when it
+takes the avid guise of love.  To hedges and ditches, and doors, to
+humans without ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the
+contents sucking their fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from
+this fast malady--the fixed idea of love pays no attention.  It runs
+with eyes turned inward to its own light, oblivious of all other
+stars.  Those with the fixed ideas that human happiness depends on
+their art, on vivisecting dogs, on hating foreigners, on paying
+supertax, on remaining Ministers, on making wheels go round, on
+preventing their neighbours from being divorced, on conscientious
+objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox and superiority to
+everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania--all are unstable
+compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession of some
+her or him.  And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the
+scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and
+whose business is pleasure, she was--as Winifred would have said in
+the latest fashion of speech--"honest to God" indifferent to it all.
+She wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies above
+the river or the Green Park when she went to Town.  She even kept
+Jon's letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which in
+days when corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and chests so
+out of fashion, there could, perhaps, have been no greater proof of
+the fixity of her idea.
+
+After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received
+his answer three days later on her return from a river picnic.  It
+was his first letter since their meeting at June's.  She opened it
+with misgiving, and read it with dismay.
+
+"Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past.  I won't tell
+it you--I think you knew when we met at June's.  She says you did.
+If you did, Fleur, you ought to have told me.  I expect you only
+heard your father's side of it.  I have heard my mother's.  It's
+dreadful.  Now that she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt her
+more.  Of course, I long for you all day, but I don't believe now
+that we shall ever come together--there's something too strong
+pulling us apart."
+
+So!  Her deception had found her out.  But Jon--she felt--had
+forgiven that.  It was what he said of his mother which caused the
+guttering in her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
+
+Her first impulse was to reply--her second, not to reply.  These
+impulses were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while
+desperation grew within her.  She was not her father's child for
+nothing.  The tenacity which had at once made and undone Soames was
+her backbone, too, frilled and embroidered by French grace and
+quickness.  Instinctively she conjugated the verb "to have" always
+with the pronoun "I."  She concealed, however, all signs of her
+growing desperation, and pursued such river pleasures as the winds
+and rain of a disagreeable July permitted, as if she had no care in
+the world; nor did any "sucking baronet" ever neglect the business of
+a publisher more consistently than her attendant spirit, Michael
+Mont.
+
+To Soames she was a puzzle.  He was almost deceived by this careless
+gaiety.  Almost--because he did not fail to mark her eyes often fixed
+on nothing, and the film of light shining from her bedroom window
+late at night.  What was she thinking and brooding over into small
+hours when she ought to have been asleep?  But he dared not ask what
+was in her mind; and, since that one little talk in the billiard-
+room, she said nothing to him.
+
+In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred
+invited them to lunch and to go afterward to "a most amusing little
+play, 'The Beggar's Opera"' and would they bring a man to make four?
+Soames, whose attitude toward theatres was to go to nothing,
+accepted, because Fleur's attitude was to go to everything.  They
+motored up, taking Michael Mont, who, being in his seventh heaven,
+was found by Winifred "very amusing."  "The Beggar's Opera" puzzled
+Soames.  The people were very unpleasant, the whole thing very
+cynical.  Winifred was "intrigued "--by the dresses.  The music, too,
+did not displease her.  At the Opera, the night before, she had
+arrived too early for the Russian Ballet, and found the stage
+occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or apoplectic from terror
+lest by some dreadful inadvertence they might drop into a tune.
+Michael Mont was enraptured with the whole thing.  And all three
+wondered what Fleur was thinking of it.  But Fleur was not thinking
+of it.  Her fixed idea stood on the stage and sang with Polly
+Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced with Jenny Diver, postured with
+Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and cuddled with Macheath.  Her lips
+might smile, her hands applaud, but the comic old masterpiece made no
+more impression on her than if it had been pathetic, like a modern
+"Revue."  When they embarked in the car to return, she ached because
+Jon was not sitting next her instead of Michael Mont.  When, at some
+jolt, the young man's arm touched hers as if by accident, she only
+thought: 'If that were Jon's arm!'  When his cheerful voice, tempered
+by her proximity, murmured above the sound of the car's progress, she
+smiled and answered, thinking: 'If that were Jon's voice!' and when
+once he said, "Fleur, you look a perfect angel in that dress!" she
+answered, "Oh, do you like it? thinking, 'If only Jon could see it!'
+
+During this drive she took a resolution.  She would go to Robin Hill
+and see him--alone; she would take the car, without word beforehand
+to him or to her father.  It was nine days since his letter, and she
+could wait no longer.  On Monday she would go!  The decision made her
+well disposed toward young Mont.  With something to look forward to
+she could afford to tolerate and respond.  He might stay to dinner;
+propose to her as usual; dance with her, press her hand, sigh--do
+what he liked.  He was only a nuisance when he interfered with her
+fixed idea.  She was even sorry for him so far as it was possible to
+be sorry for anybody but herself just now.  At dinner he seemed to
+talk more wildly than usual about what he called "the death of the
+close borough"--she paid little attention, but her father seemed
+paying a good deal, with the smile on his face which meant
+opposition, if not anger.
+
+"The younger generation doesn't think as you do, sir; does it,
+Fleur?"
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders--the younger generation was just Jon,
+and she did not know what he was thinking.
+
+"Young people will think as I do when they're my age, Mr. Mont.
+Human nature doesn't change."
+
+"I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the times.
+The pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that's going out."
+
+"Indeed!  To mind one's own business is not a form of thought, Mr.
+Mont, it's an instinct."
+
+Yes, when Jon was the business!
+
+"But what is one's business, sir?  That's the point.  Everybody's
+business is going to be one's business.  Isn't it, Fleur?"
+
+Fleur only smiled.
+
+"If not," added young Mont, "there'll be blood."
+
+"People have talked like that from time immemorial"
+
+"But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?"
+
+"I should say increasing among those who have none."
+
+"Well, look at me!  I'm heir to an entailed estate.  I don't want the
+thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow."
+
+"You're not married, and you don't know what you're talking about."
+
+Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.
+
+"Do you really mean that marriage--?" he began.
+
+"Society is built on marriage," came from between her father's close
+lips; "marriage and its consequences.  Do you want to do away with
+it?"
+
+Young Mont made a distracted gesture.  Silence brooded over the
+dinner table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest--a
+pheasant proper--under the electric light in an alabaster globe.  And
+outside, the river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and
+sweet scents.
+
+'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DESPERATE
+
+
+The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty
+to the only Jolyon Forsyte left.  The necessary forms and ceremonies-
+-the reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of
+the legacies--were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet
+of age.  Jolyon was cremated.  By his special wish no one attended
+that ceremony, or wore black for him.  The succession of his
+property, controlled to some extent by old Jolyon's Will, left his
+widow in possession of Robin Hill, with two thousand five hundred
+pounds a year for life.  Apart from this the two Wills worked
+together in some complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon's
+three children should have an equal share in their grandfather's and
+father's property in the future as in the present, save only that
+Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his capital when he
+was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the spirit of
+theirs, in order that their children might have the body after them.
+If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he outlived
+them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was
+considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of income
+tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he
+died.  All this was nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother.
+It was June who did everything needful for one who had left his
+affairs in perfect order.  When she had gone, and those two were
+alone again in the great house, alone with death drawing them
+together, and love driving them apart, Jon passed very painful days
+secretly disgusted and disappointed with himself.  His mother would
+look at him with such a patient sadness which yet had in it an
+instinctive pride, as if she were reserving her defence.  If she
+smiled he was angry that his answering smile should be so grudging
+and unnatural.  He did not judge or condemn her; that was all too
+remote--indeed, the idea of doing so had never come to him.  No! he
+was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have what he wanted be
+cause of her.  There was one alleviation--much to do in connection
+with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted to
+June, though she had offered to undertake it.  Both Jon and his
+mother had felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings
+and unfinished matter, away with her, the work would encounter such
+icy blasts from Paul Post and other frequenters of her studio, that
+it would soon be frozen out even of her warm heart.  On its old-
+fashioned plane and of its kind the work was good, and they could not
+bear the thought of its subjection to ridicule.  A one-man exhibition
+of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had
+loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together.
+Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father.  The
+quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into
+something really individual was disclosed by these researches.  There
+was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth
+and reach of vision.  Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached
+very high--but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious,
+and complete.  And, remembering his father's utter absence of "side"
+or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always
+spoken of his own efforts, ever calling himself "an amateur," Jon
+could not help feeling that he had never really known his father.  To
+ take himself seriously, yet never bore others by letting them know
+that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle.  There was
+something in this which appealed to the boy, and made him heartily
+endorse his mother's comment: "He had true refinement; he couldn't
+help thinking of others, whatever he did.  And when he took a
+resolution which went counter, he did it with the minimum of
+defiance--not like the Age, is it?  Twice in his life he had to go
+against everything; and yet it never made him bitter."  Jon saw tears
+running down her face, which she at once turned away from him.  She
+was so quiet about her loss that sometimes he had thought she didn't
+feel it much.  Now, as he looked at her, he felt how far he fell
+short of the reserve power and dignity in both his father and his
+mother.  And, stealing up to her, he put his arm round her waist.
+She kissed him swiftly, but with a sort of passion, and went out of
+the room.
+
+The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once been
+Holly's schoolroom, devoted to her silkworms, dried lavender, music,
+and other forms of instruction.  Now, at the end of July, despite its
+northern and eastern aspects, a warm and slumberous air came in
+between the long-faded lilac linen curtains.  To redeem a little the
+departed glory, as of a field that is golden and gone, clinging to a
+room which its master has left, Irene had placed on the paint-stained
+table a bowl of red roses.  This, and Jolyon's favourite cat, who
+still clung to the deserted habitat, were the pleasant spots in that
+dishevelled, sad workroom.  Jon, at the north window, sniffing air
+mysteriously scented with warm strawberries, heard a car drive up.
+The lawyers again about some nonsense!  Why did that scent so make
+one ache?  And where did it come from--there were no strawberry beds
+on this side of the house.  Instinctively he took a crumpled sheet of
+paper from his pocket, and wrote down some broken words.  A warmth
+began spreading in his chest; he rubbed the palms of his hands
+together.  Presently he had jotted this:
+
+"If I could make a little song
+A little song to soothe my heart!
+I'd make it all of little things
+The plash of water, rub of wings,
+The puffing-off of dandies crown,
+The hiss of raindrop spilling down,
+The purr of cat, the trill of bird,
+And ev'ry whispering I've heard
+>From willy wind in leaves and grass,
+And all the distant drones that pass.
+A song as tender and as light
+As flower, or butterfly in flight;
+And when I saw it opening,
+I'd let it fly and sing!"
+
+He was still muttering it over to himself at the window, when he
+heard his name called, and, turning round, saw Fleur.  At that
+amazing apparition, he made at first no movement and no sound, while
+her clear vivid glance ravished his heart.  Then he went forward to
+the table, saying, "How nice of you to come!" and saw her flinch as
+if he had thrown something at her.
+
+"I asked for you," she said, "and they showed me up here.  But I can
+go away again."
+
+Jon clutched the paint-stained table.  Her face and figure in its
+frilly frock photographed itself with such startling vividness upon
+his eyes, that if she had sunk through the floor he must still have
+seen her.
+
+"I know I told you a lie, Jon.  But I told it out of love."
+
+"Yes, oh! yes! That's nothing!"
+
+"I didn't answer your letter.  What was the use--there wasn't
+anything to answer.  I wanted to see you instead."  She held out both
+her hands, and Jon grasped them across the table.  He tried to say
+something, but all his attention was given to trying not to hurt her
+hands.  His own felt so hard and hers so soft.  She said almost
+defiantly:
+
+"That old story--was it so very dreadful?"
+
+"Yes."  In his voice, too, there was a note of defiance.
+
+She dragged her hands away.  "I didn't think in these days boys were
+tied to their mothers' apron-strings."
+
+Jon's chin went up as if he had been struck.
+
+"Oh! I didn't mean it, Jon.  What a horrible thing to say!"  Swiftly
+she came close to him.  "Jon, dear; I didn't mean it."
+
+"All right."
+
+She had put her two hands on his shoulder, and her forehead down on
+them; the brim of her hat touched his neck, and he felt it quivering.
+But, in a sort of paralysis, he made no response.  She let go of his
+shoulder and drew away.
+
+"Well, I'll go, if you don't want me.  But I never thought you'd have
+given me up."
+
+"I haven't," cried Jon, coming suddenly to life.  "I can't.  I'll try
+again."
+
+Her eyes gleamed, she swayed toward him.  "Jon--I love you!  Don't
+give me up!  If you do, I don't know what--I feel so desperate.  What
+does it matter--all that past-compared with this?"
+
+She clung to him.  He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips.  But
+while he kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down on
+the floor of his bedroom--his father's white dead face--his mother
+kneeling before it.  Fleur's whispered, "Make her!  Promise! Oh! Jon,
+try!" seemed childish in his ear.  He felt curiously old.
+
+"I promise!" he muttered.  "Only, you don't understand."
+
+"She wants to spoil our lives, just because--"
+
+"Yes, of what?"
+
+Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer.  Her arms
+tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even while he
+yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the letter.  Fleur
+did not know, she did not understand--she misjudged his mother; she
+came from the enemy's camp!  So lovely, and he loved her so--yet,
+even in her embrace, he could not help the memory of Holly's words:
+"I think she has a 'having' nature," and his mother's "My darling
+boy, don't think of me--think of yourself!"
+
+When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on his
+eyes, her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon leaned
+in the window, listening to the car bearing her away.  Still the
+scent as of warm strawberries, still the little summer sounds that
+should make his song; still all the promise of youth and happiness in
+sighing, floating, fluttering July--and his heart torn; yearning
+strong in him; hope high in him yet with its eyes cast down, as if
+ashamed.  The miserable task before him!  If Fleur was desperate, so
+was he--watching the poplars swaying, the white clouds passing, the
+sunlight on the grass.
+
+He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till
+his mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling that she
+knew what he was waiting to say.  She kissed him and went up-stairs,
+and still he lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that
+unreality of colouring which steals along and stains a summer night.
+And he would have given anything to be back again in the past--barely
+three months back; or away forward, years, in the future.  The
+present with this dark cruelty of a decision, one way or the other,
+seemed impossible.  He realised now so much more keenly what his
+mother felt than he had at first; as if the story in that letter had
+been a poisonous germ producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so
+that he really felt there were two camps, his mother's and his--
+Fleur's and her father's.  It might be a dead thing, that old tragic
+ownership and enmity, but dead things were poisonous till time had
+cleaned them away.  Even his love felt tainted, less illusioned, more
+of the earth, and with a treacherous lurking doubt lest Fleur, like
+her father, might want to own; not articulate, just a stealing haunt,
+horribly unworthy, which crept in and about the ardour of his
+memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the vividness and grace
+of that charmed face and figure--a doubt, not real enough to convince
+him of its presence, just real enough to deflower a perfect faith.
+And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was essential.  He still
+had Youth's eagerness to give with both hands, to take with neither -
+to give lovingly to one who had his own impulsive generosity.  Surely
+she had!  He got up from the window-seat and roamed in the big grey
+ghostly room, whose walls were hung with silvered canvas.  This house
+his father said in that death-bed letter--had been built for his
+mother to live in--with Fleur's father!  He put out his hand in the
+half-dark, as if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead.  He clenched,
+trying to feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze
+them, and reassure him that he-he was on his father's side.  Tears,
+prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot.  He went back to
+the window.  It was warmer, not so eerie, more comforting outside,
+where the moon hung golden, three days off full; the freedom of the
+night was comforting.  If only Fleur and he had met on some desert
+island without a past--and Nature for their house!  Jon had still his
+high regard for desert islands, where breadfruit grew, and the water
+was blue above the coral.  The night was deep, was free--there was
+enticement in it; a lure, a promise, a refuge from entanglement, and
+love!  Milksop tied to his mother's...! His cheeks burned.  He shut
+the window, drew curtains over it, switched off the lighted sconce,
+and went up-stairs.
+
+The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother, still
+in her evening gown, was standing at the window.  She turned and
+said:
+
+"Sit down, Jon; let's talk."  She sat down on the window-seat, Jon on
+his bed.  She had her profile turned to him, and the beauty and grace
+of her figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose, the neck, the
+strange and as it were remote refinement of her, moved him.  His
+mother never belonged to her surroundings.  She came into them from
+somewhere--as it were!  What was she going to say to him, who had in
+his heart such things to say to her?
+
+"I know Fleur came to-day.  I'm not surprised."  It was as though she
+had added: "She is her father's daughter!"  And Jon's heart hardened.
+Irene went on quietly:
+
+"I have Father's letter.  I picked it up that night and kept it.
+Would you like it back, dear?"
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+"I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you.  It didn't quite
+do justice to my criminality."
+
+'Mother!" burst from Jon's lips.
+
+"He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's father
+without love I did a dreadful thing.  An unhappy marriage, Jon, can
+play such havoc with other lives besides one's own.  You are
+fearfully young, my darling, and fearfully loving.  Do you think you
+can possibly be happy with this girl?"
+
+Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
+
+"Yes; oh!  yes--if you could be."
+
+Irene smiled.
+
+"Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love.  If
+yours were another case like mine, Jon--where the deepest things are
+stifled; the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!"
+
+"Why should it, Mother?  You think she must be like her father, but
+she's not.  I've seen him."
+
+Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something wavered;
+there was such irony and experience in that smile.
+
+"You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker."
+
+That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again!  He said with
+vehemence:
+
+"She isn't--she isn't.  It's only because I can't bear to make you
+unhappy, Mother, now that Father--"  He thrust his fists against his
+forehead.
+
+Irene got up.
+
+"I told you that night, dear, not to mind me.  I meant it.  Think of
+yourself and your own happiness!  I can stand what's left--I've
+brought it on myself."
+
+Again the word "Mother!" burst from Jon's lips.
+
+She came over to him and put her hands over his.
+
+"Do you feel your head, darling?"
+
+Jon shook it.  What he felt was in his chest--a sort of tearing
+asunder of the tissue there, by the two loves.
+
+"I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do.  You won't
+lose anything."  She smoothed his hair gently, and walked away.
+
+He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay, stifling
+his breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+EMBASSY
+
+
+Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been out
+in the car since two.  Three hours!  Where had she gone?  Up to
+London without a word to him?  He had never become quite reconciled
+with cars.  He had embraced them in principle--like the born
+empiricist, or Forsyte, that he was--adopting each symptom of
+progress as it came along with: "Well, we couldn't do without them
+now."  But in fact he found them tearing, great, smelly things.
+Obliged by Annette to have one--a Rollhard with pearl-grey cushions,
+electric light, little mirrors, trays for the ashes of cigarettes,
+flower vases--all smelling of petrol and stephanotis--he regarded it
+much as he used to regard his brother-in-law, Montague Dartie.  The
+thing typified all that was fast, insecure, and subcutaneously oily
+in modern life.  As modern life became faster, looser, younger,
+Soames was becoming older, slower, tighter, more and more in thought
+and language like his father James before him.  He was almost aware
+of it himself.  Pace and progress pleased him less and less; there
+was an ostentation, too, about a car which he considered provocative
+in the prevailing mood of Labour.  On one occasion that fellow Sims
+had driven over the only vested interest of a working man.  Soames
+had not forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many people
+would have stopped to put up with it.  He had been sorry for the dog,
+and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that ruffian
+hadn't been so outrageous.  With four hours fast becoming five, and
+still no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had experienced in
+person and by proxy balled within him, and sinking sensations
+troubled the pit of his stomach.  At seven he telephoned to Winifred
+by trunk call.  No!  Fleur had not been to Green Street.  Then where
+was she?  Visions of his beloved daughter rolled up in her pretty
+frills, all blood and dust-stained, in some hideous catastrophe,
+began to haunt him.  He went to her room and spied among her things.
+She had taken nothing--no dressing-case, no Jewellery.  And this, a
+relief in one sense, increased his fears of an accident.  Terrible to
+be helpless when his loved one was missing, especially when he
+couldn't bear fuss or publicity of any kind!  What should he do if
+she were not back by nightfall?
+
+At a quarter to eight he heard the car.  A great weight lifted from
+off his heart; he hurried down.  She was getting out--pale and tired-
+looking, but nothing wrong.  He met her in the hall.
+
+"You've frightened me.  Where have you been?"
+
+"To Robin Hill.  I'm sorry, dear.  I had to go; I'll tell you
+afterward."  And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
+
+Soames waited in the drawing-room.  To Robin Hill!  What did that
+portend?
+
+It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner--consecrated to the
+susceptibilities of the butler.  The agony of nerves Soames had been
+through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his power to
+condemn what she had done, or resist what she was going to do; he
+waited in a relaxed stupor for her revelation.  Life was a queer
+business.  There he was at sixty-five and no more in command of
+things than if he had not spent forty years in building up security-
+always something one couldn't get on terms with!  In the pocket of
+his dinner-jacket was a letter from Annette.  She was coming back in
+a fortnight.  He knew nothing of what she had been doing out there.
+And he was glad that he did not.  Her absence had been a relief.  Out
+of sight was out of mind!  And now she was coming back.  Another
+worry!  And the Bolderby Old Crome was gone--Dumetrius had got it--
+all because that anonymous letter had put it out of his thoughts.  He
+furtively remarked the strained look on his daughter's face, as if
+she too were gazing at a picture that she couldn't buy.  He almost
+wished the War back.  Worries didn't seem, then, quite so worrying.
+>From the caress in her voice, the look on her face, he became certain
+that she wanted something from him, uncertain whether it would be
+wise of him to give it her.  He pushed his savoury away uneaten, and
+even joined her in a cigarette.
+
+After dinner she set the electric piano-player going.  And he augured
+the worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his knee, and
+put her hand on his.
+
+"Darling, be nice to me.  I had to see Jon--he wrote to me.  He's
+going to try what he can do with his mother.  But I've been thinking.
+It's really in your hands, Father.  If you'd persuade her that it
+doesn't mean renewing the past in any way!  That I shall stay yours,
+and Jon will stay hers; that you need never see him or her, and she
+need never see you or me!  Only you could persuade her, dear, because
+only you could promise.  One can't promise for other people.  Surely
+it wouldn't be too awkward for you to see her just this once now that
+Jon's father is dead?"
+
+"Too awkward?" Soames repeated.  "The whole thing's preposterous."
+
+"You know," said Fleur, without looking up, "you wouldn't mind seeing
+her, really."
+
+Soames was silent.  Her words had expressed a truth too deep for him
+to admit.  She slipped her fingers between his own--hot, slim, eager,
+they clung there.  This child of his would corkscrew her way into a
+brick wall!
+
+"What am I to do if you won't, Father?" she said very softly.
+
+"I'll do anything for your happiness," said Soanies; "but this isn't
+for your happiness."
+
+"Oh! it is; it is!"
+
+"It'll only stir things up," he said grimly.
+
+"But they are stirred up.  The thing is to quiet them.  To make her
+feel that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with yours or
+hers.  You can do it, Father, I know you can."
+
+"You know a great deal, then," was Soames' glum answer.
+
+"If you will, Jon and I will wait a year--two years if you like."
+
+"It seems to me," murmured Soames, "that you care nothing about what
+I feel."
+
+Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.
+
+"I do, darling.  But you wouldn't like me to be awfully miserable."
+
+How she wheedled to get her ends!  And trying with all his might to
+think she really cared for him--he was not sure--not sure.  All she
+cared for was this boy!  Why should he help her to get this boy, who
+was killing her affection for himself?  Why should he?  By the laws
+of the Forsytes it was foolish!  There was nothing to be had out of
+it--nothing!  To give her to that boy!  To pass her into the enemy's
+camp, under the influence of the woman who had injured him so deeply!
+Slowly--inevitably--he would lose this flower of his life!  And
+suddenly he was conscious that his hand was wet.  His heart gave a
+little painful jump.  He couldn't bear her to cry.  He put his other
+hand quickly over hers, and a tear dropped on that, too.  He couldn't
+go on like this!  "Well, well," he said, "I'll think it over, and do
+what I can.  Come, come!"  If she must have it for her happiness--she
+must; he couldn't refuse to help her.  And lest she should begin to
+thank him he got out of his chair and went up to the piano-player--
+making that noise!  It ran down, as he reached it, with a faint buzz.
+That musical box of his nursery days: "The Harmonious Blacksmith,"
+"Glorious Port"--the thing had always made him miserable when his
+mother set it going on Sunday afternoons.  Here it was again--the
+same thing, only larger, more expensive, and now it played "The Wild,
+Wild Women," and "The Policeman's Holiday," and he was no longer in
+black velvet with a sky blue collar.  'Profond's right,' he thought,
+'there's nothing in it!  We're all progressing to the grave!'  And
+with that surprising mental comment he walked out.
+
+He did not see Fleur again that night.  But, at breakfast, her eyes
+followed him about with an appeal he could not escape--not that he
+intended to try.  No!  He had made up his mind to the nerve-racking
+business.  He would go to Robin Hill--to that house of memories.
+Pleasant memory--the last!  Of going down to keep that boy's father
+and Irene apart by threatening divorce.  He had often thought, since,
+that it had clinched their union.  And, now, he was going to clinch
+the union of that boy with his girl.  'I don't know what I've done,'
+he thought, 'to have such things thrust on me!'  He went up by train
+and down by train, and from the station walked by the long rising
+lane, still very much as he remembered it over thirty years ago.
+Funny--so near London!  Some one evidently was holding on to the land
+there.  This speculation soothed him, moving between the high hedges
+slowly, so as not to get overheated, though the day was chill enough.
+After all was said and done there was something real about land, it
+didn't shift.  Land, and good pictures!  The values might fluctuate a
+bit, but on the whole they were always going up--worth holding on to,
+in a world where there was such a lot of unreality, cheap building,
+changing fashions, such a "Here to-day and gone to-morrow" spirit.
+The French were right, perhaps, with their peasant proprietorship,
+though he had no opinion of the French.  One's bit of land!
+Something solid in it!  He had heard peasant proprietors described as
+a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont call his father a pigheaded
+Morning Poster--disrespectful young devil.  Well, there were worse
+things than being pig-headed or reading the Morning Post.  There was
+Profond and his tribe, and all these Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed
+politicians and 'wild, wild women'!  A lot of worse things!  And
+suddenly Soames became conscious of feeling weak, and hot, and shaky.
+Sheer nerves at the meeting before him!  As Aunt Juley might have
+said--quoting "Superior Dosset"--his nerves were "in a proper
+fautigue."  He could see the house now among its trees, the house he
+had watched being built, intending it for himself and this woman,
+who, by such strange fate, had lived in it with another after all!
+He began to think of Dumetrius, Local Loans, and other forms of
+investment.  He could not afford to meet her with his nerves all
+shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgment for her on earth as
+it was in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified, meeting lawless
+beauty, incarnate.  His dignity demanded impassivity during this
+embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she had behaved
+herself, would have been brother and sister.  That wretched tune,
+"The Wild, Wild Women," kept running in his head, perversely, for
+tunes did not run there as a rule.  Passing the poplars in front of
+the house, he thought: 'How they've grown; I had them planted!'
+A maid answered his ring.
+
+"Will you say--Mr. Forsyte, on a very special matter."
+
+If she realised who he was, quite probably she would not see him.
+'By George!' he thought, hardening as the tug came.  'It's a topsy-
+turvy affair!'
+
+The maid came back.  "Would the gentleman state his business,
+please?"
+
+"Say it concerns Mr. Jon," said Soames.
+
+And once more he was alone in that hall with the pool of grey-white
+marble designed by her first lover.  Ah! she had been a bad lot--had
+loved two men, and not himself!  He must remember that when he came
+face to face with her once more.  And suddenly he saw her in the
+opening chink between the long heavy purple curtains, swaying, as if
+in hesitation; the old perfect poise and line, the old startled dark-
+eyed gravity, the old calm defensive voice: "Will you come in,
+please?"
+
+He passed through that opening.  As in the picture-gallery and the
+confectioner's shop, she seemed to him still beautiful.  And this was
+the first time--the very first--since he married her seven-and-thirty
+years ago, that he was speaking to her without the legal right to
+call her his.  She was not wearing black--one of that fellow's
+radical notions, he supposed.
+
+"I apologise for coming," he said glumly; "but this business must be
+settled one way or the other."
+
+"Won't you sit down?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+Anger at his false position, impatience of ceremony between them,
+mastered him, and words came tumbling out:
+
+"It's an infernal mischance; I've done my best to discourage it.  I
+consider my daughter crazy, but I've got into the habit of indulging
+her; that's why I'm here.  I suppose you're fond of your son."
+
+"Devotedly."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"It rests with him."
+
+He had a sense of being met and baffled.  Always--always she had
+baffled him, even in those old first married days.
+
+"It's a mad notion," he said.
+
+"It is."
+
+"If you had only--!  Well--they might have been--" he did not finish
+that sentence "brother and sister and all this saved," but he saw her
+shudder as if he had, and stung by the sight he crossed over to the
+window.  Out there the trees had not grown--they couldn't, they were
+old
+
+"So far as I'm concerned," he said, "you may make your mind easy.  I
+desire to see neither you nor your son if this marriage comes about.
+Young people in these days are--are unaccountable.  But I can't bear
+to see my daughter unhappy.  What am I to say to her when I go back?"
+
+"Please say to her as I said to you, that it rests with Jon."
+
+"You don't oppose it?"
+
+"With all my heart; not with my lips."
+
+Soames stood, biting his finger.
+
+"I remember an evening--" he said suddenly; and was silent.  What was
+there--what was there in this woman that would not fit into the four
+corners of his hate or condemnation?  "Where is he--your son?"
+
+"Up in his father's studio, I think."
+
+"Perhaps you'd have him down."
+
+He watched her ring the bell, he watched the maid come in.
+
+"Please tell Mr. Jon that I want him."
+
+"If it rests with him," said Soames hurriedly, when the maid was
+gone, "I suppose I may take it for granted that this unnatural
+marriage will take place; in that case there'll be formalities.  Whom
+do I deal with--Herring's?"
+
+Irene nodded.
+
+"You don't propose to live with them?"
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+"What happens to this house?"
+
+"It will be as Jon wishes."
+
+"This house," said Soames suddenly: "I had hopes when I began it.  If
+they live in it--their children!  They say there's such a thing as
+Nemesis.  Do you believe in it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! You do!"
+
+He had come back from the window, and was standing close to her, who,
+in the curve of her grand piano, was, as it were, embayed.
+
+"I'm not likely to see you again," he said slowly.  "Will you shake
+hands"--his lip quivered, the words came out jerkily--"and let the
+past die."  He held out his hand.  Her pale face grew paler, her eyes
+so dark, rested immovably on his, her hands remained clasped in front
+of her.  He heard a sound and turned.  That boy was standing in the
+opening of the curtains.  Very queer he looked, hardly recognisable
+as the young fellow he had seen in the Gallery off Cork Street--very
+queer; much older, no youth in the face at all--haggard, rigid, his
+hair ruffled, his eyes deep in his head.  Soames made an effort, and
+said with a lift of his lip, not quite a smile nor quite a sneer:
+
+"Well, young man!  I'm here for my daughter; it rests with you, it
+seems--this matter.  Your mother leaves it in your hands."
+
+The boy continued staring at his mother's face, and made no answer.
+
+"For my daughter's sake I've brought myself to come," said Soames.
+"What am I to say to her when I go back?"
+
+Still looking at his mother, the boy said, quietly:
+
+"Tell Fleur that it's no good, please; I must do as my father wished
+before he died."
+
+"Jon!"
+
+"It's all right, Mother."
+
+In a kind of stupefaction Soames looked from one to the other; then,
+taking up hat and umbrella which he had put down on a chair, he
+walked toward the curtains.  The boy stood aside for him to go by.
+He passed through and heard the grate of the rings as the curtains
+were drawn behind him.  The sound liberated something in his chest.
+
+'So that's that!'  he thought, and passed out of the front door.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE DARK TUNE
+
+
+As Soames walked away from the house at Robin Hill the sun broke
+through the grey of that chill afternoon, in smoky radiance.  So
+absorbed in landscape painting that he seldom looked seriously for
+effects of Nature out of doors--he was struck by that moody
+effulgence--it mourned with a triumph suited to his own feeling.
+Victory in defeat.  His embassy had come to naught.  But he was rid
+of those people, had regained his daughter at the expense of--her
+happiness.  What would Fleur say to him?  Would she believe he had
+done his best?  And under that sunlight faring on the elms, hazels,
+hollies of the lane and those unexploited fields, Soames felt dread.
+She would be terribly upset!  He must appeal to her pride.  That boy
+had given her up, declared part and lot with the woman who so long
+ago had given her father up!  Soames clenched his hands.  Given him
+up, and why?  What had been wrong with him?  And once more he felt
+the malaise of one who contemplates himself as seen by another--like
+a dog who chances on his refection in a mirror and is intrigued and
+anxious at the unseizable thing.
+
+Not in a hurry to get home, he dined in town at the Connoisseurs.
+While eating a pear it suddenly occurred to him that, if he had not
+gone down to Robin Hill, the boy might not have so decided.  He
+remembered the expression on his face while his mother was refusing
+the hand he had held out.  A strange, an awkward thought!  Had Fleur
+cooked her own goose by trying to make too sure?
+
+He reached home at half-past nine.  While the car was passing in at
+one drive gate he heard the grinding sputter of a motor-cycle passing
+out by the other.  Young Mont, no doubt, so Fleur had not been
+lonely.  But he went in with a sinking heart.  In the cream-panelled
+drawing-room she was sitting with her elbows on her knees, and her
+chin on her clasped hands, in front of a white camellia plant which
+filled the fireplace.  That glance at her before she saw him renewed
+his dread.  What was she seeing among those white camellias?
+
+"Well, Father!"
+
+Soames shook his head.  His tongue failed him.  This was murderous
+work!  He saw her eyes dilate, her lips quivering.
+
+"What?  What?  Quick, Father!"
+
+"My dear," said Soames, "I--I did my best, but--" And again he shook
+his head.
+
+Fleur ran to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
+
+"She?"
+
+"No," muttered Soames; "he. I was to tell you that it was no use; he
+must do what his father wished before he died."  He caught her by the
+waist.  "Come, child, don't let them hurt you.  They're not worth
+your little finger."
+
+Fleur tore herself from his grasp.
+
+"You didn't you--couldn't have tried.  You--you betrayed me, Father!"
+
+Bitterly wounded, Soames gazed at her passionate figure writhing
+there in front of him.
+
+"You didn't try--you didn't--I was a fool!  Iwon't believe he could--
+he ever could!  Only yesterday he--!  Oh! why did I ask you?"
+
+"Yes," said Soames, quietly, "why did you?  I swallowed my feelings;
+I did my best for you, against my judgment--and this is my reward.
+Good-night!"
+
+With every nerve in his body twitching he went toward the door.
+
+Fleur darted after him.
+
+"He gives me up?  You mean that?  Father!"
+
+Soames turned and forced himself to answer:
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh!" cried Fleur.  "What did you--what could you have done in those
+old days?"
+
+The breathless sense of really monstrous injustice cut the power of
+speech in Soames' throat.  What had he done!  What had they done to
+him!
+
+And with quite unconscious dignity he put his hand on his breast, and
+looked at her.
+
+"It's a shame!" cried Fleur passionately.
+
+Soames went out.  He mounted, slow and icy, to his picture gallery,
+and paced among his treasures.  Outrageous!  Oh!  Outrageous!  She
+was spoiled!  Ah! and who had spoiled her?  He stood still before the
+Goya copy.  Accustomed to her own way in everything.  Flower of his
+life!  And now that she couldn't have it!  He turned to the window
+for some air.  Daylight was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the
+poplars!  What sound was that?  Why!  That piano thing!  A dark tune,
+with a thrum and a throb!  She had set it going--what comfort could
+she get from that?  His eyes caught movement down there beyond the
+lawn, under the trellis of rambler roses and young acacia-trees,
+where the moonlight fell.  There she was, roaming up and down.  His
+heart gave a little sickening jump.  What would she do under this
+blow?  How could he tell?  What did he know of her--he had only loved
+her all his life--looked on her as the apple of his eye!  He knew
+nothing--had no notion.  There she was--and that dark tune--and the
+river gleaming in the moonlight!
+
+'I must go out,' he thought.
+
+He hastened down to the drawing-room, lighted just as he had left it,
+with the piano thrumming out that waltz, or fox-trot, or whatever
+they called it in these days, and passed through on to the verandah.
+
+Where could he watch, without her seeing him?  And he stole down
+through the fruit garden to the boat-house.  He was between her and
+the river now, and his heart felt lighter.  She was his daughter, and
+Annette's--she wouldn't do anything foolish; but there it was--he
+didn't know!  From the boat house window he could see the last acacia
+and the spin of her skirt when she turned in her restless march.
+That tune had run down at last--thank goodness!  He crossed the floor
+and looked through the farther window at the water slow-flowing past
+the lilies.  It made little bubbles against them, bright where a
+moon-streak fell.  He remembered suddenly that early morning when he
+had slept on the house-boat after his father died, and she had just
+been born--nearly nineteen years ago!  Even now he recalled the
+unaccustomed world when he woke up, the strange feeling it had given
+him.  That day the second passion of his life began--for this girl of
+his, roaming under the acacias.  What a comfort she had been to him!
+And all the soreness and sense of outrage left him.  If he could make
+her happy again, he didn't care!  An owl flew, queeking, queeking; a
+bat flitted by; the moonlight brightened and broadened on the water.
+How long was she going to roam about like this!  He went back to the
+window, and suddenly saw her coming down to the bank.  She stood
+quite close, on the landing-stage.  And Soames watched, clenching his
+hands.  Should he speak to her?  His excitement was intense.  The
+stillness of her figure, its youth, its absorption in despair, in
+longing, in--itself.  He would always remember it, moonlit like that;
+and the faint sweet reek of the river and the shivering of the willow
+leaves.  She had everything in the world that he could give her,
+except the one thing that she could not have because of him!  The
+perversity of things hurt him at that moment, as might a fish-bone in
+his throat.
+
+Then, with an infinite relief, he saw her turn back toward the house.
+What could he give her to make amends?  Pearls, travel, horses, other
+young men--anything she wanted--that he might lose the memory of her
+young figure lonely by the water!  There!  She had set that tune
+going again!  Why--it was a mania!  Dark, thrumming, faint,
+travelling from the house.  It was as though she had said: "If I
+can't have something to keep me going, I shall die of this!"  Soames
+dimly understood.  Well, if it helped her, let her keep it thrumming
+on all night!  And, mousing back through the fruit garden, he
+regained the verandah.  Though he meant to go in and speak to her
+now, he still hesitated, not knowing what to say, trying hard to
+recall how it felt to be thwarted in love.  He ought to know, ought
+to remember--and he could not!  Gone--all real recollection; except
+that it had hurt him horribly.  In this blankness he stood passing
+his handkerchief over hands and lips, which were very dry.  By
+craning his head he could just see Fleur, standing with her back to
+that piano still grinding out its tune, her arms tight crossed on her
+breast, a lighted cigarette between her lips, whose smoke half veiled
+her face.  The expression on it was strange to Soames, the eyes shone
+and stared, and every feature was alive with a sort of wretched scorn
+and anger.  Once or twice he had seen Annette look like that--the
+face was too vivid, too naked, not his daughter's at that moment.
+And he dared not go in, realising the futility of any attempt at
+consolation.  He sat down in the shadow of the ingle-nook.
+
+Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him!  Nemesis!  That old
+unhappy marriage!  And in God's name-why?  How was he to know, when
+he wanted Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that she
+would never love him?  The tune died and was renewed, and died again,
+and still Soames sat in the shadow, waiting for he knew not what.
+The fag of Fleur's cigarette, flung through the window, fell on the
+grass; he watched it glowing, burning itself out.  The moon had freed
+herself above the poplars, and poured her unreality on the garden.
+Comfortless light, mysterious, withdrawn--like the beauty of that
+woman who had never loved him--dappling the nemesias and the stocks
+with a vesture not of earth.  Flowers!  And his flower so unhappy!
+Ah!  Why could one not put happiness into Local Loans, gild its
+edges, insure it against going down?
+
+Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window.  All
+was silent and dark in there.  Had she gone up?  He rose, and,
+tiptoeing, peered in.  It seemed so!  He entered.  The verandah kept
+the moonlight out; and at first he could see nothing but the outlines
+of furniture blacker than the darkness.  He groped toward the farther
+window to shut it.  His foot struck a chair, and he heard a gasp.
+There she was, curled and crushed into the corner of the sofa!  His
+hand hovered.  Did she want his consolation?  He stood, gazing at
+that ball of crushed frills and hair and graceful youth, trying to
+burrow its way out of sorrow.  How leave her there?  At last he
+touched her hair, and said:
+
+"Come, darling, better go to bed.  I'll make it up to you, somehow."
+How fatuous!  But what could he have said?
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER THE OAK-TREE
+
+
+When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood without
+speaking, till he said suddenly:
+
+"I ought to have seen him out."
+
+But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went upstairs
+to his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.
+
+The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had once
+been married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever
+since she left him the night before.  It had put the finishing touch
+of reality.  To marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face;
+to betray his dead father!  It was no good!  Jon had the least
+resentful of natures.  He bore his parents no grudge in this hour of
+his distress.  For one so young there was a rather strange power in
+him of seeing things in some sort of proportion.  It was worse for
+Fleur, worse for his mother even, than it was for him.  Harder than
+to give up was to be given up, or to be the cause of some one you
+loved giving up for you.  He must not, would not behave grudgingly!
+While he stood watching the tardy sunlight, he had again that sudden
+vision of the world which had come to him the night before.  Sea on
+sea, country on country, millions on millions of people, all with
+their own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering--all with
+things they had to give up, and separate struggles for existence.
+Even though he might be willing to give up all else for the one thing
+he couldn't have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered
+much in so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad.  He
+pictured the people who had nothing--the millions who had given up
+life in the War, the millions whom the War had left with life and
+little else; the hungry children he had read of, the shattered men;
+people in prison, every kind of unfortunate.  And--they did not help
+him much.  If one had to miss a meal, what comfort in the knowledge
+that many others had to miss it too?  There was more distraction in
+the thought of getting away out into this vast world of which he knew
+nothing yet.  He could not go on staying here, walled in and
+sheltered, with everything so slick and comfortable, and nothing to
+do but brood and think what might have been. He could not go back to
+Wansdon, and the memories of Fleur.  If he saw her again he could not
+trust himself; and if he stayed here or went back there, he would
+surely see her.  While they were within reach of each other that must
+happen.  To go far away and quickly was the only thing to do.  But,
+however much he loved his mother, he did not want to go away with
+her.  Then feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind desperately
+to propose that they should go to Italy.  For two hours in that
+melancholy room he tried to master himself, then dressed solemnly for
+dinner.
+
+His mother had done the same.  They ate little, at some length, and
+talked of his father's catalogue.  The show was arranged for October,
+and beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.
+
+After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a little,
+talked a little, till they were standing silent at last beneath the
+oak-tree.  Ruled by the thought: 'If I show anything, I show all,'
+Jon put his arm through hers and said quite casually:
+
+"Mother, let's go to Italy."
+
+Irene pressed his arm, and said as casually:
+
+"It would be very nice; but I've been thinking you ought to see and
+do more than you would if I were with you."
+
+"But then you'd be alone."
+
+"I was once alone for more than twelve years.  Besides, I should like
+to be here for the opening of Father's show."
+
+Jon's grip tightened round her arm; he was not deceived.
+
+"You couldn't stay here all by yourself; it's too big."
+
+"Not here, perhaps.  In London, and I might go to Paris, after the
+show opens.  You ought to have a year at least, Jon, and see the
+world."
+
+"Yes, I'd like to see the world and rough it.  But I don't want to
+leave you all alone."
+
+"My dear, I owe you that at least.  If it's for your good, it'll be
+for mine.  Why not start tomorrow?  You've got your passport."
+
+"Yes; if I'm going it had better be at once.  Only--Mother--if--if I
+wanted to stay out somewhere--America or anywhere, would you mind
+coming presently?"
+
+"Wherever and whenever you send for me.  But don't send until you
+really want me."
+
+Jon drew a deep breath.
+
+"I feel England's choky."
+
+They stood a few minutes longer under the oak-tree--looking out to
+where the grand stand at Epsom was veiled in evening.  The branches
+kept the moonlight from them, so that it only fell everywhere else--
+over the fields and far away, and on the windows of the creepered
+house behind, which soon would be to let.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+FLEUR'S WEDDING
+
+
+The October paragraphs describing the wedding of Fleur Forsyte to
+Michael Mont hardly conveyed the symbolic significance of this event.
+In the union of the great-granddaughter of "Superior Dosset" with the
+heir of a ninth baronet was the outward and visible sign of that
+merger of class in class which buttresses the political stability of
+a realm.  The time had come when the Forsytes might resign their
+natural resentment against a "flummery" not theirs by birth, and
+accept it as the still more natural due of their possessive
+instincts.  Besides, they had to mount to make room for all those so
+much more newly rich.  In that quiet but tasteful ceremony in Hanover
+Square, and afterward among the furniture in Green Street, it had
+been impossible for those not in the know to distinguish the Forsyte
+troop from the Mont contingent--so far away was "Superior Dosset"
+now.  Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his
+moustache, his accent, or the shine on his top-hat, a pin to choose
+between Soames and the ninth baronet himself?  Was not Fleur as self-
+possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the likeliest
+Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present?  If anything, the Forsytes
+had it in dress and looks and manners.  They had become "upper class"
+and now their name would be formally recorded in the Stud Book, their
+money joined to land.  Whether this was a little late in the day, and
+those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money, destined
+for the melting-pot--was still a question so moot that it was not
+mooted.  After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up.  Timothy,
+the last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater
+Road--so Francie had reported.  It was whispered, too, that this
+young Mont was a sort of socialist--strangely wise of him, and in the
+nature of insurance, considering the days they lived in.  There was
+no uneasiness on that score.  The landed classes produced that sort
+of amiable foolishness at times, turned to safe uses and confined to
+theory.  As George remarked to his sister Francie: "They'll soon be
+having puppies--that'll give him pause."
+
+The church with white flowers and something blue in the middle of the
+East window looked extremely chaste, as though endeavouring to
+counteract the somewhat lurid phraseology of a Service calculated to
+keep the thoughts of all on puppies.  Forsytes, Haymans, Tweetymans,
+sat in the left aisle; Monts, Charwells; Muskhams in the right; while
+a sprinkling of Fleur's fellow-sufferers at school, and of Mont's
+fellow-sufferers in, the War, gaped indiscriminately from either
+side, and three maiden ladies, who had dropped in on their way from
+Skyward's brought up the rear, together with two Mont retainers and
+Fleur's old nurse.  In the unsettled state of the country as full a
+house as could be expected.
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed
+his hand more than once during the performance.  To her, who knew the
+plot of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh
+painful.  'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought--Jon, out
+in British Columbia.  She had received a letter from him only that
+morning which had made her smile and say:
+
+"Jon's in British Columbia, Val, because he wants to be in
+California.  He thinks it's too nice there."
+
+"Oh!" said Val, "so he's beginning to see a joke again."
+
+"He's bought some land and sent for his mother."
+
+"What on earth will she do out there?"
+
+"All she cares about is Jon.  Do you still think it a happy release?"
+
+Val's shrewd eyes narrowed to grey pin-points between their dark
+lashes.
+
+"Fleur wouldn't have suited him a bit.  She's not bred right."
+
+"Poor little Fleur!" sighed Holly.  Ah! it was strange--this
+marriage.  The young man, Mont, had caught her on the rebound, of
+course, in the reckless mood of one whose ship has just gone down.
+Such a plunge could not but be--as Val put it--an outside chance.
+There was little to be told from the back view of her young cousin's
+veil, and Holly's eyes reviewed the general aspect of this Christian
+wedding.  She, who had made a love-match which had been successful,
+had a horror of unhappy marriages.  This might not be one in the end-
+-but it was clearly a toss-up; and to consecrate a toss-up in this
+fashion with manufactured unction before a crowd of fashionable free-
+thinkers--for who thought otherwise than freely, or not at all, when
+they were "dolled" up--seemed to her as near a sin as one could find
+in an age which had abolished them.  Her eyes wandered from the
+prelate in his robes (a Charwell-the Forsytes had not as yet produced
+a prelate) to Val, beside her, thinking--she was certain--of the
+Mayfly filly at fifteen to one for the Cambridgeshire.  They passed
+on and caught the profile of the ninth baronet, in counterfeitment of
+the kneeling process.  She could just see the neat ruck above his
+knees where he had pulled his trousers up, and thought: 'Val's
+forgotten to pull up his!'  Her eyes passed to the pew in front of
+her, where Winifred's substantial form was gowned with passion, and
+on again to Soames and Annette kneeling side by side.  A little smile
+came on her lips--Prosper Profond, back from the South Seas of the
+Channel, would be kneeling too, about six rows behind.  Yes!  This
+was a funny "small" business, however it turned out; still it was in
+a proper church and would be in the proper papers to-morrow morning.
+
+They had begun a hymn; she could hear the ninth baronet across the
+aisle, singing of the hosts of Midian.  Her little finger touched
+Val's thumb--they were holding the same hymn-book--and a tiny thrill
+passed through her, preserved--from twenty years ago.  He stooped and
+whispered:
+
+"I say, d'you remember the rat?"  The rat at their wedding in Cape
+Colony, which had cleaned its whiskers behind the table at the
+Registrar's!  And between her little and third forgers she squeezed
+his thumb hard.
+
+The hymn was over, the prelate had begun to deliver his discourse.
+He told them of the dangerous times they lived in, and the awful
+conduct of the House of Lords in connection with divorce.  They were
+all soldiers--he said--in the trenches under the poisonous gas of the
+Prince of Darkness, and must be manful.  The purpose of marriage was
+children, not mere sinful happiness.
+
+An imp danced in Holly's eyes--Val's eyelashes were meeting.
+Whatever happened; he must not snore.  Her finger and thumb closed on
+his thigh till he stirred uneasily.
+
+The discourse was over, the danger past.  They were signing in the
+vestry; and general relaxation had set in.
+
+A voice behind her said:
+
+"Will she stay the course?"
+
+"Who's that?" she whispered.
+
+"Old George Forsyte!"
+
+Holly demurely scrutinized one of whom she had often heard.  Fresh
+from South Africa, and ignorant of her kith and kin, she never saw
+one without an almost childish curiosity.  He was very big, and very
+dapper; his eyes gave her a funny feeling of having no particular
+clothes.
+
+"They're off!" she heard him say.
+
+They came, stepping from the chancel.  Holly looked first in young
+Mont's face.  His lips and ears were twitching, his eyes, shifting
+from his feet to the hand within his arm, stared suddenly before them
+as if to face a firing party.  He gave Holly the feeling that he was
+spiritually intoxicated.  But Fleur!  Ah!  That was different.  The
+girl was perfectly composed, prettier than ever, in her white robes
+and veil over her banged dark chestnut hair; her eyelids hovered
+demure over her dark hazel eyes.  Outwardly, she seemed all there.
+But inwardly, where was she?  As those two passed, Fleur raised her
+eyelids--the restless glint of those clear whites remained on Holly's
+vision as might the flutter of caged bird's wings.
+
+In Green Street Winifred stood to receive, just a little less
+composed than usual.  Soames' request for the use of her house had
+come on her at a deeply psychological moment.  Under the influence of
+a remark of Prosper Profond, she had begun to exchange her Empire for
+Expressionistic furniture.  There were the most amusing arrangements,
+with violet, green, and orange blobs and scriggles, to be had at
+Mealard's.  Another month and the change would have been complete.
+Just now, the very "intriguing" recruits she had enlisted, did not
+march too well with the old guard.  It was as if her regiment were
+half in khaki, half in scarlet and bearskins.  But her strong and
+comfortable character made the best of it in a drawing-room which
+typified, perhaps, more perfectly than she imagined, the semi-
+bolshevized imperialism of her country.  After all, this was a day of
+merger, and you couldn't have too much of it!  Her eyes travelled
+indulgently among her guests.  Soames had gripped the back of a buhl
+chair; young Mont was behind that "awfully amusing" screen, which no
+one as yet had been able to explain to her.  The ninth baronet had
+shied violently at a round scarlet table, inlaid under glass with
+blue Australian butteries' wings, and was clinging to her Louis-
+Quinze cabinet; Francie Forsyte had seized the new mantel-board,
+finely carved with little purple grotesques on an ebony ground;
+George, over by the old spinet, was holding a little sky-blue book as
+if about to enter bets; Prosper Profond was twiddling the knob of the
+open door, black with peacock-blue panels; and Annette's hands, close
+by, were grasping her own waist; two Muskhams clung to the balcony
+among the plants, as if feeling ill; Lady Mont, thin and brave-
+looking, had taken up her long-handled glasses and was gazing at the
+central light shade, of ivory and orange dashed with deep magenta, as
+if the heavens had opened.  Everybody, in fact, seemed holding on to
+something.  Only Fleur, still in her bridal dress, was detached from
+all support, flinging her words and glances to left and right.
+
+The room was full of the bubble and the squeak of conversation.
+Nobody could hear anything that anybody said; which seemed of little
+consequence, since no one waited for anything so slow as an answer.
+Modern conversation seemed to Winifred so different from the days of
+her prime, when a drawl was all the vogue.  Still it was "amusing,"
+which, of course, was all that mattered.  Even the Forsytes were
+talking with extreme rapidity--Fleur and Christopher, and Imogen, and
+young Nicholas's youngest, Patrick.  Soames, of course, was silent;
+but George, by the spinet, kept up a running commentary, and Francie,
+by her mantel-shelf.  Winifred drew nearer to the ninth baronet.  He
+seemed to promise a certain repose; his nose was fine and drooped a
+little, his grey moustaches too; and she said, drawling through her
+smile:
+
+"It's rather nice, isn't it?"
+
+His reply shot out of his smile like a snipped bread pellet
+
+"D'you remember, in Frazer, the tribe that buries the bride up to the
+waist?"
+
+He spoke as fast as anybody!  He had dark lively little eyes, too,
+all crinkled round like a Catholic priest's.  Winifred felt suddenly
+he might say things she would regret.
+
+"They're always so amusing--weddings," she murmured, and moved on to
+Soames.  He was curiously still, and Winifred saw at once what was
+dictating his immobility.  To his right was George Forsyte, to his
+left Annette and Prosper Profond.  He could not move without either
+seeing those two together, or the reflection of them in George
+Forsyte's japing eyes.  He was quite right not to be taking notice.
+
+"They say Timothy's sinking;" he said glumly.
+
+"Where will you put him, Soames?"
+
+"Highgate."  He counted on his fingers.  "It'll make twelve of them
+there, including wives.  How do you think Fleur looks?"
+
+"Remarkably well."
+
+Soames nodded.  He had never seen her look prettier, yet he could not
+rid himself of the impression that this business was unnatural--
+remembering still that crushed figure burrowing into the corner of
+the sofa.  From that night to this day he had received from her no
+confidences.  He knew from his chauffeur that she had made one more
+attempt on Robin Hill and drawn blank--an empty house, no one at
+home.  He knew that she had received a letter, but not what was in
+it, except that it had made her hide herself and cry.  He had
+remarked that she looked at him sometimes when she thought he wasn't
+noticing, as if she were wondering still what he had done--forsooth--
+to make those people hate him so.  Well, there it was!  Annette had
+come back, and things had worn on through the summer--very miserable,
+till suddenly Fleur had said she was going to marry young Mont.  She
+had shown him a little more affection when she told him that.  And he
+had yielded--what was the good of opposing it?  God knew that he had
+never wished to thwart her in anything!  And the young man seemed
+quite delirious about her.  No doubt she was in a reckless mood, and
+she was young, absurdly young.  But if he opposed her, he didn't know
+what she would do; for all he could tell she might want to take up a
+profession, become a doctor or solicitor, some nonsense.  She had no
+aptitude for painting, writing, music, in his view the legitimate
+occupations of unmarried women, if they must do something in these
+days.  On the whole, she was safer married, for he could see too well
+how feverish and restless she was at home.  Annette, too, had been in
+favour of it--Annette, from behind the veil of his refusal to know
+what she was about, if she was about anything.  Annette had said:
+"Let her marry this young man. He is a nice boy--not so highty-
+flighty as he seems."  Where she got her expressions, he didn't know-
+-but her opinion soothed his doubts.  His wife, whatever her conduct,
+had clear eyes and an almost depressing amount of common sense.  He
+had settled fifty thousand on Fleur, taking care that there was no
+cross settlement in case it didn't turn out well.  Could it turn out
+well?  She had not got over that other boy--he knew.  They were to go
+to Spain for the honeymoon.  He would be even lonelier when she was
+gone.  But later, perhaps, she would forget, and turn to him again!
+Winifred's voice broke on his reverie.
+
+"Why!  Of all wonders-June!"
+
+There, in a djibbah--what things she wore!--with her hair straying
+from under a fillet, Soames saw his cousin, and Fleur going forward
+to greet her.  The two passed from their view out on to the stairway.
+
+"Really," said Winifred, "she does the most impossible things!  Fancy
+her coming!"
+
+"What made you ask her?" muttered Soames.
+
+"Because I thought she wouldn't accept, of course."
+
+Winifred had forgotten that behind conduct lies the main trend of
+character; or, in other words, omitted to remember that Fleur was now
+a "lame duck."
+
+On receiving her invitation, June had first thought, 'I wouldn't go
+near them for the world!' and then, one morning, had awakened from a
+dream of Fleur waving to her from a boat with a wild unhappy gesture.
+And she had changed her mind.
+
+When Fleur came forward and said to her, "Do come up while I'm
+changing my dress," she had followed up the stairs.  The girl led the
+way into Imogen's old bedroom, set ready for her toilet.
+
+June sat down on the bed, thin and upright, like a little spirit in
+the sear and yellow.  Fleur locked the door.
+
+The girl stood before her divested of her wedding dress.  What a
+pretty thing she was
+
+"I suppose you think me a fool," she said, with quivering lips, "when
+it was to have been Jon.  But what does it matter?  Michael wants me,
+and I don't care.  It'll get me away from home."  Diving her hand
+into the frills on her breast, she brought out a letter.  "Jon wrote
+me this."
+
+June read:  "Lake Okanagen, British Columbia.  I'm not coming back to
+England.  Bless you always.  Jon."
+
+"She's made safe, you see," said Fleur.
+
+June handed back the letter.
+
+"That's not fair to Irene," she said, "she always told Jon he could
+do as he wished."
+
+Fleur smiled bitterly.  "Tell me, didn't she spoil your life too?"
+June looked up.  "Nobody can spoil a life, my dear.  That's nonsense.
+Things happen, but we bob up."
+
+With a sort of terror she saw the girl sink on her knees and bury her
+face in the djibbah.  A strangled sob mounted to June's ears.
+
+"It's all right--all right," she murmured, "Don't!  There, there!"
+
+But the point of the girl's chin was pressed ever closer into her
+thigh, and the sound was dreadful of her sobbing.
+
+Well, well!  It had to come.  She would feel better afterward!  June
+stroked the short hair of that shapely head; and all the scattered
+mother-sense in her focussed itself and passed through the tips of
+her fingers into the girl's brain.
+
+"Don't sit down under it, my dear," she said at last.  "We can't
+control life, but we can fight it.  Make the best of things.  I've
+had to.  I held on, like you; and I cried, as you're crying now.  And
+look at me!"
+
+Fleur raised her head; a sob merged suddenly into a little choked
+laugh.  In truth it was a thin and rather wild and wasted spirit she
+was looking at, but it had brave eyes.
+
+"All right!" she said.  "I'm sorry.  I shall forget him, I suppose,
+if I fly fast and far enough."
+
+And, scrambling to her feet, she went over to the wash-stand.
+
+June watched her removing with cold water the traces of emotion.
+Save for a little becoming pinkness there was nothing left when she
+stood before the mirror.  June got off the bed and took a pin-cushion
+in her hand.  To put two pins into the wrong places was all the vent
+she found for sympathy.
+
+"Give me a kiss," she said when Fleur was ready, and dug her chin
+into the girl's warm cheek.
+
+"I want a whiff," said Fleur; "don't wait."
+
+June left her, sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her lips
+and her eyes half closed, and went down-stairs.  In the doorway of
+the drawing-room stood Soames as if unquiet at his daughter's
+tardiness.  June tossed her head and passed down on to the half-
+landing.  Her cousin Francie was standing there.
+
+"Look!" said June, pointing with her chin at Soames.  "That man's
+fatal!"
+
+"How do you mean," said Francie, "fatal?"
+
+June did not answer her.  "I shan't wait to see them off," she said.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye!" said Francie, and her eyes, of a Celtic grey, goggled.
+That old feud!  Really, it was quite romantic!
+
+Soames, moving to the well of the staircase, saw June go, and drew a
+breath of satisfaction.  Why didn't Fleur come?  They would miss
+their train.  That train would bear her away from him, yet he could
+not help fidgeting at the thought that they would lose it.  And then
+she did come, running down in her tan-coloured frock and black velvet
+cap, and passed him into the drawing-room.  He saw her kiss her
+mother, her aunt, Val's wife, Imogen, and then come forth, quick and
+pretty as ever.  How would she treat him at this last moment of her
+girlhood?  He couldn't hope for much!
+
+Her lips pressed the middle of his cheek.
+
+"Daddy!" she said, and was past and gone!  Daddy!  She hadn't called
+him that for years.  He drew a long breath and followed slowly down.
+There was all the folly with that confetti stuff and the rest of it
+to go through with yet.  But he would like just to catch her smile,
+if she leaned out, though they would hit her in the eye with the
+shoe, if they didn't take care.  Young Mont's voice said fervently in
+his ear:
+
+"Good-bye, sir; and thank you!  I'm so fearfully bucked."
+
+"Good-bye," he said; "don't miss your train."
+
+He stood on the bottom step but three, whence he could see above the
+heads--the silly hats and heads.  They were in the car now; and there
+was that stuff, showering, and there went the shoe.  A flood of
+something welled up in Soames, and--he didn't know--he couldn't see!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
+
+When they came to prepare that terrific symbol Timothy Forsyte--the
+one pure individualist left, the only man who hadn't heard of the
+Great War--they found him wonderful--not even death had undermined
+his soundness.
+
+To Smither and Cook that preparation came like final evidence of what
+they had never believed possible--the end of the old Forsyte family
+on earth.  Poor Mr. Timothy must now take a harp and sing in the
+company of Miss Forsyte, Mrs. Julia, Miss Hester; with Mr. Jolyon,
+Mr. Swithin, Mr. James, Mr. Roger, and Mr. Nicholas of the party.
+Whether Mrs. Hayman would be there was more doubtful, seeing that she
+had been cremated.  Secretly Cook thought that Mr. Timothy would be
+upset--he had always been so set against barrel organs.  How many
+times had she not said: "Drat the thing!  There it is again!
+Smither, you'd better run up and see what you can do."  And in her
+heart she would so have enjoyed the tunes, if she hadn't known that
+Mr. Timothy would ring the bell in a minute and say: "Here, take him
+a halfpenny and tell him to move on."  Often they had been obliged to
+add threepence of their own before the man would go--Timothy had ever
+underrated the value of emotion.  Luckily he had taken the organs for
+blue-bottles in his last years, which had been a comfort, and they
+had been able to enjoy the tunes.  But a harp!  Cook wondered.  It
+was a change!  And Mr. Timothy had never liked change.  But she did
+not speak of this to Smither, who did so take a line of her own in
+regard to heaven that it quite put one about sometimes.
+
+She cried while Timothy was being prepared, and they all had sherry
+afterward out of the yearly Christmas bottle, which would not be
+needed now.  Ah! dear!  She had been there five-and-forty years and
+Smither three-and-forty!  And now they would be going to a tiny house
+in Tooting, to live on their savings and what Miss Hester had so
+kindly left them--for to take fresh service after the glorious past--
+No!  But they would like just to see Mr. Soames again, and Mrs.
+Dartie, and Miss Francie, and Miss Euphemia.  And even if they had to
+take their own cab, they felt they must go to the funeral.  For six
+years Mr. Timothy had been their baby, getting younger and younger
+every day, till at last he had been too young to live.
+
+They spent the regulation hours of waiting in polishing and dusting,
+in catching the one mouse left, and asphyxiating the last beetle so
+as to leave it nice, discussing with each other what they would buy
+at the sale.  Miss Ann's workbox; Miss Juley's (that is Mrs. Julia's)
+seaweed album; the fire-screen Miss Hester had crewelled; and Mr.
+Timothy's hair--little golden curls, glued into a black frame.  Oh!
+they must have those--only the price of things had gone up so!
+
+It fell to Soames to issue invitations for the funeral.  He had them
+drawn up by Gradman in his office--only blood relations, and no
+flowers.  Six carriages were ordered.  The Will would be read
+afterward at the house.
+
+He arrived at eleven o'clock to see that all was ready.  At a quarter
+past old Gradman came in black gloves and crape on his hat.  He and
+Soames stood in the drawing-room waiting.  At half-past eleven the
+carriages drew up in a long row.  But no one else appeared.  Gradman
+said:
+
+"It surprises me, Mr. Soames.  I posted them myself."
+
+"I don't know," said Soames; "he'd lost touch with the family."
+Soames had often noticed in old days how much more neighbourly his
+family were to the dead than to the living.  But, now, the way they
+had flocked to Fleur's wedding and abstained from Timothy's funeral,
+seemed to show some vital change.  There might, of course, be another
+reason; for Soames felt that if he had not known the contents of
+Timothy's Will, he might have stayed away himself through delicacy.
+Timothy had left a lot of money, with nobody in particular to leave
+it to.  They mightn't like to seem to expect something.
+
+At twelve o'clock the procession left the door; Timothy alone in the
+first carriage under glass.  Then Soames alone; then Gradman alone;
+then Cook and Smither together.  They started at a walk, but were
+soon trotting under a bright sky.  At the entrance to Highgate
+Cemetery they were delayed by service in the Chapel.  Soames would
+have liked to stay outside in the sunshine.  He didn't believe a word
+of it; on the other hand, it was a form of insurance which could not
+safely be neglected, in case there might be something in it after
+all.
+
+They walked up two and two--he and Gradman, Cook and Smither--to the
+family vault.  It was not very distinguished for the funeral of the
+last old Forsyte.
+
+He took Gradman into his carriage on the way back to the Bayswater
+Road with a certain glow in his heart.  He had a surprise in pickle
+for the old chap who had served the Forsytes four-and-fifty years-a
+treat that was entirely his doing.  How well he remembered saying to
+Timothy the day--after Aunt Hester's funeral: "Well; Uncle Timothy,
+there's Gradman.  He's taken a lot of trouble for the family.  What
+do you say to leaving him five thousand?" and his surprise, seeing
+the diflicuIty there had been in getting Timothy to leave anything,
+when Timothy had nodded.  And now the old chap would be as pleased as
+Punch, for Mrs. Gradman, he knew, had a weak heart, and their son had
+lost a leg in the War.  It was extraordinarily gratifying to Soames
+to have left him five thousand pounds of Timothy's money.  They sat
+down together in the little drawing-room, whose walls--like a vision
+of heaven--were sky-blue and gold with every picture-frame
+unnaturally bright, and every speck of dust removed from every piece
+of furniture, to read that little masterpiece--the Will of Timothy.
+With his back to the light in Aunt Hester's chair, Soames faced
+Gradman with his face to the light, on Aunt Ann's sofa; and, crossing
+his legs, began:
+
+"This is the last Will and Testament of me Timothy Forsyte of The
+Bower Bayswater Road, London I appoint my nephew Soames Forsyte of
+The Shelter Mapleduram and Thomas Gradman of 159 Folly Road Highgate
+(hereinafter called my Trustees) to be the trustees and executors of
+this my Will To the said Soames Forsyte I leave the sum of one
+thousand pounds free of legacy duty and to the said Thomas Gradman I
+leave the sum of five thousand pounds free of legacy duty."
+
+Soames paused.  Old Gradman was leaning forward, convulsively
+gripping a stout black knee with each of his thick hands; his mouth
+had fallen open so that the gold fillings of three teeth gleamed; his
+eyes were blinking, two tears rolled slowly out of them.  Soames read
+hastily on.
+
+"All the rest of my property of whatsoever description I bequeath to
+my Trustees upon Trust to convert and hold the same upon the
+following trusts namely To pay thereout all my debts funeral expenses
+and outgoings of any kind in connection with my Will and to hold the
+residue thereof in trust for that male lineal descendant of my father
+Jolyon Forsyte by his marriage with Ann Pierce who after the decease
+of all lineal descendants whether male or female of my said father by
+his said marriage in being at the time of my death shall last attain
+the age of twenty-one years absolutely it being my desire that my
+property shall be nursed to the extreme limit permitted by the laws
+of England for the benefit of such male lineal descendant as
+aforesaid."
+
+Soames read the investment and attestation clauses, and, ceasing,
+looked at Gradman.  The old fellow was wiping his brow with a large
+handkerchief, whose brilliant colour supplied a sudden festive tinge
+to the proceedings.
+
+"My word, Mr. Soames!" he said, and it was clear that the lawyer in
+him had utterly wiped out the man: "My word!  Why, there are two
+babies now, and some quite young children--if one of them lives to be
+eighty--it's not a great age--and add twenty-one--that's a hundred
+years; and Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound net
+if he's worth a penny.  Compound interest at five per cent. doubles
+you in fourteen years.  In fourteen years three hundred thousand-six
+hundred thousand in twenty-eight--twelve hundred thousand in forty-
+two--twenty-four hundred thousand in fifty-six--four million eight
+hundred thousand in seventy--nine million six hundred thousand in
+eighty-four--Why, in a hundred years it'll be twenty million!  And we
+shan't live to use it!  It is a Will!"
+
+Soames said dryly: "Anything may happen.  The State might take the
+lot; they're capable of anything in these days."
+
+"And carry five," said Gradman to himself.  "I forgot--Mr. Timothy's
+in Consols; we shan't get more than two per cent. with this income
+tax.  To be on the safe side, say eight millions.  Still, that's a
+pretty penny."
+
+Soames rose and handed him the Will.  "You're going into the City.
+Take care of that, and do what's necessary.  Advertise; but there are
+no debts.  When's the sale?"
+
+"Tuesday week," said Gradman.  "Life or lives in bein' and twenty-one
+years afterward--it's a long way off.  But I'm glad he's left it in
+the family...."
+
+The sale--not at Jobson's, in view of the Victorian nature of the
+effects--was far more freely attended than the funeral, though not by
+Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give them
+their heart's desires.  Winifred was present, Euphemia, and Francie,
+and Eustace had come in his car.  The miniatures, Barbizons, and J.
+R. drawings had been bought in by Soames; and relics of no marketable
+value were set aside in an off-room for members of the family who
+cared to have mementoes.  These were the only restrictions upon
+bidding characterised by an almost tragic languor.  Not one piece of
+furniture, no picture or porcelain figure appealed to modern taste.
+The humming birds had fallen like autumn leaves when taken from where
+they had not hummed for sixty years.  It was painful to Soames to see
+the chairs his aunts had sat on, the little grand piano they had
+practically never played, the books whose outsides they had gazed at,
+the china they had dusted, the curtains they had drawn, the hearth-
+rug which had warmed their feet; above all, the beds they had lain
+and died in--sold to little dealers, and the housewives of Fulham.
+And yet--what could one do?  Buy them and stick them in a lumber-
+room?  No; they had to go the way of all flesh and furniture, and be
+worn out.  But when they put up Aunt Ann's sofa and were going to
+knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out, suddenly: "Five
+pounds!"  The sensation was considerable, and the sofa his.
+
+When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those
+Victorian ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October
+sunshine feeling as if cosiness had died out of the world, and the
+board "To Let" was up, indeed.  Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in
+Spain; no comfort in Annette; no Timothy's on the Bayswater Road.  In
+the irritable desolation of his soul he went into the Goupenor
+Gallery.  That chap Jolyon's watercoIours were on view there.  He
+went in to look down his nose at them--it might give him some faint
+satisfaction.  The news had trickled through from June to Val's wife,
+from her to Val, from Val to his mother, from her to Soames, that the
+house--the fatal house at Robin Hill--was for sale, and Irene going
+to join her boy out in British Columbia, or some such place.  For one
+wild moment the thought had come to Soames: 'Why shouldn't I buy it
+back?  I meant it for my!'  No sooner come than gone.  Too lugubrious
+a triumph; with too many humiliating memories for himself and Fleur.
+She would never live there after what had happened.  No, the place
+must go its way to some peer or profiteer.  It had been a bone of
+contention from the first, the shell of the feud; and with the woman
+gone, it was an empty shell.  "For Sale or To Let."  With his mind's
+eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied wall which he
+had built.
+
+He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery.  There
+was certainly a body of work!  And now that the fellow was dead it
+did not seem so trivial.  The drawings were pleasing enough, with
+quite a sense of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush
+work.  'His father and my father; he and I; his child and mine!'
+thought Soames.  So it had gone on!  And all about that woman!
+Softened by the events of the past week, affected by the melancholy
+beauty of the autumn day, Soames came nearer than he had ever been to
+realisation of that truth--passing the understanding of a Forsyte
+pure--that the body of Beauty has a spiritual essence, uncapturable
+save by a devotion which thinks not of self.  After all, he was near
+that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps that made him
+understand a little how he had missed the prize.  And there, among
+the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that which he had
+found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance
+which surprised him.  But he did not buy a drawing.
+
+Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air
+he met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his
+mind when he went into the Gallery--Irene, herself, coming in.  So
+she had not gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that
+fellow's remains!  He subdued the little involuntary leap of his
+subconsciousness, the mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm
+of this once-owned woman, and passed her with averted eyes.  But when
+he had gone by he could not for the life of him help looking back.
+This, then, was finality--the heat and stress of his life, the
+madness and the longing thereof, the only defeat he had known, would
+be over when she faded from his view this time; even such memories
+had their own queer aching value.
+
+She, too, was looking back.  Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her
+lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak.  It was the turn
+of Soames to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell
+wave; he went out into the fashionable street quivering from head to
+foot.  He knew what she had meant to say: "Now that I am going for
+ever out of the reach of you and yours--forgive me; I wish you well."
+That was the meaning; last sign of that terrible reality--passing
+morality, duty, common sense--her aversion from him who had owned her
+body, but had never touched her spirit or her heart.  It hurt; yes--
+more than if she had kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
+
+Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-
+cab to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the
+Forsyte vault.  Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria,
+tall, ugly, and individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive
+system.  He could remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated
+the addition to its face of the pheasant proper.  The proposal had
+been rejected in favour of a wreath in stone, above the stark words:
+"The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850."  It was in good order.
+All trace of the recent interment had been removed, and its sober
+grey gloomed reposefully in the sunshine.  The whole family lay there
+now, except old Jolyon's wife, who had gone back under a contract to
+her own family vault in Suffolk; old Jolyon himself lying at Robin
+Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that none knew where she might
+be.  Soames gazed at it with satisfaction--massive, needing little
+attention; and this was important, for he was well aware that no one
+would attend to it when he himself was gone, and he would have to be
+looking out for lodgings soon.  He might have twenty years before
+him, but one never knew.  Twenty years without an aunt or uncle, with
+a wife of whom one had better not know anything, with a daughter gone
+from home.  His mood inclined to melancholy and retrospection.
+
+This cemetery was full, they said--of people with extraordinary
+names, buried in extraordinary taste.  Still, they had a fine view up
+here, right over London.  Annette had once given him a story to read
+by that Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern, where all the
+skeletons emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious
+inscriptions on the stones were altered to descriptions of their
+sins.  Not a true story at all.  He didn't know about the French, but
+there was not much real harm in English people except their teeth and
+their taste, which was certainly deplorable.  "The family vault of
+Jolyon Forsyte: 1850."  A lot of people had been buried here since
+then--a lot of English life crumbled to mould and dust!  The boom of
+an airplane passing under the gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift
+his eyes.  The deuce of a lot of expansion had gone on.  But it all
+came back to a cemetery--to a name and a date on a tomb.  And he
+thought with a curious pride that he and his family had done little
+or nothing to help this feverish expansion.  Good solid middlemen,
+they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.  "Superior
+Dosset," indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted in a
+doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them all
+had soiled his hands by creating anything--unless you counted Val
+Dartie and his horse-breeding.  Collectors, solicitors, barristers,
+merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even
+soldiers--there they had been!  The country had expanded, as it were,
+in spite of them.  They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken
+advantage of the process and when you considered how "Superior
+Dosset" had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal
+descendants already owned what old Gradman estimated at between a
+million and a million and a half, it was not so bad!  And yet he
+sometimes felt as if the family bolt was shot, their possessive
+instinct dying out.  They seemed unable to make money--this fourth
+generation; they were going into art, literature, farming, or the
+army; or just living on what was left them--they had no push and no
+tenacity.  They would die out if they didn't take care.
+
+Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze.  The air up
+here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the
+feeling that mortality was in it.  He gazed restlessly at the crosses
+and the urns, the angels, the "immortelles," the flowers, gaudy or
+withering; and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different
+from anything else up there that he was obliged to walk the few
+necessary yards and look at it.  A sober corner, with a massive
+queer-shaped cross of grey rough-hewn granite, guarded by four dark
+yew-trees.  The spot was free from the pressure of the other graves,
+having a little box-hedged garden on the far side, and in front a
+goldening birch-tree.  This oasis in the desert of conventional
+graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and he sat down
+there in the sunshine.  Through those trembling gold birch leaves he
+gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of memory.  He thought
+of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair was rusty-golden and
+her white shoulders his--Irene, the prize of his love-passion,
+resistant to his ownership.  He saw Bosinney's body lying in that
+white mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with
+the eyes of a dying bird.  Again he thought of her by the little
+green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him.  His
+fancy took him on beside his drifting river on the November day when
+Fleur was to be born, took him to the dead leaves floating on the
+green-tinged water and the snake-headed weed for ever swaying and
+nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered.  And on again to the window opened
+to the cold starry night above Hyde Park, with his father lying dead.
+His fancy darted to that picture of "the future town," to that boy's
+and Fleur's first meeting; to the bluish trail of Prosper Profond's
+cigar, and Fleur in the window pointing down to where the fellow
+prowled.  To the sight of Irene and that dead fellow sitting side by
+side in the stand at Lord's.  To her and that boy at Robin Hill.  To
+the sofa, where Fleur lay crushed up in the corner; to her lips
+pressed into his cheek, and her farewell "Daddy."  And suddenly he
+saw again Irene's grey-gloved hand waving its last gesture of
+release.
+
+He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the scut of
+his possessive instinct, warming himself even with its failures.
+
+"To Let"--the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his soul,
+his investments, and his woman, without check or question.  And now
+the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman had herself,
+and God knew who had his soul.  "To Let"--that sane and simple creed!
+
+The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new
+forms only when their destructive flood should have passed its full.
+He sat there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts resolutely
+set on the past--as a man might ride into a wild night with his face
+to the tail of his galloping horse.  Athwart the Victorian dykes the
+waters were rolling on property, manners, and morals, on melody and
+the old forms of art--waters bringing to his mouth a salt taste as of
+blood, lapping to the foot of this Highgate Hill where Victorianism
+lay buried.  And sitting there, high up on its most individual spot,
+Soames--like a figure of Investment--refused their restless sounds.
+Instinctively he would not fight them--there was in him too much
+primeval wisdom, of Man the possessive animal.  They would quiet down
+when they had fulfilled their tidal fever of dispossessing and
+destroying; when the creations and the properties of others were
+sufficiently broken and defected--they would lapse and ebb, and fresh
+forms would rise based on an instinct older than the fever of change-
+-the instinct of Home.
+
+"Je m'en fiche," said Prosper Profond.  Soames did not say "Je m'en
+fiche"--it was French, and the fellow was a thorn in his side--but
+deep down he knew that change was only the interval of death between
+two forms of life, destruction necessary to make room for fresher
+property.  What though the board was up, and cosiness to let?--some
+one would come along and take it again some day.
+
+And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there--the melancholy
+craving in his heart--because the sun was like enchantment on his
+face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's
+rustle was so gentle, and the yewtree green so dark, and the sickle
+of a moon pale in the sky.
+
+He might wish and wish and never get it--the beauty and the loving in
+the world!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Volume 3 of The Forsyte Saga,
+AWAKENING and TO LET, by John Galsworthy.
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Awakening & To Let, John Galsworthy
+#6 in our series by John Galsworthy
+#3 in our series The Forsyte Saga
+
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+Title: Awakening & To Let
+
+Author: John Galsworthy
+
+Release Date: April, 2001 [Etext #2596]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[Most recently updated: December 9, 2001]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Awakening & To Let, John Galsworthy
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE FORSYTE SAGA
+
+VOLUME III--AWAKENING and TO LET
+
+By John Galsworthy
+
+
+
+
+AWAKENING
+
+
+Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill, the
+July sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad stairway
+turned; and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte stood, blue-
+linen-suited.  His hair was shining, and his eyes, from beneath a
+frown, for he was considering how to go downstairs, this last of
+innumerable times, before the car brought his father and mother home.
+Four at a time, and five at the bottom?  Stale!  Down the banisters?
+But in which fashion?  On his face, feet foremost?  Very stale.  On
+his stomach, sideways?  Paltry!  On his back, with his arms stretched
+down on both sides?  Forbidden!  Or on his face, head foremost, in a
+manner unknown as yet to any but himself?  Such was the cause of the
+frown on the illuminated face of little Jon....
+
+In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to
+simplify the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of little
+Jon, or they would have claimed him for a disciple.  But one can be
+too simple in this life, for his real name was Jolyon, and his living
+father and dead half-brother had usurped of old the other
+shortenings, Jo and Jolly.  As a fact little Jon had done his best to
+conform to convention and spell himself first Jhon, then John; not
+till his father had explained the sheer necessity, had he spelled his
+name Jon.
+
+Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart by
+the groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse "Da," who
+wore the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of Spraggins
+in that private life lived at odd moments even by domestic servants.
+His mother had only appeared to him, as it were in dreams, smelling
+delicious, smoothing his forehead just before he fell asleep, and
+sometimes docking his hair, of a golden brown colour.  When he cut
+his head open against the nursery fender she was there to be bled
+over; and when he had nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle
+his head against her neck.  She was precious but remote, because "Da"
+was so near, and there is hardly room for more than one woman at a
+time in a man's heart.  With his father, too, of course, he had
+special bonds of union; for little Jon also meant to be a painter
+when he grew up--with the one small difference, that his father
+painted pictures, and little Jon intended to paint ceilings and
+walls, standing on a board between two step-ladders, in a dirty-white
+apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash.  His father also took him
+riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because it was
+so-coloured.
+
+Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was
+rather curly and large.  He had never heard his father or his mother
+speak in an angry voice, either to each other, himself, or anybody
+else; the groom, Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other servants, even
+"Da," who alone restrained him in his courses, had special voices
+when they talked to him.  He was therefore of opinion that the world
+was a place of perfect and perpetual gentility and freedom.
+
+A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country, just
+over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was preparing
+for the Liberal revival of 1906.  Coercion was unpopular, parents had
+exalted notions of giving their offspring a good time.  They spoiled
+their rods, spared their children, and anticipated the results with
+enthusiasm.  In choosing, moreover, for his father an amiable man of
+fifty-two, who had already lost an only son, and for his mother a
+woman of thirty-eight, whose first and only child he was, little Jon
+had done well and wisely.  What had saved him from becoming a cross
+between a lap dog and a little prig, had been his father's adoration
+of his mother, for even little Jon could see that she was not merely
+just his mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his
+father's heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet.
+As for "Auntie" June, his half-sister (but so old that she had grown
+out of the relationship) she loved him, of course, but was too
+sudden.  His devoted "Da," too, had a Spartan touch.  His bath was
+cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged to be sorry for
+himself.  As to the vexed question of his education, little Jon
+shared the theory of those who considered that children should not be
+forced.  He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came for two hours
+every morning to teach him her language, together with history,
+geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave
+him disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune,
+never making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so
+that he remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers.
+Under his father he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals.
+He was not a highly educated little boy.  Yet, on the whole, the
+silver spoon stayed in his mouth without spoiling it, though "Da"
+sometimes said that other children would do him a "world of good."
+
+It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she
+held him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which
+she did not approve.  This first interference with the free
+individualism of a Forsyte drove him almost frantic.  There was
+something appalling in the utter helplessness of that position, and
+the uncertainty as to whether it would ever come to an end.  Suppose
+she never let him get up any more!  He suffered torture at the top of
+his voice for fifty seconds.  Worse than anything was his perception
+that "Da" had taken all that time to realise the agony of fear he was
+enduring.  Thus, dreadfully, was revealed to him the lack of
+imagination in the human being.
+
+When he was let up he remained convinced that "Da" had done a
+dreadful thing.  Though he did not wish to bear witness against her,
+he had been compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and
+say: "Mum, don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again."
+
+His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits
+of hair--"couleur de feuille morte," as little Jon had not yet
+learned to call it--had looked at him with eyes like little bits of
+his brown velvet tunic, and answered:
+
+"No, darling, I won't."
+
+She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
+especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
+happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to
+his father:
+
+"Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I?  She's so devoted to
+him"; and his father's answer:
+
+"Well, she mustn't show it that way.  I know exactly what it feels
+like to be held down on one's back.  No Forsyte can stand it for a
+minute."
+
+Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little
+Jon was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed
+where he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
+
+Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence.
+Nothing much had been revealed to him after that, till one day,
+having gone down to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from
+the cow, after Garratt had finished milking, he had seen Clover's
+calf, dead.  Inconsolable, and followed by an upset Garratt, he had
+sought "Da"; but suddenly aware that she was not the person he
+wanted, had rushed away to find his father, and had run into the arms
+of his mother.
+
+"Clover's calf's dead!  Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!"
+
+His mother's clasp, and her:
+
+"Yes, darling, there, there!" had stayed his sobbing.  But if
+Clover's calf could die, anything could--not only bees, flies,
+beetles and chickens--and look soft like that!  This was appalling--
+and soon forgotten!
+
+The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant
+experience, which his mother had understood much better than "Da";
+and nothing of vital importance had happened after that till the year
+turned; when, following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a
+disease composed of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many
+Tangerine oranges.  It was then that the world had flowered.  To
+"Auntie" June he owed that flowering, for no sooner was he a little
+lame duck than she came rushing down from London, bringing with her
+the books which had nurtured her own Berserker spirit, born in the
+noted year of 1869.  Aged, and of many colours, they were stored with
+the most formidable happenings.  Of these she read to little Jon,
+till he was allowed to read to himself; whereupon she whisked back to
+London and left them with him in a heap.  Those books cooked his
+fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but midshipmen and
+dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses, sharks,
+battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
+extravagant delights.  The moment he was suffered to get up, he
+rigged his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath
+across green seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of
+its mahogany drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking
+tumbler screwed to his eye, in search of rescuing sails.  He made a
+daily raft out of the towel stand, the tea tray, and his pillows.  He
+saved the juice from his French plums, bottled it in an empty
+medicine bottle, and provisioned the raft with the rum that it
+became; also with pemmican made out of little saved-up bits of
+chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with lime juice against
+scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a little
+economised juice.  He made a North Pole one morning from the whole of
+his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark
+canoe (in private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a
+polar bear fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up in
+"Da's" nightgown.  After that, his father, seeking to steady his
+imagination, brought him Ivanboe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur,
+and Tom Brown's Schooldays.  He read the first, and for three days
+built, defended and stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every
+part in the piece except those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing
+cries of: "En avant, de Bracy!" and similar utterances.  After
+reading the book about King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir
+Lamorac de Galis, because, though there was very little about him, he
+preferred his name to that of any other knight; and he rode his old
+rocking-horse to death, armed with a long bamboo.  Bevis he found
+tame; besides, it required woods and animals, of which he had none in
+his nursery, except his two cats, Fitz and Puck Forsyte, who
+permitted no liberties.  For Tom Brown he was as yet too young.
+There was relief in the house when, after the fourth week, he was
+permitted to go down and out.
+
+The month being March the trees were exceptionally like the masts of
+ships, and for little Jon that was a wonderful Spring, extremely hard
+on his knees, suits, and the patience of "Da," who had the washing
+and reparation of his clothes.  Every morning the moment his
+breakfast was over, he could be viewed by his mother and father,
+whose windows looked out that way, coming from the study, crossing
+the terrace, climbing the old oak tree, his face resolute and his
+hair bright.  He began the day thus because there was not time to go
+far afield before his lessons.  The old tree's variety never staled;
+it had mainmast, foremast, top-gallant mast, and he could always come
+down by the halyards--or ropes of the swing.  After his lessons,
+completed by eleven, he would go to the kitchen for a thin piece of
+cheese, a biscuit and two French plums--provision enough for a jolly-
+boat at least--and eat it in some imaginative way; then, armed to the
+teeth with gun, pistols, and sword, he would begin the serious
+climbing of the morning, encountering by the way innumerable slavers,
+Indians, pirates, leopards, and bears.  He was seldom seen at that
+hour of the day without a cutlass in his teeth (like Dick Needham)
+amid the rapid explosion of copper caps.  And many were the gardeners
+he brought down with yellow peas shot out of his little gun.  He
+lived a life of the most violent action.
+
+"Jon," said his father to his mother, under the oak tree, "is
+terrible.  I'm afraid he's going to turn out a sailor, or something
+hopeless.  Do you see any sign of his appreciating beauty?"
+
+"Not the faintest."
+
+"Well, thank heaven he's no turn for wheels or engines!  I can bear
+anything but that.  But I wish he'd take more interest in Nature."
+
+"He's imaginative, Jolyon."
+
+"Yes, in a sanguinary way.  Does he love anyone just now?"
+
+"No; only everyone.  There never was anyone born more loving or more
+lovable than Jon."
+
+"Being your boy, Irene."
+
+At this moment little Jon, lying along a branch high above them,
+brought them down with two peas; but that fragment of talk lodged,
+thick, in his small gizzard.  Loving, lovable, imaginative,
+sanguinary!
+
+The leaves also were thick by now, and it was time for his birthday,
+which, occurring every year on the twelfth of May, was always
+memorable for his chosen dinner of sweetbread, mushrooms, macaroons,
+and ginger beer.
+
+Between that eighth birthday, however, and the afternoon when he
+stood in the July radiance at the turning of the stairway, several
+important things had happened.
+
+"Da," worn out by washing his knees, or moved by that mysterious
+instinct which forces even nurses to desert their nurslings, left the
+very day after his birthday in floods of tears "to be married"--of
+all things--"to a man."  Little Jon, from whom it had been kept, was
+inconsolable for an afternoon.  It ought not to have been kept from
+him!  Two large boxes of soldiers and some artillery, together with
+The Young Buglers, which had been among his birthday presents,
+cooperated with his grief in a sort of conversion, and instead of
+seeking adventures in person and risking his own life, he began to
+play imaginative games, in which he risked the lives of countless tin
+soldiers, marbles, stones and beans.  Of these forms of "chair a
+canon" he made collections, and, using them alternately, fought the
+Peninsular, the Seven Years, the Thirty Years, and other wars, about
+which he had been reading of late in a big History of Europe which
+had been his grandfather's.  He altered them to suit his genius, and
+fought them all over the floor in his day nursery, so that nobody
+could come in, for fearing of disturbing Gustavus Adolphus, King of
+Sweden, or treading on an army of Austrians.  Because of the sound of
+the word he was passionately addicted to the Austrians, and finding
+there were so few battles in which they were successful he had to
+invent them in his games.  His favourite generals were Prince Eugene,
+the Archduke Charles and Wallenstein.  Tilly and Mack ("music-hall
+turns" he heard his father call them one day, whatever that might
+mean) one really could not love very much, Austrian though they were.
+For euphonic reasons, too, he doted on Turenne.
+
+This phase, which caused his parents anxiety, because it kept him
+indoors when he ought to have been out, lasted through May and half
+of June, till his father killed it by bringing home to him Tom Sawyer
+and Huckleberry Finn.  When he read those books something happened in
+him, and he went out of doors again in passionate quest of a river.
+There being none on the premises at Robin Hill, he had to make one
+out of the pond, which fortunately had water lilies, dragonflies,
+gnats, bullrushes, and three small willow trees.  On this pond, after
+his father and Garratt had ascertained by sounding that it had a
+reliable bottom and was nowhere more than two feet deep, he was
+allowed a little collapsible canoe, in which he spent hours and hours
+paddling, and lying down out of sight of Indian Joe and other
+enemies.  On the shore of the pond, too, he built himself a wigwam
+about four feet square, of old biscuit tins, roofed in by boughs.  In
+this he would make little fires, and cook the birds he had not shot
+with his gun, hunting in the coppice and fields, or the fish he did
+not catch in the pond because there were none.  This occupied the
+rest of June and that July, when his father and mother were away in
+Ireland.  He led a lonely life of "make believe" during those five
+weeks of summer weather, with gun, wigwam, water and canoe; and,
+however hard his active little brain tried to keep the sense of
+beauty away, she did creep in on him for a second now and then,
+perching on the wing of a dragon-fly, glistening on the water lilies,
+or brushing his eyes with her blue as he Jay on his back in ambush.
+
+"Auntie" June, who had been left in charge, had a "grown-up" in the
+house, with a cough and a large piece of putty which he was making
+into a face; so she hardly ever came down to see him in the pond.
+Once, however, she brought with her two other "grown-ups."  Little
+Jon, who happened to have painted his naked self bright blue and
+yellow in stripes out of his father's water-colour box, and put some
+duck's feathers in his hair, saw them coming, and--ambushed himself
+among the willows.  As he had foreseen, they came at once to his
+wigwam and knelt down to look inside, so that with a blood-curdling
+yell he was able to take the scalps of "Auntie" June and the woman
+"grown-up" in an almost complete manner before they kissed him.  The
+names of the two grown-ups were "Auntie" Holly and "Uncle" Val, who
+had a brown face and a little limp, and laughed at him terribly.  He
+took a fancy to "Auntie" Holly, who seemed to be a sister too; but
+they both went away the same afternoon and he did not see them again.
+Three days before his father and mother were to come home "Auntie"
+June also went off in a great hurry, taking the "grown-up" who
+coughed and his piece of putty; and Mademoiselle said: "Poor man, he
+was veree ill.  I forbid you to go into his room, Jon."  Little Jon,
+who rarely did things merely because he was told not to, refrained
+from going, though he was bored and lonely.  In truth the day of the
+pond was past, and he was filled to the brim of his soul with
+restlessness and the want of something--not a tree, not a gun--
+something soft.  Those last two days had seemed months in spite of
+Cast Up by the Sea, wherein he was reading about Mother Lee and her
+terrible wrecking bonfire.  He had gone up and down the stairs
+perhaps a hundred times in those two days, and often from the day
+nursery, where he slept now, had stolen into his mother's room,
+looked at everything, without touching, and on into the dressing-
+room; and standing on one leg beside the bath, like Slingsby, had
+whispered:
+
+"Ho, ho, ho!  Dog my cats!" mysteriously, to bring luck.  Then,
+stealing back, he had opened his mother's wardrobe, and taken a long
+sniff which seemed to bring him nearer to--he didn't know what.
+
+He had done this just before he stood in the streak of sunlight,
+debating in which of the several ways he should slide down the
+banisters.  They all seemed silly, and in a sudden languor he began
+descending the steps one by one.  During that descent he could
+remember his father quite distinctly--the short grey beard, the deep
+eyes twinkling, the furrow between them, the funny smile, the thin
+figure which always seemed so tall to little Jon; but his mother he
+couldn't see.  All that represented her was something swaying with
+two dark eyes looking back at him; and the scent of her wardrobe.
+
+Bella was in the hall, drawing aside the big curtains, and opening
+the front door.  Little Jon said, wheedling
+
+"Bella!"
+
+"Yes, Master Jon."
+
+"Do let's have tea under the oak tree when they come; I know they'd
+like it best."
+
+"You mean you'd like it best."
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+"No, they would, to please me."
+
+Bella smiled.  "Very well, I'll take it out if you'll stay quiet here
+and not get into mischief before they come."
+
+Little Jon sat down on the bottom step, and nodded.  Bella came
+close, and looked him over.
+
+"Get up!" she said.
+
+Little Jon got up.  She scrutinized him behind; he was not green, and
+his knees seemed clean.
+
+"All right!" she said.  "My!  Aren't you brown?  Give me a kiss!"
+
+And little Jon received a peck on his hair.
+
+"What jam?" he asked.  "I'm so tired of waiting."
+
+"Gooseberry and strawberry."
+
+Num!  They were his favourites!
+
+When she was gone he sat still for quite a minute.  It was quiet in
+the big hall open to its East end so that he could see one of his
+trees, a brig sailing very slowly across the upper lawn.  In the
+outer hall shadows were slanting from the pillars.  Little Jon got
+up, jumped one of them, and walked round the clump of iris plants
+which filled the pool of grey-white marble in the centre.  The
+flowers were pretty, but only smelled a very little.  He stood in the
+open doorway and looked out.  Suppose!--suppose they didn't come!  He
+had waited so long that he felt he could not bear that, and his
+attention slid at once from such finality to the dust motes in the
+bluish sunlight coming in: Thrusting his hand up, he tried to catch
+some.  Bella ought to have dusted that piece of air!  But perhaps
+they weren't dust--only what sunlight was made of, and he looked to
+see whether the sunlight out of doors was the same.  It was not.  He
+had said he would stay quiet in the hall, but he simply couldn't any
+more; and crossing the gravel of the drive he lay down on the grass
+beyond.  Pulling six daisies he named them carefully, Sir Lamorac,
+Sir Tristram, Sir Lancelot, Sir Palimedes, Sir Bors, Sir Gawain, and
+fought them in couples till only Sir Lamorac, whom he had selected
+for a specially stout stalk, had his head on, and even he, after
+three encounters, looked worn and waggly.  A beetle was moving slowly
+in the grass, which almost wanted cutting.  Every blade was a small
+tree, round whose trunk the beetle had to glide.  Little Jon
+stretched out Sir Lamorac, feet foremost, and stirred the creature
+up.  It scuttled painfully.  Little Jon laughed, lost interest, and
+sighed.  His heart felt empty.  He turned over and lay on his back.
+There was a scent of honey from the lime trees in flower, and in the
+sky the blue was beautiful, with a few white clouds which looked and
+perhaps tasted like lemon ice.  He could hear Bob playing: "Way down
+upon de Suwannee ribber" on his concertina, and it made him nice and
+sad.  He turned over again and put his ear to the ground--Indians
+could hear things coming ever so far--but he could hear nothing--only
+the concertina!  And almost instantly he did hear a grinding sound, a
+faint toot.  Yes!  it was a car--coming--coming!  Up he jumped.
+Should he wait in the porch, or rush upstairs, and as they came in,
+shout: "Look!" and slide slowly down the banisters, head foremost?
+Should he?  The car turned in at the drive.  It was too late!  And he
+only waited, jumping up and down in his excitement.  The car came
+quickly, whirred, and stopped.  His father got out, exactly like
+life.  He bent down and little Jon bobbed up--they bumped.  His
+father said
+
+"Bless us!  Well, old man, you are brown!"  Just as he would; and the
+sense of expectation--of something wanted--bubbled unextinguished in
+little Jon.  Then, with a long, shy look he saw his mother, in a blue
+dress, with a blue motor scarf over her cap and hair, smiling.  He
+jumped as high as ever he could, twined his legs behind her back, and
+hugged.  He heard her gasp, and felt her hugging back.  His eyes,
+very dark blue just then, looked into hers, very dark brown, till her
+lips closed on his eyebrow, and, squeezing with all his might, he
+heard her creak and laugh, and say:
+
+"You are strong, Jon!"
+
+He slid down at that, and rushed into the hall, dragging her by the
+hand.
+
+While he was eating his jam beneath the oak tree, he noticed things
+about his mother that he had never seemed to see before, her cheeks
+for instance were creamy, there were silver threads in her dark goldy
+hair, her throat had no knob in it like Bella's, and she went in and
+out softly.  He noticed, too, some little lines running away from the
+corners of her eyes, and a nice darkness under them.  She was ever so
+beautiful, more beautiful than "Da" or Mademoiselle, or "Auntie" June
+or even "Auntie" Holly, to whom he had taken a fancy; even more
+beautiful than Bella, who had pink cheeks and came out too suddenly
+in places.  This new beautifulness of his mother had a kind of
+particular importance, and he ate less than he had expected to.
+
+When tea was over his father wanted him to walk round the gardens.
+He had a long conversation with his father about things in general,
+avoiding his private life--Sir Lamorac, the Austrians, and the
+emptiness he had felt these last three days, now so suddenly filled
+up.  His father told him of a place called Glensofantrim, where he
+and his mother had been; and of the little people who came out of the
+ground there when it was very quiet.  Little Jon came to a halt, with
+his heels apart.
+
+"Do you really believe they do, Daddy?"  "No, Jon, but I thought you
+might."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You're younger than I; and they're fairies."  Little Jon squared the
+dimple in his chin.
+
+"I don't believe in fairies.  I never see any."  "Ha!" said his
+father.
+
+"Does Mum?"
+
+His father smiled his funny smile.
+
+"No; she only sees Pan."
+
+"What's Pan?"
+
+"The Goaty God who skips about in wild and beautiful places."
+
+"Was he in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Mum said so."
+
+Little Jon took his heels up, and led on.
+
+"Did you see him?"
+
+"No; I only saw Venus Anadyomene."
+
+Little Jon reflected; Venus was in his book about the Greeks and
+Trojans.  Then Anna was her Christian and Dyomene her surname?
+
+But it appeared, on inquiry, that it was one word, which meant rising
+from the foam.
+
+"Did she rise from the foam in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Yes; every day."
+
+"What is she like, Daddy?"
+
+"Like Mum."
+
+"Oh! Then she must be..." but he stopped at that, rushed at a wall,
+scrambled up, and promptly scrambled down again.  The discovery that
+his mother was beautiful was one which he felt must absolutely be
+kept to himself.  His father's cigar, however, took so long to smoke,
+that at last he was compelled to say:
+
+"I want to see what Mum's brought home.  Do you mind, Daddy?"
+
+He pitched the motive low, to absolve him from unmanliness, and was a
+little disconcerted when his father looked at him right through,
+heaved an important sigh, and answered:
+
+"All right, old man, you go and love her."
+
+He went, with a pretence of slowness, and then rushed, to make up.
+He entered her bedroom from his own, the door being open.  She was
+still kneeling before a trunk, and he stood close to her, quite
+still.
+
+She knelt up straight, and said:
+
+"Well, Jon?"
+
+"I thought I'd just come and see."
+
+Having given and received another hug, he mounted the window-seat,
+and tucking his legs up under him watched her unpack.  He derived a
+pleasure from the operation such as he had not yet known, partly
+because she was taking out things which looked suspicious, and partly
+because he liked to look at her.  She moved differently from anybody
+else, especially from Bella; she was certainly the refinedest-looking
+person he had ever seen.  She finished the trunk at last, and knelt
+down in front of him.
+
+"Have you missed us, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon nodded, and having thus admitted his feelings, continued
+to nod.
+
+"But you had 'Auntie' June?"
+
+"Oh! she had a man with a cough."
+
+His mother's face changed, and looked almost angry.  He added
+hastily:
+
+"He was a poor man, Mum; he coughed awfully; I--I liked him."
+
+His mother put her hands behind his waist.
+
+"You like everybody, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon considered.
+
+"Up to a point," he said: "Auntie June took me to church one Sunday."
+
+"To church?  Oh!"
+
+"She wanted to see how it would affect me."  "And did it?"
+
+"Yes.  I came over all funny, so she took me home again very quick.
+I wasn't sick after all.  I went to bed and had hot brandy and water,
+and read The Boys of Beechwood.  It was scrumptious."
+
+His mother bit her lip.
+
+"When was that?"
+
+"Oh! about--a long time ago--I wanted her to take me again, but she
+wouldn't.  You and Daddy never go to church, do you?"
+
+"No, we don't."
+
+"Why don't you?"
+
+His mother smiled.
+
+"Well, dear, we both of us went when we were little.  Perhaps we went
+when we were too little."
+
+"I see," said little Jon, "it's dangerous."
+
+"You shall judge for yourself about all those  things as you grow
+up."
+
+Little Jon replied in a calculating manner:
+
+"I don't want to grow up, much.  I don't want  to go to school."  A
+sudden overwhelming desire  to say something more, to say what he
+really  felt, turned him red.  "I--I want to stay with you,  and be
+your lover, Mum."
+
+Then with an instinct to improve the situation, he added quickly   "I
+don't want to go to bed to-night, either.  I'm simply tired of going
+to bed, every night."
+
+"Have you had any more nightmares?"
+
+"Only about one.  May I leave the door open into your room to-night,
+Mum?"
+
+"Yes, just a little."  Little Jon heaved a sigh of satisfaction.
+
+"What did you see in Glensofantrim?"
+
+"Nothing but beauty, darling."
+
+"What exactly is beauty?"
+
+"What exactly is--Oh! Jon, that's a  poser."
+
+"Can I see it, for instance?"   His mother got up, and sat beside
+him.  "You do, every day.  The sky is beautiful, the  stars, and
+moonlit nights, and then the birds, the flowers, the trees--they're
+all beautiful.  Look out of the window--there's beauty for you, Jon."
+
+"Oh! yes, that's the view.  Is that all?"
+
+"All? no.  The sea is wonderfully beautiful, and the waves, with
+their foam flying back."
+
+"Did you rise from it every day, Mum?"
+
+His mother smiled.  "Well, we bathed."
+
+Little Jon suddenly reached out and caught her neck in his hands.
+
+"I know," he said mysteriously, "you're it, really, and all the rest
+is make-believe."
+
+She sighed, laughed, said:  "Oh! Jon!"
+
+Little Jon said critically:
+
+"Do you think Bella beautiful, for instance?  I hardly do."
+
+"Bella is young; that's something."
+
+"But you look younger, Mum.  If you bump against Bella she hurts."
+
+"I don't believe 'Da' was beautiful, when I come to think of it; and
+Mademoiselle's almost ugly."
+
+"Mademoiselle has a very nice face."  "Oh! yes; nice.  I love your
+little rays, Mum."
+
+"Rays?"
+
+Little Jon put his finger to the outer corner of her eye.
+
+"Oh! Those?  But they're a sign of age."
+
+"They come when you smile."
+
+"But they usen't to."
+
+"Oh! well, I like them.  Do you love me, Mum?"
+
+"I do--I do love you, darling."
+
+"Ever so?"
+
+"Ever so!"
+
+"More than I thought you did?"
+
+"Much--much more."
+
+"Well, so do I; so that makes it even."
+
+Conscious that he had never in his life so given himself away, he
+felt a sudden reaction to the manliness of Sir Lamorac, Dick Needham,
+Huck Finn, and other heroes.
+
+"Shall I show you a thing or two?" he said; and slipping out of her
+arms, he stood on his head.  Then, fired by her obvious admiration,
+he mounted the bed, and threw himself head foremost from his feet on
+to his back, without touching anything with his hands.  He did this
+several times.
+
+That evening, having inspected what they had brought, he stayed up to
+dinner, sitting between them at the little round table they used when
+they were alone.  He was extremely excited.  His mother wore a
+French-grey dress, with creamy lace made out of little scriggly
+roses, round her neck, which was browner than the lace.  He kept
+looking at her, till at last his father's funny smile made him
+suddenly attentive to his slice of pineapple.  It was later than he
+had ever stayed up, when he went to bed.  His mother went up with
+him, and he undressed very slowly so as to keep her there.  When at
+last he had nothing on but his pyjamas, he said:
+
+"Promise you won't go while I say my prayers!"
+
+"I promise."
+
+Kneeling down and plunging his face into the bed, little Jon hurried
+up, under his breath, opening one eye now and then, to see her
+standing perfectly still with a smile on her face.  "Our Father"--so
+went his last prayer, "which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mum, thy
+Kingdom Mum--on Earth as it is in heaven, give us this day our daily
+Mum and forgive us our trespasses on earth as it is in heaven and
+trespass against us, for thine is the evil the power and the glory
+for ever and ever.  Amum!  Look out!"  He sprang, and for a long
+minute remained in her arms.  Once in bed, he continued to hold her
+hand.
+
+"You won't shut the door any more than that, will you?  Are you going
+to be long, Mum?"
+
+"I must go down and play to Daddy."
+
+"Oh! well, I shall hear you."
+
+"I hope not; you must go to sleep."
+
+"I can sleep any night."
+
+"Well, this is just a night like any other."
+
+"Oh! no--it's extra special."
+
+"On extra special nights one always sleeps soundest."
+
+"But if I go to sleep, Mum, I shan't hear you come up."
+
+"Well, when I do, I'll come in and give you a kiss, then if you're
+awake you'll know, and if you're not you'll still know you've had
+one."
+
+Little Jon sighed, "All right!" he said: "I suppose I must put up
+with that.  Mum?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"What was her name that Daddy believes in?  Venus Anna Diomedes?"
+
+"Oh! my angel!  Anadyomene."
+
+"Yes! but I like my name for you much better."
+
+"What is yours, Jon?"
+
+Little Jon answered shyly:
+
+"Guinevere! it's out of the Round Table--I've only just thought
+of it, only of course her hair was down."
+
+His mother's eyes, looking past him, seemed to float.
+
+"You won't forget to come, Mum?"
+
+"Not if you'll go to sleep."
+
+"That's a bargain, then."  And little Jon screwed up his eyes.
+
+He felt her lips on his forehead, heard her footsteps; opened his
+eyes to see her gliding through the doorway, and, sighing, screwed
+them up again.
+
+Then Time began.
+
+For some ten minutes of it he tried loyally to sleep, counting a
+great number of thistles in a row, "Da's" old recipe for bringing
+slumber.  He seemed to have been hours counting.  It must, he
+thought, be nearly time for her to come up now.  He threw the
+bedclothes back.  "I'm hot!" he said, and his voice sounded funny in
+the darkness, like someone else's.  Why didn't she come?  He sat up.
+He must look!  He got out of bed, went to the window and pulled the
+curtain a slice aside.  It wasn't dark, but he couldn't tell whether
+because of daylight or the moon, which was very big.  It had a funny,
+wicked face, as if laughing at him, and he did not want to look at
+it.  Then, remembering that his mother had said moonlit nights were
+beautiful, he continued to stare out in a general way.  The trees
+threw thick shadows, the lawn looked like spilt milk, and a long,
+long way he could see; oh! very far; right over the world, and it all
+looked different and swimmy.  There was a lovely smell, too, in his
+open window.
+
+'I wish I had a dove like Noah!' he thought.
+
+
+"The moony moon was round and bright,
+It shone and shone and made it light."
+
+
+After that rhyme, which came into his head all at once, he became
+conscious of music, very soft-lovely!  Mum playing!  He bethought
+himself of a macaroon he had, laid up in his chest of drawers, and,
+getting it, came back to the window.  He leaned out, now munching,
+now holding his jaws to hear the music better.  "Da" used to say that
+angels played on harps in heaven; but it wasn't half so lovely as Mum
+playing in the moony night, with him eating a macaroon.  A cockchafer
+buzzed by, a moth flew in his face, the music stopped, and little Jon
+drew his head in.  She must be coming!  He didn't want to be found
+awake.  He got back into bed and pulled the clothes nearly over his
+head; but he had left a streak of moonlight coming in.  It fell
+across the floor, near the foot of the bed, and he watched it moving
+ever so slowly towards him, as if it were alive.  The music began
+again, but he could only just hear it now; sleepy music, pretty--
+sleepy--music--sleepy--slee.....
+
+And time slipped by, the music rose, fell, ceased; the moonbeam crept
+towards his face.  Little Jon turned in his sleep till he lay on his
+back, with one brown fist still grasping the bedclothes.  The corners
+of his eyes twitched--he had begun to dream.  He dreamed he was
+drinking milk out of a pan that was the moon, opposite a great black
+cat which watched him with a funny smile like his father's.  He heard
+it whisper: "Don't drink too much!" It was the cat's milk, of course,
+and he put out his hand amicably to stroke the creature; but it was
+no longer there; the pan had become a bed, in which he was lying, and
+when he tried to get out he couldn't find the edge; he couldn't find
+it--he--he--couldn't get out!  It was dreadful!
+
+He whimpered in his sleep.  The bed had begun to go round too; it was
+outside him and inside him; going round and round, and getting fiery,
+and Mother Lee out of Cast up by the Sea was stirring it!  Oh! so
+horrible she looked!  Faster and faster!--till he and the bed and
+Mother Lee and the moon and the cat were all one wheel going round
+and round and up and up--awful--awful--awful!
+
+He shrieked.
+
+A voice saying: "Darling, darling!" got through the wheel, and he
+awoke, standing on his bed, with his eyes wide open.
+
+There was his mother, with her hair like Guinevere's, and, clutching
+her, he buried his face in it.
+
+"Oh! oh!"
+
+"It's all right, treasure.  You're awake now.  There!  There!  It's
+nothing!"
+
+But little Jon continued to say: "Oh! oh!"
+
+Her voice went on, velvety in his ear:
+
+"It was the moonlight, sweetheart, coming on your face."
+
+Little Jon burbled into her nightgown
+
+"You said it was beautiful.  Oh!"
+
+"Not to sleep in, Jon.  Who let it in?  Did you draw the curtains?"
+
+"I wanted to see the time; I--I looked out, I--I heard you playing,
+Mum; I--I ate my macaroon."  But he was growing slowly comforted; and
+the instinct to excuse his fear revived within him.
+
+"Mother Lee went round in me and got all fiery," he mumbled.
+
+"Well, Jon, what can you expect if you eat macaroons after you've
+gone to bed?"
+
+"Only one, Mum; it made the music ever so more beautiful.  I was
+waiting for you--I nearly thought it was to-morrow."
+
+"My ducky, it's only just eleven now."
+
+Little Jon was silent, rubbing his nose on her neck.
+
+"Mum, is Daddy in your room?"
+
+"Not to-night."
+
+"Can I come?"
+
+"If you wish, my precious."
+
+Half himself again, little Jon drew back.
+
+"You look different, Mum; ever so younger."
+
+"It's my hair, darling."
+
+Little Jon laid hold of it, thick, dark gold, with a few silver
+threads.
+
+"I like it," he said: "I like you best of all like this."
+
+Taking her hand, he had begun dragging her towards the door.  He shut
+it as they passed, with a sigh of relief.
+
+"Which side of the bed do you like, Mum?"
+
+"The left side."
+
+"All right."
+
+Wasting no time, giving her no chance to change her mind, little Jon
+got into the bed, which seemed much softer than his own.  He heaved
+another sigh, screwed his head into the pillow and lay examining the
+battle of chariots and swords and spears which always went on outside
+blankets, where the little hairs stood up against the light.
+
+"It wasn't anything, really, was it?" he said.
+
+>From before her glass his mother answered:
+
+"Nothing but the moon and your imagination heated up.  You mustn't
+get so excited, Jon."
+
+But, still not quite in possession of his nerves, little Jon answered
+boastfully:
+
+"I wasn't afraid, really, of course!"  And again he lay watching the
+spears and chariots.  It all seemed very long.
+
+"Oh! Mum, do hurry up!"
+
+"Darling, I have to plait my hair."
+
+"Oh! not to-night.  You'll only have to unplait it again to-morrow.
+I'm sleepy now; if you don't come, I shan't be sleepy soon."
+
+His mother stood up white and flowey before the winged mirror: he
+could see three of her, with her neck turned and her hair bright
+under the light, and her dark eyes smiling.  It was unnecessary, and
+he said:
+
+"Do come, Mum; I'm waiting."
+
+"Very well, my love, I'll come."
+
+Little Jon closed his eyes.  Everything was turning out most
+satisfactory, only she must hurry up!  He felt the bed shake, she was
+getting in.  And, still with his eyes closed, he said sleepily: "It's
+nice, isn't it?"
+
+He heard her voice say something, felt her lips touching his nose,
+and, snuggling up beside her who lay awake and loved him with her
+thoughts, he fell into the dreamless sleep, which rounded off his
+past.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO LET
+
+
+
+"From out the fatal loins of those two foes
+A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life."
+                        --Romeo and Juliet.
+
+
+
+
+
+TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
+
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+ENCOUNTER
+
+
+Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was
+staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the
+intention of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork
+Street, and looking into the Future.  He walked.  Since the War he
+never took a cab if he could help it.  Their drivers were, in his
+view, an uncivil lot, though now that the War was over and supply
+beginning to exceed demand again, getting more civil in accordance
+with the custom of human nature.  Still, he had not forgiven them,
+deeply identifying them with gloomy memories, and now, dimly, like
+all members, of their class, with revolution.  The considerable
+anxiety he had passed through during the War, and the more
+considerable anxiety he had since undergone in the Peace, had
+produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature.  He had,
+mentally, so frequently experienced ruin, that he had ceased to
+believe in its material probability.  Paying away four thousand a
+year in income and super tax, one could not very well be worse off!
+A fortune of a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a wife and
+one daughter, and very diversely invested, afforded substantial
+guarantee even against that "wildcat notion" a levy on capital.  And
+as to confiscation of war profits, he was entirely in favour of it,
+for he had none, and "serve the beggars right!" The price of
+pictures, moreover, had, if anything, gone up, and he had done better
+with his collection since the War began than ever before.  Air-raids,
+also, had acted beneficially on a spirit congenitally cautious, and
+hardened a character already dogged.  To be in danger of being
+entirely dispersed inclined one to be less apprehensive of the more
+partial dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while the habit
+of condemning the impudence of the Germans had led naturally to
+condemning that of Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of
+his soul.
+
+He walked.  There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet
+him at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past
+two.  It was good for him to walk--his liver was a little
+constricted, and his nerves rather on edge.  His wife was always out
+when she was in Town, and his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all
+over the place like most young women since the War.  Still, he must
+be thankful that she had been too young to do anything in that War
+itself.  Not, of course, that he had not supported the War from its
+inception, with all his soul, but between that and supporting it with
+the bodies of his wife and daughter, there had been a gap fixed by
+something old-fashioned within him which abhorred emotional
+extravagance.  He had, for instance, strongly objected to Annette, so
+attractive, and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her native France,
+her "chere patrie" as, under the stimulus of war, she had begun to
+call it, to nurse her "braves poilus," forsooth!  Ruining her health
+and her looks!  As if she were really a nurse!  He had put a stopper
+on it.  Let her do needlework for them at home, or knit!  She had not
+gone, therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since.  A
+bad tendency of hers to mock at him, not openly, but in continual
+little ways, had grown.  As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed
+problem whether or not she should go to school.  She was better away
+from her mother in her war mood, from the chance of air-raids, and
+the impetus to do extravagant things; so he had placed her in a
+seminary as far West as had seemed to him compatible with excellence,
+and had missed her horribly.  Fleur!  He had never regretted the
+somewhat outlandish name by which at her birth he had decided so
+suddenly to call her--marked concession though it had been to the
+French.  Fleur!  A pretty name--a pretty child!  But restless--too
+restless; and wilful!  Knowing her power too over her father!  Soames
+often reflected on the mistake it was to dote on his daughter.  To
+get old and dote!  Sixty-five!  He was getting on; but he didn't feel
+it, for, fortunately perhaps, considering Annette's youth and good
+looks, his second marriage had turned out a cool affair.  He had
+known but one real passion in his life--for that first wife of his--
+Irene.  Yes, and that fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who had gone off
+with her, was looking very shaky, they said.  No wonder, at seventy-
+two, after twenty years of a third marriage!
+
+Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the
+Row.  A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house
+in Park Lane which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and
+the little house in Montpellier Square where thirty-five years ago he
+had enjoyed his first edition of matrimony.  Now, after twenty years
+of his second edition, that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous
+existence--which had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he
+had hoped for.  For many years he had ceased regretting, even
+vaguely, the son who had not been born; Fleur filled the bill in his
+heart.  After all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward
+at all to the time when she would change it.  Indeed, if he ever
+thought of such a calamity, it was seasoned by the vague feeling that
+he could make her rich enough to purchase perhaps and extinguish the
+name of the fellow who married her--why not, since, as it seemed,
+women were equal to men nowadays?  And Soames, secretly convinced
+that they were not, passed his curved hand over his face vigorously,
+till it reached the comfort of his chin.  Thanks to abstemious
+habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his nose was pale and thin,
+his grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight unimpaired.  A slight
+stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to his face by the
+heightening of his forehead in the recession of his grey hair.
+Little change had Time wrought in the "warmest" of the young
+Forsytes, as the last of the old Forsytes--Timothy-now in his hundred
+and first year, would have phrased it.
+
+The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had
+given up top hats--it was no use attracting attention to wealth in
+days like  these.  Plane-trees!  His thoughts travelled sharply to
+Madrid--the Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind
+about that Goya picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study
+the painter on his spot.  The fellow had impressed him--great range,
+real genius!  Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher
+before they had finished with him.  The second Goya craze would be
+greater even than the first; oh, yes!  And he had bought.  On that
+visit he had--as never before--commissioned a copy of a fresco
+painting called "La Vendimia," wherein was the figure of a girl with
+an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his daughter.  He had it now
+in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather poor it was--you couldn't
+copy Goya.  He would still look at it, however, if his daughter were
+not there, for the sake of something irresistibly reminiscent in the
+light, erect balance of the figure, the width between the arching
+eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.  Curious that Fleur
+should have dark eyes, when his own were grey--no pure Forsyte had
+brown eyes--and her mother's blue!  But of course her grandmother
+Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!
+
+He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner.  No greater change
+in all England than in the Row!  Born almost within hail of it, he
+could remember it from 1860 on.  Brought there as a child between the
+crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding
+with a cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white
+top hats; the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man
+in a long red waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs
+on several strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles
+spaniels, Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline--you
+never saw them now.  You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just
+working people sitting in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a
+few young bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory
+Colonials charging up and down on dismal-looking hacks; with, here
+and there, little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their
+livers, or an orderly trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no
+thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no gossip--nothing;
+only the trees the same--the trees in--different to the generations
+and declensions of mankind.  A democratic England--dishevelled,
+hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an apex.  And that something
+fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over within him.  Gone
+forever, the close borough of rank and polish!  Wealth there was--oh,
+yes!  wealth--he himself was a richer man than his father had ever
+been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast,
+ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.  Little half-beaten
+pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and there, dispersed and
+chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever again firm and
+coherent to look up to.  And into this new hurly-burly of bad manners
+and loose morals his daughter--flower of his life--was flung!  And
+when those Labour chaps got power--if they ever did--the worst was
+yet to come.
+
+He passed out under the archway, at last no longer--thank goodness!--
+disfigured by the gungrey of its search-light.  'They'd better put a
+search-light on to where they're all going,' he thought, 'and light
+up their precious democracy!' And he directed his steps along the
+Club fronts of Piccadilly.  George Forsyte, of course, would be
+sitting in the bay window of the Iseeum.  The chap was so big now
+that he was there nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic,
+humorous eye noting the decline of men and things.  And Soames
+hurried, ever constitutionally uneasy beneath his cousin's glance.
+George, who, as he had heard, had written a letter signed "Patriot"
+in the middle of the War, complaining of the Government's hysteria in
+docking the oats of race-horses.  Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous,
+neat, clean-shaven, with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling,
+no doubt, of the best hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand.  Well,
+be didn't change!  And for perhaps the first time in his life Soames
+felt a kind of sympathy tapping in his waistcoat for that sardonic
+kinsman.  With his weight, his perfectly parted hair, and bull-like
+gaze, he was a guarantee that the old order would take some shifting
+yet.  He saw George move the pink paper as if inviting him to ascend-
+-the chap must want to ask something about his property.  It was
+still under Soames' control; for in the adoption of a sleeping
+partnership at that painful period twenty years back when he had
+divorced Irene, Soames had found himself almost insensibly retaining
+control of all purely Forsyte affairs.
+
+Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in.  Since the death
+of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had
+quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not
+suicide--the Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames.
+George, too, he knew, had sown the last of his wild oats, and was
+committed definitely to the joys of the table, eating only of the
+very best so as to keep his weight down, and owning, as he said,
+"just one or two old screws to give me an interest in life."  He
+joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window without the
+embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel up there.
+George put out a well-kept hand.
+
+"Haven't seen you since the War," he said.  "How's your wife?"
+
+"Thanks," said Soames coldly, "well enough."
+
+Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George's fleshy face, and
+gloated from his eye.
+
+"That Belgian chap, Profond," he said, "is a member here now.  He's a
+rum customer."
+
+"Quite!" muttered Soames.  "What did you want to see me about?"
+
+"Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment.  I suppose
+he's made his Will."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up--last of the old
+lot; he's a hundred, you know.  They say he's like a rummy.  Where
+are you goin' to put him?  He ought to have a pyramid by rights."
+
+Soames shook his head.  "Highgate, the family vault."
+
+"Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere
+else.  They say he still takes an interest in food.  He might last
+on, you know.  Don't we get anything for the old Forsytes?   Ten of
+them--average age eighty-eight--I worked it out.  That ought to be
+equal to triplets."
+
+"Is that all?" said Soames, "I must be getting on."
+
+'You unsociable devil,' George's eyes seemed to answer.  "Yes, that's
+all: Look him up in his mausoleum--the old chap might want to
+prophesy."  The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he
+added: "Haven't you attorneys invented a way yet of dodging this
+damned income tax?  It hits the fixed inherited income like the very
+deuce.  I used to have two thousand five hundred a year; now I've got
+a beggarly fifteen hundred, and the price of living doubled."
+
+"Ah!" murmured Soames, "the turf's in danger."
+
+Over George's face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.
+
+"Well," he said, "they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in
+the sear and yellow, getting poorer every day.  These Labour chaps
+mean to have the lot before they've done.  What are you going to do
+for a living when it comes?  I shall work a six-hour day teaching
+politicians how to see a joke.  Take my tip, Soames; go into
+Parliament, make sure of your four hundred--and employ me."
+
+And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.
+
+Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his
+cousin's words.  He himself had always been a worker and a saver,
+George always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once
+began, it was he--the worker and the saver--who would be looted!
+That was the negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte
+principles.  Could civilization be built on any other?  He did not
+think so.  Well, they wouldn't confiscate his pictures, for they
+wouldn't know their worth.  But what would they be worth, if these
+maniacs once began to milk capital?  A drug on the market.  'I don't
+care about myself,' he thought; 'I could live on five hundred a year,
+and never know the difference, at my age.'  But Fleur!  This fortune,
+so widely invested, these treasures so carefully chosen and amassed,
+were all for--her.  And if it should turn out that he couldn't give
+or leave them to her--well, life had no meaning, and what was the use
+of going in to look at this crazy, futuristic stuff with the view of
+seeing whether it had any future?
+
+Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his
+shilling, picked up a catalogue, and entered.  Some ten persons were
+prowling round.  Soames took steps and came on what looked to him
+like a lamp-post bent by collision with a motor omnibus.  It was
+advanced some three paces from the wall, and was described in his
+catalogue as "Jupiter."  He examined it with curiosity, having
+recently turned some of his attention to sculpture.  'If that's
+Jupiter,' he thought, 'I wonder what Juno's like.'  And suddenly he
+saw her, opposite.  She appeared to him like nothing so much as a
+pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow.  He was still gazing at
+her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left.  "Epatant!" he
+heard one say.
+
+"Jargon!" growled Soames to himself.
+
+The other's boyish voice replied
+
+"Missed it, old bean; he's pulling your leg.  When Jove and Juno
+created he them, he was saying: 'I'll see how much these fools will
+swallow.'  And they've lapped up the lot."
+
+"You young duffer!  Vospovitch is an innovator.  Don't you see that
+he's brought satire into sculpture?  The future of plastic art, of
+music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric.  It was
+bound to.  People are tired--the bottom's tumbled out of sentiment."
+
+"Well, I'm quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty.  I was
+through the War.  You've dropped your handkerchief, sir."
+
+Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him.  He took it with
+some natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose.  It had the
+right scent--of distant Eau de Cologne--and his initials in a corner.
+Slightly reassured, he raised his eyes to the young man's face.  It
+had rather fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush
+growing out of it on each side, and small lively eyes, above a
+normally dressed appearance.
+
+"Thank you," he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: "Glad
+to hear you like beauty; that's rare, nowadays."
+
+"I dote on it," said the young man; "but you and I are the last of
+the old guard, sir."
+
+Soames smiled.
+
+"If you really care for pictures," he said, "here's my card.  I can
+show you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you're down the river
+and care to look in."
+
+"Awfully nice of you, sir.  I'll drop in like a bird.  My name's
+Mont-Michael."  And he took off his hat.
+
+Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in
+response, with a downward look at the young man's companion, who had
+a purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look-
+-as if he were a poet!
+
+It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he
+went and sat down in an alcove.  What had possessed him to give his
+card to a rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like
+that?  And Fleur, always at the back of his thoughts, started out
+like a filigree figure from a clock when the hour strikes.  On the
+screen opposite the alcove was a large canvas with a great many
+square tomato-coloured blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as
+Soames could see from where he sat.  He looked at his catalogue: "No.
+32 'The Future Town'--Paul Post."  'I suppose that's satiric too,' he
+thought.  'What a thing!' But his second impulse was more cautious.
+It did not do to condemn hurriedly.  There had been those stripey,
+streaky creations of Monet's, which had turned out such trumps; and
+then the stippled school; and Gauguin.  Why, even since the Post-
+Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed
+at.  During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life, indeed,
+he had marked so many "movements," seen the tides of taste and
+technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything
+except that there was money to be made out of every change of
+fashion.  This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue
+primordial instinct, or lose the market.  He got up and stood before
+the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people.
+Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one
+passing said: "He's got the airplanes wonderfully, don't you think!"
+Below the tomato blobs was a band of white with vertical black
+stripes, to which he could assign no meaning whatever, till some one
+else came by, murmuring: "What expression he gets with his
+foreground!"  Expression?  Of what?  Soames went back to his seat.
+The thing was "rich," as his father would have said, and he wouldn't
+give a damn for it.  Expression!  Ah! they were all Expressionists
+now, he had heard, on the Continent.  So it was coming here too, was
+it?  He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887--or '8--
+hatched in China, so they said.  He wondered where this--this
+Expressionism had been hatched.  The thing was a regular disease!
+
+He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him
+and the "Future Town."  Their backs were turned; but very suddenly
+Soames put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat
+forward, gazed through the slit between.  No mistaking that back,
+elegant as ever though the hair above had gone grey.  Irene!  His
+divorced wife--Irene!  And this, no doubt, was--her son--by that
+fellow Jolyon Forsyte--their boy, six months older than his own girl!
+And mumbling over in his mind the bitter days of his divorce, he rose
+to get out of sight, but quickly sat down again.  She had turned her
+head to speak to her boy; her profile was still so youthful that it
+made her grey hair seem powdery, as if fancy-dressed; and her lips
+were smiling as Soames, first possessor of them, had never seen them
+smile.  Grudgingly he admitted her still beautiful and in figure
+almost as young as ever.  And how that boy smiled back at her!
+Emotion squeezed Soames' heart.  The sight infringed his sense of
+justice.  He grudged her that boy's smile--it went beyond what Fleur
+gave him, and it was undeserved.  Their son might have been his son;
+Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight!  He
+lowered his catalogue.  If she saw him, all the better!  A reminder
+of her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing
+of it, would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis
+which surely must soon or late visit her!  Then, half-conscious that
+such a thought was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took
+out his watch.  Past four!  Fleur was late.  She had gone to his
+niece Imogen Cardigan's, and there they would keep her smoking
+cigarettes and gossiping, and that.  He heard the boy laugh, and say
+eagerly: "I say, Mum, is this by one of Auntie June's lame ducks?"
+
+"Paul Post--I believe it is, darling."
+
+The word produced a little shock in Soames; he had never heard her
+use it.  And then she saw him.  His eyes must have had in them
+something of George Forsyte's sardonic look; for her gloved hand
+crisped the folds of her frock, her eyebrows rose, her face went
+stony.  She moved on.
+
+"It is a caution," said the boy, catching her arm again.
+
+Soames stared after them.  That boy was good-looking, with a Forsyte
+chin, and eyes deep-grey, deep in; but with something sunny, like a
+glass of old sherry spilled over him; his smile perhaps, his hair.
+Better than they deserved--those two!  They passed from his view into
+the next room, and Soames continued to regard the Future Town, but
+saw it not.  A little smile snarled up his lips.  He was despising
+the vehemence of his own feelings after all these years.  Ghosts!
+And yet as one grew old--was there anything but what was ghost-like
+left?  Yes, there was Fleur!  He fixed his eyes on the entrance.  She
+was due; but she would keep him waiting, of course!  And suddenly he
+became aware of a sort of human breeze--a short, slight form clad in
+a sea-green djibbah with a metal belt and a fillet binding unruly
+red-gold hair all streaked with grey.  She was talking to the Gallery
+attendants, and something familiar riveted his gaze--in her eyes, her
+chin, her hair, her spirit--something which suggested a thin Skye
+terrier just before its dinner.  Surely June Forsyte!  His cousin
+June--and coming straight to his recess!  She sat down beside him,
+deep in thought, took out a tablet, and made a pencil note.  Soames
+sat unmoving.  A confounded thing, cousinship!  "Disgusting!" he
+heard her murmur; then, as if resenting the presence of an
+overhearing stranger, she looked at him.  The worst had happened.
+
+"Soames!"
+
+Soames turned his head a very little.
+
+"How are you?" he said.  "Haven't seen you for twenty years."
+
+"No.  Whatever made you come here?"
+
+"My sins," said Soames.  "What stuff!"
+
+"Stuff?  Oh, yes--of course; it hasn't arrived yet.
+
+"It never will," said Soames; "it must be making a dead loss."
+
+"Of course it is."
+
+"How d'you know?"
+
+"It's my Gallery."
+
+Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
+
+"Yours?  What on earth makes you run a show like this?"
+
+"I don't treat Art as if it were grocery."
+
+Soames pointed to the Future Town.  "Look at that!  Who's going to
+live in a town like that, or with it on his walls?"
+
+June contemplated the picture for a moment.
+
+"It's a vision," she said.
+
+"The deuce!"
+
+There was silence, then June rose.  'Crazylooking creature!' he
+thought.
+
+"Well," he said, "you'll find your young stepbrother here with a
+woman I used to know.  If you take my advice, you'll close this
+exhibition."
+
+June looked back at him.  "Oh! You Forsyte!" she said, and moved on.
+About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a
+look of dangerous decisions.  Forsyte!  Of course, he was a Forsyte!
+And so was she!  But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought
+Bosinney into his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June
+and never would!  And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a
+Gallery!... And suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of
+his own family.  The old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many
+years; there was no clearing-house for news.  What had they all done
+in the War?  Young Roger's boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's
+second son killed; young Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or
+whatever they gave them.  They had all joined up somehow, he
+believed.  That boy of Jolyon's and Irene's, he supposed, had been
+too young; his own generation, of course, too old, though Giles
+Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross--and Jesse Hayman been a
+special constable--those "Dromios" had always been of a sporting
+type!  As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read the
+papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought
+no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he
+could have done at his age.  Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him
+that he and his family had taken this war very differently to that
+affair with the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the
+resources of the Empire.  In that old war, of course, his nephew Val
+Dartie had been wounded, that fellow Jolyon's first son had died of
+enteric, "the Dromios" had gone out on horses, and June had been a
+nurse; but all that had seemed in the nature of a portent, while in
+this war everybody had done "their bit," so far as he could make out,
+as a matter of course.  It seemed to show the growth of something or
+other--or perhaps the decline of something else.  Had the Forsytes
+become less individual, or more Imperial, or less provincial?  Or was
+it simply that one hated Germans?...  Why didn't Fleur come, so that
+he could get away?  He saw those three return together from the other
+room and pass back along the far side of the screen.  The boy was
+standing before the Juno now.  And, suddenly, on the other side of
+her, Soames saw--his daughter, with eyebrows raised, as well they
+might be.  He could see her eyes glint sideways at the boy, and the
+boy look back at her.  Then Irene slipped her hand through his arm,
+and drew him on.  Soames saw him glancing round, and Fleur looking
+after them as the three went out.
+
+A voice said cheerfully: "Bit thick, isn't it, sir?"
+
+The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing.
+Soames nodded.
+
+"I don't know what we're coming to."
+
+"Oh! That's all right, sir," answered the young man cheerfully; "they
+don't either."
+
+Fleur's voice said: "Hallo, Father!  Here you are!" precisely as if
+he had been keeping her waiting.
+
+The young man, snatching off his hat, passed on.
+
+"Well," said Soames, looking her up and down, "you're a punctual sort
+of young woman!"
+
+This treasured possession of his life was of medium height and
+colour, with short, dark chestnut hair; her wide-apart brown eyes
+were set in whites so clear that they glinted when they moved, and
+yet in repose were almost dreamy under very white, black-lashed lids,
+held over them in a sort of suspense.  She had a charming profile,
+and nothing of her father in her face save a decided chin.  Aware
+that his expression was softening as he looked at her, Soames frowned
+to preserve the unemotionalism proper to a Forsyte.  He knew she was
+only too inclined to take advantage of his weakness.
+
+Slipping her hand under his arm, she said:
+
+"Who was that?"
+
+"He picked up my handkerchief.  We talked about the pictures."
+
+"You're not going to buy that, Father?"
+
+"No," said Soames grimly; "nor that Juno you've been looking at."
+
+Fleur dragged at his arm.  "Oh! Let's go!  It's a ghastly show."
+
+In the doorway they passed the young man called Mont and his partner.
+But Soames had hung out a board marked "Trespassers will be
+prosecuted," and he barely acknowledged the young fellow's salute.
+
+"Well," he said in the street, "whom did you meet at Imogen's?"
+
+"Aunt Winifred, and that Monsieur Profond."
+
+"Oh!" muttered Soames; "that chap!  What does your aunt see in him?"
+
+"I don't know.  He looks pretty deep--mother says she likes him."
+
+Soames grunted.
+
+"Cousin Val and his wife were there, too."
+
+"What!" said Soames.  "I thought they were back in South Africa."
+
+"Oh, no!  They've sold their farm.  Cousin Val is going to train
+race-horses on the Sussex Downs.  They've got a jolly old manor-
+house; they asked me down there."
+
+Soames coughed: the news was distasteful to him.  "What's his wife
+like now?"
+
+"Very quiet, but nice, I think."
+
+Soames coughed again.  "He's a rackety chap, your Cousin Val."
+
+"Oh! no, Father; they're awfully devoted.  I promised to go--Saturday
+to Wednesday next."
+
+"Training race-horses!" said Soames.  It was extravagant, but not the
+reason for his distaste.  Why the deuce couldn't his nephew have
+stayed out in South Africa?  His own divorce had been bad enough,
+without his nephew's marriage to the daughter of the co-respondent; a
+half-sister too of June, and of that boy whom Fleur had just been
+looking at from under the pump-handle.  If he didn't look out, she
+would come to know all about that old disgrace!  Unpleasant things!
+They were round him this afternoon like a swarm of bees!
+
+"I don't like it!" he said.
+
+"I want to see the race-horses," murmured Fleur; "and they've
+promised I shall ride.  Cousin Val can't walk much, you know; but he
+can ride perfectly.  He's going to show me their gallops."
+
+"Racing!" said Soames.  "It's a pity the War didn't knock that on the
+head.  He's taking after his father, I'm afraid."
+
+"I don't know anything about his father."
+
+"No," said Soames, grimly.  "He took an interest in horses and broke
+his neck in Paris, walking down-stairs.  Good riddance for your
+aunt."  He frowned, recollecting the inquiry into those stairs which
+he had attended in Paris six years ago, because.  Montague Dartie
+could not attend it himself--perfectly normal stairs in a house where
+they played baccarat.  Either his winnings or the way he had
+celebrated them had gone to his brother-in-law's head.  The French
+procedure had been very loose; he had had a lot of trouble
+with it.
+
+A sound from Fleur distracted his attention.  "Look! The people who
+were in the Gallery with us."
+
+"What people?" muttered Soames, who knew perfectly well.
+
+"I think that woman's beautiful."
+
+"Come into this pastry-cook's," said Soames abruptly, and tightening
+his grip on her arm he turned into a confectioner's.  It was--for
+him--a surprising thing to do, and he said rather anxiously: "What
+will you have?"
+
+"Oh! I don't want anything.  I had a cocktail and a tremendous
+lunch."
+
+"We must have something now we're here," muttered Soames, keeping
+hold of her arm.
+
+"Two teas," he said; "and two of those nougat things."
+
+But no sooner was his body seated than his soul sprang up.  Those
+three--those three were coming in!  He heard Irene say something to
+her boy, and his answer:
+
+"Oh! no, Mum; this place is all right.  My stunt."  And the three sat
+down.
+
+At that moment, most awkward of his existence, crowded with ghosts
+and shadows from his past, in presence of the only two women he had
+ever loved--his divorced wife and his daughter by her successor--
+Soames was not so much afraid of them as of his cousin June.  She
+might make a scene--she might introduce those two children--she was
+capable of anything.  He bit too hastily at the nougat, and it stuck
+to his plate.  Working at it with his finger, he glanced at Fleur.
+She was masticating dreamily, but her eyes were on the boy.  The
+Forsyte in him said: "Think, feel, and you're done for!"  And he
+wiggled his finger desperately.  Plate!  Did Jolyon wear a plate?
+Did that woman wear a plate?  Time had been when he had seen her
+wearing nothing!  That was something, anyway, which had never been
+stolen from him.  And she knew it, though she might sit there calm
+and self-possessed, as if she had never been his wife.  An acid
+humour stirred in his Forsyte blood; a subtle pain divided by hair's
+breadth from pleasure.  If only June did not suddenly bring her
+hornets about his ears!  The boy was talking.
+
+"Of course, Auntie June"--so he called his half-sister "Auntie," did
+he?--well, she must be fifty, if she was a day!--" it's jolly good of
+you to encourage them.  Only--hang it all!"  Soames stole a glance.
+Irene's startled eyes were bent watchfully on her boy.  She--she had
+these devotions--for Bosinney--for that boy's father--for this boy!
+He touched Fleur's arm, and said:
+
+"Well, have you had enough?"
+
+"One more, Father, please."
+
+She would be sick!  He went to the counter to pay.  When he turned
+round again he saw Fleur standing near the door, holding a
+handkerchief which the boy had evidently just handed to her.
+
+"F. F.," he heard her say.  "Fleur Forsyte--it's mine all right.
+Thank you ever so."
+
+Good God!  She had caught the trick from what he'd told her in the
+Gallery--monkey!
+
+"Forsyte?  Why--that's my name too.  Perhaps we're cousins."
+
+"Really!  We must be.  There aren't any others.  I live at
+Mapledurham; where do you?"
+
+"Robin Hill."
+
+Question and answer had been so rapid that all was over before he
+could lift a finger.  He saw Irene's face alive with startled
+feeling, gave the slightest shake of his head, and slipped his arm
+through Fleur's.
+
+"Come along!" he said.
+
+She did not move.
+
+"Didn't you hear, Father?  Isn't it queer--our name's the same.  Are
+we cousins?"
+
+"What's that?" he said.  "Forsyte?  Distant, perhaps."
+
+"My name's Jolyon, sir.  Jon, for short."
+
+"Oh! Ah!" said Soames.  "Yes.  Distant.  How are you?  Very good of
+you.  Good-bye!"
+
+He moved on.
+
+"Thanks awfully," Fleur was saying.  "Au revoir!"
+
+"Au revoir!" he heard the boy reply.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
+
+
+Emerging from the "pastry-cook's," Soames' first impulse was to vent
+his nerves by saying to his daughter: 'Dropping your hand-kerchief!'
+to which her reply might well be: 'I picked that up from you!' His
+second impulse therefore was to let sleeping dogs lie.  But she would
+surely question him.  He gave her a sidelong look, and found she was
+giving him the same.  She said softly:
+
+"Why don't you like those cousins, Father?"  Soames lifted the corner
+of his lip.
+
+"What made you think that?"
+
+"Cela se voit."
+
+'That sees itself!'  What a way of putting it!  After twenty years of
+a French wife Soames had still little sympathy with her language; a
+theatrical affair and connected in his mind with all the refinements
+of domestic irony.
+
+"How?" he asked.
+
+"You must know them; and you didn't make a sign.  I saw them looking
+at you."
+
+"I've never seen the boy in my life," replied Soames with perfect
+truth.
+
+"No; but you've seen the others, dear."
+
+Soames gave her another look.  What had she picked up?  Had her Aunt
+Winifred, or Imogen, or Val Dartie and his wife, been talking?  Every
+breath of the old scandal had been carefully kept from her at home,
+and Winifred warned many times that he wouldn't have a whisper of it
+reach her for the world.  So far as she ought to know, he had never
+been married before.  But her dark eyes, whose southern glint and
+clearness often almost frightened him, met his with perfect
+innocence.
+
+"Well," he said, "your grandfather and his brother had a quarrel.
+The two families don't know each other."
+
+"How romantic!"
+
+'Now, what does she mean by that?' he thought.  The word was to him
+extravagant and dangerous--it was as if she had said: "How jolly!"
+
+"And they'll continue not to know each, other," he added, but
+instantly regretted the challenge in those words.  Fleur was smiling.
+In this age, when young people prided themselves on going their own
+ways and paying no attention to any sort of decent prejudice, he had
+said the very thing to excite her wilfulness.  Then, recollecting the
+expression on Irene's face, he breathed again.
+
+"What sort of a quarrel?" he heard Fleur say.
+
+"About a house.  It's ancient history for you.  Your grandfather died
+the day you were born.  He was ninety."
+
+"Ninety?  Are there many Forsytes besides those in the Red Book?"
+
+"I don't know," said Soames.  "They're all dispersed now.  The old
+ones are dead, except Timothy."
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.
+
+"Timothy?  Isn't that delicious?"
+
+"Not at all," said Soames.  It offended him that she should think
+"Timothy" delicious--a kind of insult to his breed.  This new
+generation mocked at anything solid and tenacious.  "You go and see
+the old boy.  He might want to prophesy."  Ah!  If Timothy could see
+the disquiet England of his great-nephews and great-nieces, he would
+certainly give tongue.  And involuntarily he glanced up at the
+Iseeum; yes--George was still in the window, with the same pink paper
+in his hand.
+
+"Where is Robin Hill, Father?"
+
+Robin Hill!  Robin Hill, round which all that tragedy had centred!
+What did she want to know for?
+
+"In Surrey," he muttered; "not far from Richmond.  Why?"
+
+"Is the house there?"
+
+"What house?"
+
+"That they quarrelled about."
+
+"Yes.  But what's all that to do with you?  We're going home to-
+morrow--you'd better be thinking about your frocks."
+
+"Bless you!  They're all thought about.  A family feud?  It's like
+the Bible, or Mark Twain--awfully exciting.  What did you do in the
+feud, Father?"
+
+"Never you mind."
+
+"Oh! But if I'm to keep it up?"
+
+"Who said you were to keep it up?"
+
+"You, darling."
+
+"I?  I said it had nothing to do with you."
+
+"Just what I think, you know; so that's all right."
+
+She was too sharp for him; fine, as Annette sometimes called her.
+Nothing for it but to distract her attention.
+
+"There's a bit of rosaline point in here," he said, stopping before a
+shop, "that I thought you might like."
+
+When he had paid for it and they had resumed their progress, Fleur
+said:
+
+"Don't you think that boy's mother is the most beautiful woman of her
+age you've ever seen?"
+
+Soames shivered.  Uncanny, the way she stuck to it!
+
+"I don't know that I noticed her."
+
+"Dear, I saw the corner of your eye."
+
+"You see everything--and a great deal more, it seems to me!"
+
+"What's her husband like?  He must be your first cousin, if your
+fathers were brothers."
+
+"Dead, for all I know," said Soames, with sudden vehemence.  "I
+haven't seen him for twenty years."
+
+"What was he?"
+
+"A painter."
+
+"That's quite jolly."
+
+The words: "If you want to please me you'll put those people out of
+your head," sprang to Soames' lips, but he choked them back--he must
+not let her see his feelings.
+
+"He once insulted me," he said.
+
+Her quick eyes rested on his face.
+
+"I see!  You didn't avenge it, and it rankles.  Poor Father!  You let
+me have a go!"
+
+It was really like lying in the dark with a mosquito hovering above
+his face.  Such pertinacity in Fleur was new to him, and, as they
+reached the hotel, he said grimly:
+
+"I did my best.  And that's enough about these people.  I'm going up
+till dinner."
+
+"I shall sit here."
+
+With a parting look at her extended in a chair--a look half-
+resentful, half-adoring--Soames moved into the lift and was
+transported to their suite on the fourth floor.  He stood by the
+window of the sitting-room which gave view over Hyde Park, and
+drummed a finger on its pane.  His feelings were confused, tetchy,
+troubled.  The throb of that old wound, scarred over by Time and new
+interests, was mingled with displeasure and anxiety, and a slight
+pain in his chest where that nougat stuff had disagreed.  Had Annette
+come in?  Not that she was any good to him in such a difficulty.
+Whenever she had questioned him about his first marriage, he had
+always shut her up; she knew nothing of it, save that it had been the
+great passion of his life, and his marriage with herself but domestic
+makeshift.  She had always kept the grudge of that up her sleeve, as
+it were, and used it commercially.  He listened.  A sound--the vague
+murmur of a woman's movements--was coming through the door.  She was
+in.  He tapped.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"I," said Soames.
+
+She had been changing her frock, and was still imperfectly clothed; a
+striking figure before her glass.  There was a certain magnificence
+about her arms, shoulders, hair, which had darkened since he first
+knew her, about the turn of her neck, the silkiness of her garments,
+her dark-lashed, greyblue eyes--she was certainly as handsome at
+forty as she had ever been.  A fine possession, an excellent
+housekeeper, a sensible and affectionate enough mother.  If only she
+weren't always so frankly cynical about the relations between them!
+Soames, who had no more real affection for her than she had for him,
+suffered from a kind of English grievance in that she had never
+dropped even the thinnest veil of sentiment over their partnership.
+Like most of his countrymen and women, he held the view that marriage
+should be based on mutual love, but that when from a marriage love
+had disappeared, or, been found never to have really existed--so that
+it was manifestly not based on love--you must not admit it.  There it
+was, and the love was not--but there you were, and must continue to
+be!  Thus you had it both ways, and were not tarred with cynicism,
+realism, and immorality like the French.  Moreover, it was necessary
+in the interests of property.  He knew that she knew that they both
+knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not to
+admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand
+what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.  He
+said:
+
+"Whom have you got at 'The Shelter' next week?"
+
+Annette went on touching her lips delicately with salve--he always
+wished she wouldn't do that.
+
+"Your sister Winifred, and the Car-r-digans"--she took up a tiny
+stick of black--"and Prosper Profond."
+
+"That Belgian chap?  Why him?"
+
+Annette turned her neck lazily, touched one eyelash, and said:
+
+"He amuses Winifred."
+
+"I want some one to amuse Fleur; she's restive."
+
+"R-restive?" repeated Annette.  "Is it the first time you see that,
+my friend?  She was born r-restive, as you call it."
+
+Would she never get that affected roll out of her r's?
+
+He touched the dress she had taken off, and asked:
+
+"What have you been doing?"
+
+Annette looked at him, reflected in her glass.  Her just-brightened
+lips smiled, rather full, rather ironical.
+
+"Enjoying myself," she said.
+
+"Oh!" answered Soames glumly.  "Ribbandry, I suppose."
+
+It was his word for all that incomprehensible running in and out of
+shops that women went in for.  "Has Fleur got her summer dresses?"
+
+"You don't ask if I have mine."
+
+"You don't care whether I do or not."
+
+"Quite right.  Well, she has; and I have mine--terribly expensive."
+
+"H'm!" said Soames.  "What does that chap Profond do in England?"
+
+Annette raised the eyebrows she had just finished.
+
+"He yachts."
+
+"Ah!" said Soames; "he's a sleepy chap."
+
+"Sometimes," answered Annette, and her face had a sort of quiet
+enjoyment.  "But sometimes very amusing."
+
+"He's got a touch of the tar-brush about him."
+
+Annette stretched herself.
+
+"Tar-brush?" she said.  "What is that?  His mother was Armenienne."
+
+"That's it, then," muttered Soames.  "Does he know anything about
+pictures?"
+
+"He knows about everything--a man of the world."
+
+"Well, get some one for Fleur.  I want to distract her.  She's going
+off on Saturday to Val Dartie and his wife; I don't like it."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Since the reason could not be explained without going into family
+history, Soames merely answered:
+
+"Racketing about.  There's too much of it."
+
+"I like that little Mrs. Val; she is very quiet and clever."
+
+"I know nothing of her except--This thing's new."  And Soames took
+up a creation from the bed.
+
+Annette received it from him.
+
+"Would you hook me?" she said.
+
+Soames hooked.  Glancing once over her shoulder into the glass, he
+saw the expression on her face, faintly amused, faintly contemptuous,
+as much as to say: "Thanks!  You will never learn!"  No, thank God,
+he wasn't a Frenchman!  He finished with a jerk, and the words: "It's
+too low here."  And he went to the door, with the wish to get away
+from her and go down to Fleur again.
+
+Annette stayed a powder-puff, and said with startling suddenness
+
+"Que to es grossier!"
+
+He knew the expression--he had reason to.  The first time she had
+used it he had thought it meant "What a grocer you are!" and had not
+known whether to be relieved or not when better informed.  He
+resented the word--he was not coarse!  If he was coarse, what was
+that chap in the room beyond his, who made those horrible noises in
+the morning when he cleared his throat, or those people in the Lounge
+who thought it well-bred to say nothing but what the whole world
+could hear at the top of their voices--quacking inanity!  Coarse,
+because he had said her dress was low!  Well, so it was!  He went out
+without reply.
+
+Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where
+he had left her.  She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot
+in silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming.  Her
+eyes showed it too--they went off like that sometimes.  And then, in
+a moment, she would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a
+monkey.  And she knew so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen.
+What was that odious word?  Flapper!  Dreadful young creatures--
+squealing and squawking and showing their legs!  The worst of them
+bad dreams, the best of them powdered angels!  Fleur was not a
+flapper, not one of those slangy, ill-bred young females.  And yet
+she was frighteningly self-willed, and full of life, and determined
+to enjoy it.  Enjoy!  The word brought no puritan terror to Soames;
+but it brought the terror suited to his temperament.  He had always
+been afraid to enjoy to-day for fear he might not enjoy tomorrow so
+much.  And it was terrifying to feel that his daughter was divested
+of that safeguard.  The very way she sat in that chair showed it--
+lost in her dream.  He had never been lost in a dream himself--there
+was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it from he did not
+know!  Certainly not from Annette!  And yet Annette, as a young girl,
+when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look.  Well,
+she had lost it now!
+
+Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down
+at a writing-table.  Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to
+write as if she had not time to breathe before she got her letter
+written.  And suddenly she saw him.  The air of desperate absorption
+vanished, she smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were
+a little puzzled and a little bored.
+
+Ah!  She was "fine"--"fine!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+AT ROBIN HILL
+
+
+Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill,
+quietly going into his affairs.  He did everything quietly now,
+because his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he
+disliked the idea of dying.  He had never realised how much till one
+day, two years ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms,
+and been told:
+
+"At any moment, on any overstrain."
+
+He had taken it with a smile--the natural Forsyte reaction against an
+unpleasant truth.  But with an increase of symptoms in the train on
+the way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over
+him.  To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work--though he did
+little enough work now!  To leave them for unknown darkness, for the
+unimaginable state, for such nothingness that he would not even be
+conscious of wind stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent
+of earth and grass.  Of such nothingness that, however hard he might
+try to conceive it, he never could, and must still hover on the hope
+that he might see again those he loved!  To realise this was to
+endure very poignant spiritual anguish.  Before he reached home that
+day he had determined to keep it from Irene.  He would have to be
+more careful than man had ever been, for the least thing would give
+it away and make her as wretched as himself, almost.  His doctor had
+passed him sound in other respects, and seventy was nothing of an
+age--he would last a long time yet, if he could.
+
+Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the
+full the subtler side of character.  Naturally not abrupt, except
+when nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate.  The sad
+patience of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a
+smile which his lips preserved even in private.  He devised
+continually all manner of cover to conceal his enforced lack of
+exertion.
+
+Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the
+Simple Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee
+with no coffee in it.  In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte
+in his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony.  Secure
+from discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had
+spent the fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might
+die to-morrow without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final
+polish to his terrestrial state.  Having docketed and enclosed it in
+his father's old Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope,
+wrote the words outside: "Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be
+found the exact state of me, J. F.," and put it in his breast-
+pocket, where it would be always about him, in case of accident.
+Then, ringing for tea, he went out to have it under the old oak-tree.
+
+All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a
+little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he
+thought habitually, like other people, of other things.  He thought
+of his son now.
+
+Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
+Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his
+dead half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed
+to avoid the evil and contain the good of the Public School system,
+may or may not contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in
+April perfectly ignorant of whit he wanted to become.  The War, which
+had promised to go on for ever, had ended just as he was about to
+join the Army, six months before his time.  It had taken him ever
+since to get used to the idea that he could now choose for himself.
+He had held with his father several discussions, from which, under a
+cheery show of being ready for anything--except, of course, the
+Church, Army, Law, Stage, Stock Exchange, Medicine, Business, and
+Engineering--Jolyon had gathered rather clearly that Jon wanted to go
+in for nothing.  He himself had felt exactly like that at the same
+age.  With him that pleasant vacuity had soon been ended by an early
+marriage, and its unhappy consequences.  Forced to become an
+underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity before his
+artistic talent had outcropped.  But having--as the simple say--
+"learned" his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that Jon
+would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his
+aversion from everything else meant that he was going to be a writer.
+Holding, however, the view that experience was necessary even for
+that profession, there seemed to Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for
+Jon, but University, travel, and perhaps the eating of dinners for
+the Bar.  After that one would see, or more probably one would not.
+In face of these proffered allurements, however, Jon had remained
+undecided.
+
+Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether
+the world had really changed.  People said that it was a new age.
+With the profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived
+that under slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it
+had been.  Mankind was still divided into two species: The few who
+had "speculation" in their souls, and the many who had none, with a
+belt of hybrids like himself in the middle.  Jon appeared to have
+speculation; it seemed to his father a bad lookout.
+
+With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard
+the boy say, a fortnight ago: "I should like to try farming, Dad; if
+it won't cost you too much.  It seems to be about the only sort of
+life that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and of course that's out
+of the question for me."
+
+Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:
+
+"All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first
+Jolyon in 1760.  It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no
+doubt, you may grow a better turnip than he did."
+
+A little dashed, Jon had answered:
+
+"But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?"
+
+"'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it, you'll
+do more good than most men, which is little enough."
+
+To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it.  I give
+him four years.  Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'
+
+After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote to
+his daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer near
+them on the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice.  Holly's
+answer had been enthusiastic.  There was an excellent man quite
+close; she and Val would love Jon to live with them.
+
+The boy was due to go to-morrow.
+
+Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the leaves of
+the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him desirable for
+thirty-two years.  The tree beneath which he sat seemed not a day
+older!  So young, the little leaves of brownish gold; so old, the
+whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk.  A tree of memories,
+which would live on hundreds of years yet, unless some barbarian cut
+it down--would see old England out at the pace things were going!  He
+remembered a night three years before, when, looking from his window,
+with his arm close round Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane
+hovering, it seemed, right over the old tree.  Next day they had
+found a bomb hole in a field on Gage's farm.  That was before he knew
+that he was under sentence of death.  He could almost have wished the
+bomb had finished him.  It would have saved a lot of hanging about,
+many hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach.  He had counted on
+living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when Irene
+would be seventy.  As it was, she would miss him.  Still there was
+Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who adored his
+mother.
+
+Under that tree, where old Jolyon--waiting for Irene to come to him
+across the lawn--had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered, whimsically,
+whether, having put everything in such perfect order, he had not
+better close his own eyes and drift away.  There was something
+undignified in o parasitically clinging on to the effortless close of
+a life wherein he regretted two things only--the long division
+between his father and himself when he was young, and the lateness of
+his union o with Irene.
+
+>From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in blossom.
+Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in blossom; and
+his heart ached suddenly because he might never see them flower
+again.  Spring!  Decidedly no man ought to have to die while his
+heart was still young enough to love beauty!  Blackbirds sang
+recklessly in the shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the leaves
+above him glistened; and over the fields was every imaginable tint of
+early foliage, burnished by the level sunlight, away to where the
+distant "smoke-bush" blue was trailed along the horizon.  Irene's
+flowers in their narrow beds had startling individuality that
+evening, little deep assertions of gay life.  Only Chinese and
+Japanese painters, and perhaps Leonardo, had known how to get that
+startling little ego into each painted flower, and bird, and beast--
+the ego, yet the sense of species, the universality of life as well.
+They were the fellows!  'I've made nothing that will live!' thought
+Jolyon; 'I've been an amateur--a mere lover, not a creator.  Still, I
+shall leave Jon behind me when I go.'   What luck that the boy had
+not been caught by that ghastly war!  He might so easily have been
+killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal.  Jon
+would do something some day--if the Age didn't spoil him--an
+imaginative chap!  His whim to take up farming was but a bit of
+sentiment, and about as likely to last.  And just then he saw them
+coming up the field: Irene and the boy; walking from the station,
+with their arms linked.  And getting up, he strolled down through the
+new rose garden to meet them....
+
+Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window.  She
+sat there without speaking till he said:
+
+"What is it, my love?"
+
+"We had an encounter to-day."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"Soames."
+
+Soames!  He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two
+years; conscious that it was bad for him.  And, now, his heart moved
+in a disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within his
+chest.
+
+Irene went on quietly:
+
+"He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
+confectioner's where we had tea."
+
+Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.
+
+"How did he look?"
+
+"Grey; but otherwise much the same."
+
+"And the daughter?"
+
+"Pretty.  At least, Jon thought so."
+
+Jolyon's heart side-slipped again.  His wife's face had a strained
+and puzzled look.
+
+
+"You didn't-?" he began.
+
+"No; but Jon knows their name.  The girl dropped her handkerchief and
+he picked it up."
+
+Jolyon sat down on his bed.  An evil chance!
+
+"June was with you.  Did she put her foot into it?"
+
+"No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it
+was."
+
+Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
+
+"I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from him.
+He'll find out some day."
+
+"The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard
+judgment.  When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your
+mother if she had done what I have?"
+
+Yes!  There it was!  Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of
+the tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the
+prisoned grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or
+passion--knew nothing at all, as yet!
+
+"What have you told him?" he said at last.
+
+"That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had
+never cared much for your family, or they for you.  I expect he will
+be asking you."
+
+Jolyon smiled.  "This promises to take the place of air-raids," he
+said.  "After all, one misses them."
+
+Irene looked up at him.
+
+"We've known it would come some day."
+
+He answered her with sudden energy:
+
+"I could never stand seeing Jon blame you.  He shan't do that, even
+in thought.  He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's put to
+him properly.  I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
+otherwise."
+
+"Not yet, Jolyon."
+
+That was like her--she had no foresight, and never went to meet
+trouble.  Still--who knew?--she might be right.  It was ill going
+against a mother's instinct.  It might be well to let the boy go on,
+if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by which
+he could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy,
+longing, had deepened his charity.  All the same, one must take
+precautions--every precaution possible!  And, long after Irene had
+left him, he lay awake turning over those precautions.  He must write
+to Holly, telling her that Jon knew nothing as yet of family history.
+Holly was discreet, she would make sure of her husband, she would see
+to it!  Jon could take the letter with him when he went to-morrow.
+
+And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate
+died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for
+Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so
+rounded off and polished....
+
+But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the
+prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, "love
+at first sight!"  He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of
+those dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno--a conviction that
+this was his 'dream'; so that what followed had seemed to him at once
+natural and miraculous.  Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for
+one who was terribly susceptible to the charm of words.  In a
+homoeopathic Age, when boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up
+in early life till sex was almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-
+fashioned.  His modern school took boys only, and his holidays had
+been spent at Robin Hill with boy friends, or his parents alone.  He
+had never, therefore, been inoculated against the germs of love by
+small doses of the poison.  And now in the dark his temperature was
+mounting fast.  He lay awake, featuring Fleur--as they called it--
+recalling her words, especially that "Au revoir!" so soft and
+sprightly.
+
+He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis
+shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and
+out through the study window.  It was just light; there was a smell
+of grass.  'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!'  It was mysteriously white
+out of doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to
+chirp.  'I'll go down into the coppice,' he thought.  He ran down
+through the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed
+into the coppice.  Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the
+larch-trees there was mystery--the air, as it were, composed of that
+romantic quality.  Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the
+bluebells in the sharpening light.  Fleur!  It rhymed with her!  And
+she lived at Mapleduram--a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere.
+He could find it in the atlas presently.  He would write to her.  But
+would she answer?  Oh! She must.  She had said "Au revoir!"  Not
+good-bye!  What luck that she had dropped her handkerchief!  He would
+never have known her but for that.  And the more he thought of that
+handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed.  Fleur!  It certainly
+rhymed with her!  Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be
+joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.
+
+Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then
+returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his
+bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration.  Then, remembering that the
+study window was open, he went down and shut it, first removing the
+ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his feeling.  The thing was
+too deep to be revealed to mortal soul-even-to his mother.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE MAUSOLEUM
+
+
+There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time,
+leaving their bodies in the limbo of London.  Such was not quite the
+condition of "Timothy's" on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul
+still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the
+atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose
+windows are only opened to air it twice a day.
+
+To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box,
+a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy.  One did not
+reach him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of
+old-time habit or absentmindedness, would drive up once in a blue
+moon and ask after their surviving uncle.  Such were Francie, now
+quite emancipated from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia,
+emancipated from old Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her "man of
+the world."  But, after all, everybody was emancipated now, or said
+they were--perhaps not quite the same thing!
+
+When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on
+the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation
+of seeing Timothy in the flesh.  His heart made a faint demonstration
+within him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly
+whitened doorstep of that little house where four Forsytes had once
+lived, and now but one dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into
+which Soames had come and out of which he had gone times without
+number, divested of, or burdened with, fardels of family gossip; the
+house of the "old people" of another century, another age.
+
+The sight of Smither--still corseted up to the armpits because the
+new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never
+been considered "nice" by Aunts Juley and Hester--brought a pale
+friendliness to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to
+old pattern in every detail, an invaluable servant--none such left--
+smiling back at him, with the words: "Why! it's Mr. Soames, after all
+this time!  And how are you, sir?  Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to
+know you've been."
+
+"How is he?"
+
+"Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's a
+wonderful man.  As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It
+would please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how
+he relishes a baked apple still.  But he's quite deaf.  And a mercy,
+I always think.  For what we should have done with him in the air-
+raids, I don't know."
+
+"Ah!" said Soames.  "What did you do with him?"
+
+"We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the
+cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang.  It would never
+have done to let him know there was a war on.  As I said to Cook, 'If
+Mr. Timothy rings, they may do what they like--I'm going up.  My dear
+mistresses would have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody
+going to him.'  But he slept through them all beautiful.  And the one
+in the daytime he was having his bath.  It was a mercy, because he
+might have noticed the people in the street all looking up--he often
+looks out of the window."
+
+"Quite!" murmured Soames.  Smither was getting garrulous!  "I just
+want to look round and see if there's anything to be done."
+
+"Yes, sir.  I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice in
+the dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of.  It's funny
+they should be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not
+coming down, just before the War.  But they're nasty little things;
+you never know where they'll take you next."
+
+"Does he leave his bed?"--
+
+"Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window
+in the morning, not to risk a change of air.  And he's quite
+comfortable in himself; has his Will out every day regular.  It's a
+great consolation to him--that."
+
+"Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything
+to say to me."
+
+Smither coloured up above her corsets.
+
+"It will be an occasion!" she said.  "Shall I take you round the
+house, sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?"
+
+"No, you go to him," said Soames.  "I can go round the house by
+myself."
+
+One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt
+that he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so
+saturated with the past.  When Smither, creaking with excitement, had
+left him, Soames entered the dining-room and sniffed.  In his opinion
+it wasn't mice, but incipient wood-rot, and he examined the
+panelling.  Whether it was worth a coat of paint, at Timothy's age,
+he was not sure.  The room had always been the most modern in the
+house; and only a faint smile curled Soames' lips and nostrils.
+Walls of a rich green surmounted the oak dado; a heavy metal
+chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling divided by imitation beams.
+The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a bargain, one day at
+Jobson's sixty years ago--three Snyder "still lifes," two faintly
+coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather charming, which bore
+the initials "J. R."--Timothy had always believed they might turn out
+to be Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who admired them, had discovered
+that they were only John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of a white
+pony being shod.  Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed dark
+mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and a
+mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
+apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body since
+he was four years old.  He looked especially at the two drawings, and
+thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'
+
+>From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study.  He did not
+remember ever having been in that room.  It was lined from floor to
+ceiling with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity.  One wall
+seemed devoted to educational books, which Timothy's firm had
+published two generations back-sometimes as many as twenty copies of
+one book.  Soames read their titles and shuddered.  The middle wall
+had precisely the same books as used to be in the library at his own
+father's in Park Lane, from which he deduced the fancy that James and
+his youngest brother had gone out together one day and bought a brace
+of small libraries.  The third wall he approached with more
+excitement.  Here, surely, Timothy's own taste would be found.  It
+was.  The books were dummies.  The fourth wall was all heavily
+curtained window.  And turned toward it was a large chair with a
+mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy
+of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to
+come down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him
+still.  In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited
+by Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but
+England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very
+sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the
+pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman;
+all due to Swithin, who was always taking things into his head, and
+who, thank goodness, had been sick too.  Soames knew all about it,
+having heard the tale fifty times at least from one or other of them.
+He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak
+and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs
+which had died on it in latitude 44.
+
+'Mausoleum!' he thought.  'George was right!'  And he went out and up
+the stairs.  On the half-landing he stopped before the case of
+stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood.  They looked
+not a day older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass.  If the case
+were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing
+would crumble, he suspected.  It wouldn't be worth putting that into
+the sale!  And suddenly he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann--dear
+old Aunt Ann--holding him by the hand in front of that case and
+saying: "Look, Soamey!  Aren't they bright and pretty, dear little
+humming-birds!"  Soames remembered his own answer: "They don't hum,
+Auntie."  He must have been six, in a black velveteen suit with a
+light-blue collar-he remembered that suit well!  Aunt Ann with her
+ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave old aquiline
+smile--a fine old lady, Aunt Ann!  He moved on up to the drawing-room
+door.  There on each side of it were the groups of miniatures.  Those
+he would certainly buy in!  The miniatures of his four aunts, one of
+his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy.
+They had all been painted by a young lady friend of the family at a
+time, 1830, about, when miniatures were considered very genteel, and
+lasting too, painted as they were on ivory.  Many a time had he heard
+the tale of that young lady: "Very talented, my dear; she had quite a
+weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went into a consumption
+and died: so like Keats--we often spoke of it."
+
+Well, there they were!  Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan--quite a small
+child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white
+waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on
+heaven.  Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been
+rather like that--a wonderful man to the last.  Yes, she must have
+had talent, and miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet
+of their own, little subject to the currents of competition on
+aesthetic Change.  Soames opened the drawing-room door.  The room was
+dusted, the furniture uncovered, the curtains drawn back, precisely
+as if his aunts still dwelt there patiently waiting.  And a thought
+came to him: When Timothy died--why not?  Would it not be almost a
+duty to preserve this house--like Carlyle's--and put up a tablet, and
+show it?  "Specimen of mid-Victorian abode--entrance, one shilling,
+with catalogue."  After all, it was the completest thing, and perhaps
+the deadest in the London of to-day.  Perfect in its special taste
+and culture, if, that is, he took down and carried over to his own
+collection the four Barbizon pictures he had given them.  The still
+sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned with red flowers and
+ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the cast-iron grate; the
+mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of little knickknacks; the
+beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey, Cowper, Coleridge,
+Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in a
+bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full
+of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their mother's
+father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow
+elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte,
+who had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery
+writing on it, recording God knew what!  And the pictures crowding on
+the walls--all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like
+tile foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that--pictures
+bright and illustrative, "Telling the Bees," "Hey for the Ferry!" and
+two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them
+by Swithin.  Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed a
+thousand times in supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection
+of bright, smooth gilt frames.
+
+And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed
+as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it.  And the
+gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked.  And on one side of
+the fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her
+Aunt Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright.
+And on the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to
+the light, for Aunt Hester.  Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to
+see them sitting there.  Ah!  and the atmosphere--even now, of too
+many stuffs and washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried
+bees' wings.  'No,' he thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it
+ought to be preserved.'  And, by George, they might laugh at it, but
+for a standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness
+of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day hollow--to-day
+with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its cross-legged,
+bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down to the waist if
+you took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr within each Forsyte but
+hardly his idea of a lady), with their feet, too, screwed round the
+legs of their chairs while they ate, and their "So longs," and their
+"Old Beans," and their laughter--girls who gave him the shudders
+whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed,
+capable, older women who managed life and gave him the shudders too.
+No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or
+very much their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and
+reverence for past and future.
+
+With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing up-
+stairs.  He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order of
+the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls.  At
+the top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors.  Which of them
+was Timothy's?  And he listened.  A sound, as of a child slowly
+dragging a hobby-horse about, came to his ears.  That must be
+Timothy!  He tapped, and a door was opened by Smither, very red in
+the face.
+
+Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him
+to attend.  If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see
+him through the door.
+
+Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.
+
+The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
+impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
+affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the
+window, a distance of some twelve feet.  The lower part of his square
+face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as
+short as it could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where
+the hair was also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a
+good yellow.  One hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the
+skirt of his Jaeger dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his
+bed-socked ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers.  The
+expression on his face was that of a crossed child, intent on
+something that he has not got.  Each time he turned he stumped the
+stick, and then dragged it, as if to show that he could do without
+it:
+
+"He still looks strong," said Soames under his breath.
+
+"Oh! yes, sir.  You should see him take his bath--it's wonderful; he
+does enjoy it so."
+
+Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight.  Timothy had resumed
+his babyhood.
+
+"Does he take any interest in things generally?" he said, also loud.
+
+"Oh I yes, sir; his food and his Will.  It's quite a sight to see him
+turn it over and over, not to read it, of course; and every now and
+then he asks the price of Consols, and I write it on a slate for him-
+very large.  Of course, I always write the same, what they were when
+he last took notice, in 1914.  We got the doctor to forbid him to
+read the paper when the War broke out.  Oh! he did take on about that
+at first.  But he soon came round, because he knew it tired him; and
+he's a wonder to conserve energy as he used to call it when my dear
+mistresses were alive, bless their hearts!  How he did go on at them
+about that; they were always so active, if you remember, Mr. Soames."
+
+"What would happen if I were to go in?" asked Soames: "Would he
+remember me?  I made his Will, you know, after Miss Hester died in
+1907."
+
+"Oh! that, sir," replied Smither doubtfully, "I couldn't take on me
+to say.  I think he might; he really is a wonderful man for his age."
+
+Soames moved into the doorway, and waiting for Timothy to turn, said
+in a loud voice: "Uncle Timothy!"
+
+Timothy trailed back half-way, and halted.
+
+"Eh?" he said.
+
+"Soames," cried Soames at the top of his voice, holding out his hand,
+"Soames Forsyte!"
+
+"No!" said Timothy, and stumping his stick loudly on the floor, he
+continued his walk.
+
+"It doesn't seem to work," said Soames.
+
+"No, sir," replied Smither, rather crestfallen; "you see, he hasn't
+finished his walk.  It always was one thing at a time with him.  I
+expect he'll ask me this afternoon if you came about the gas, and a
+pretty job I shall have to make him understand."
+
+"Do you think he ought to have a man about him?"
+
+Smither held up her hands.  "A man!  Oh! no.  Cook and me can manage
+perfectly.  A strange man about would send him crazy in no time.  And
+my mistresses wouldn't like the idea of a man in the house.  Besides,
+we're so--proud of him."
+
+"I suppose the doctor comes?"
+
+"Every morning.  He makes special terms for such a quantity, and Mr.
+Timothy's so used, he doesn't take a bit of notice, except to put out
+his tongue."
+
+"Well," said Soames, turning away, "it's rather sad and painful to
+me."
+
+"Oh! sir," returned Smither anxiously, "you mustn't think that.  Now
+that he can't worry about things, he quite enjoys his life, really he
+does.  As I say to Cook, Mr. Timothy is more of a man than he ever
+was.  You see, when he's not walkin', or takin' his bath, he's
+eatin', and when he's not eatin', he's sleepin'; and there it is.
+There isn't an ache or a care about him anywhere."
+
+"Well," said Soames, "there's something in that.  I'll go down.  By
+the way, let me see his Will."
+
+"I should have to take my time about that, sir; he keeps it under his
+pillow, and he'd see me, while he's active."
+
+"I only want to know if it's the one I made," said Soames; "you take
+a look at its date some time, and let me know."
+
+"Yes, sir; but I'm sure it's the same, because me and Cook witnessed,
+you remember, and there's our names on it still, and we've only done
+it once."
+
+"Quite," said Soames.  He did remember.  Smither and Jane had been
+proper witnesses, having been left nothing in the Will that they
+might have no interest in Timothy's death.  It had been--he fully
+admitted--an almost improper precaution, but Timothy had wished it,
+and, after all, Aunt Hester had provided for them amply.
+
+"Very well," he said; "good-bye, Smither.  Look after him, and if he
+should say anything at any time, put it down, and let me know."
+
+"Oh I yes, Mr. Soames; I'll be sure to do that.  It's been such a
+pleasant change to see you.  Cook will be quite excited when I tell
+her."
+
+Soames shook her hand and went down-stairs.  He stood for fully two
+minutes by the hat-stand whereon he had hung his hat so many times.
+'So it all passes,' he was thinking; 'passes and begins again.  Poor
+old chap!'  And he listened, if perchance the sound of Timothy
+trailing his hobby-horse might come down the well of the stairs; or
+some ghost of an old face show over the bannisters, and an old voice
+say: 'Why, it's dear Soames, and we were only saying that we hadn't
+seen him for a week!'
+
+Nothing--nothing!  Just the scent of camphor, and dust-motes in a
+sunbeam through the fanlight over the door.  The little old house!  A
+mausoleum!  And, turning on his heel, he went out, and caught his
+train.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE NATIVE HEATH
+
+
+          "His foot's upon his native heath,
+          His name's--Val Dartie."
+
+With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his
+age, set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old
+manor-house he had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs.  His
+destination was Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn
+of 1899, when he stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire.  He
+paused at the door to give his wife a kiss, and put a flask of port
+into his pocket.
+
+"Don't overtire your leg, Val, and don't bet too much."
+
+With the pressure of her chest against his own, and her eyes looking
+into his, Val felt both leg and pocket safe.  He should be moderate;
+Holly was always right--she had a natural aptitude.  It did not seem
+so remarkable to him, perhaps, as it might to others, that--half
+Dartie as he was--he should have been perfectly faithful to his young
+first cousin during the twenty years since he married her
+romantically out in the Boer War; and faithful without any feeling of
+sacrifice or boredom--she was so quick, so slyly always a little in
+front of his mood.  Being first cousins they had decided, rather
+needlessly, to have no children; and, though a little sallower, she
+had kept her looks, her slimness, and the colour of her dark hair.
+Val particularly admired the life of her own she carried on, besides
+carrying on his, and riding better every year.  She kept up her
+music, she read an awful lot--novels, poetry, all sorts of stuff.
+Out on their farm in Cape colony she had looked after all the
+"nigger" babies and women in a miraculous manner.  She was, in fact,
+clever; yet made no fuss about it, and had no "side."  Though not
+remarkable for humility, Val had come to have the feeling that she
+was his superior, and he did not grudge it--a great tribute.  It
+might be noted that he never looked at Holly without her knowing of
+it, but that she looked at him sometimes unawares.
+
+He had kissed her in the porch because he should not be doing so on
+the platform, though she was going to the station with him, to drive
+the car back.  Tanned and wrinkled by Colonial weather and the wiles
+inseparable from horses, and handicapped by the leg which, weakened
+in the Boer War, had probably saved his life in the War just past,
+Val was still much as he had been in the days of his courtship; his
+smile as wide and charming, his eyelashes, if anything, thicker and
+darker, his eyes screwed up under them, as bright a grey, his
+freckles rather deeper, his hair a little grizzled at the sides.  He
+gave the impression of one who has lived actively with horses in a
+sunny climate.
+
+Twisting the car sharp round at the gate, he said:
+
+"When is young Jon coming?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+"Is there anything you want for him?  I could bring it down on
+Saturday."
+
+"No; but you might come by the same train as Fleur--one-forty."
+
+Val gave the Ford full rein; he still drove like a man in a new
+country on bad roads, who refuses to compromise, and expects heaven
+at every hole.
+
+"That's a young woman who knows her way about," he said.  "I say, has
+it struck you?"
+
+"Yes," said Holly.
+
+"Uncle Soames and your Dad--bit awkward, isn't it?"
+
+"She won't know, and he won't know, and nothing must be said, of
+course.  It's only for five days, Val."
+
+"Stable secret!  Righto!"  If Holly thought it safe, it was.
+Glancing slyly round at him, she said: "Did you notice how
+beautifully she asked herself?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Well, she did.  What do you think of her, Val?"
+
+"Pretty and clever; but she might run out at any corner if she got
+her monkey up, I should say."
+
+"I'm wondering," Holly murmured, "whether she is the modern young
+woman.  One feels at sea coming home into all this."
+
+"You?  You get the hang of things so quick."
+
+Holly slid her hand into his coat-pocket.
+
+"You keep one in the know," said Val encouraged.  "What do you think
+of that Belgian fellow, Profond?"
+
+"I think he's rather 'a good devil.'"
+
+Val grinned.
+
+"He seems to me a queer fish for a friend of our family.  In fact,
+our family is in pretty queer waters, with Uncle Soames marrying a
+Frenchwoman, and your Dad marrying Soames's first.  Our grandfathers
+would have had fits!"
+
+"So would anybody's, my dear."
+
+"This car," Val said suddenly, "wants rousing; she doesn't get her
+hind legs under her uphill.  I shall have to give her her head on the
+slope if I'm to catch that train."
+
+There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really
+sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his
+guidance compared with its running under that of Holly was always
+noticeable.  He caught the train.
+
+"Take care going home; she'll throw you down if she can.  Good-bye,
+darling."
+
+"Good-bye," called Holly, and kissed her hand.
+
+In the train, after quarter of an hour's indecision between thoughts
+of Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim
+memory of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square
+book, all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and
+shape of horses.  The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a
+certain strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the
+Dartie hankering for a Nutter.  On getting back to England, after the
+profitable sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing
+that the sun seldom shone, Val had said to himself: "I've absolutely
+got to have an interest in life, or this country will give me the
+blues.  Hunting's not enough, I'll breed and I'll train."  With just
+that extra pinch of shrewdness and decision imparted by long
+residence in a new country, Val had seen the weak point of modern
+breeding.  They were all hypnotised by fashion and high price.  He
+should buy for looks, and let names go hang!  And here he was
+already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain of blood!
+Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in this damned
+climate which makes one go round in a ring.  All the same, I must
+have a strain of Mayfly blood.'
+
+In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes.  It was one of those
+quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather
+than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock.
+His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in
+which he had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the
+horseman, and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he
+called "the silly haw-haw" of some Englishmen, the "flapping
+cockatoory" of some English-women--Holly had none of that and Holly
+was his model.  Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to
+the heart of a transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way
+to the heart of a Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:
+
+"Mr. Val Dartie?  How's Mrs. Val Dartie?  She's well, I hope."  And
+he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.
+
+"Prosper Profond--I met you at lunch," said the voice.
+
+"How are you?" murmured Val.
+
+"I'm very well," replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
+inimitable slowness.  "A good devil," Holly had called him.  Well!
+He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed
+beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes,
+unexpectedly intelligent.
+
+"Here's a gentleman wants to know you--cousin of yours--Mr. George
+Forsyde."
+
+Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
+lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
+remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father
+at the Iseeum Club.
+
+"I used to go racing with your father," George was saying: "How's the
+stud?  Like to buy one of my screws?"
+
+Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen
+out of breeding.  They believed in nothing over here, not even in
+horses.  George Forsyte, Prosper Profond!  The devil himself was not
+more disillusioned than those two.
+
+"Didn't know you were a racing man," he said to Monsieur Profond.
+
+"I'm not.  I don't care for it.  I'm a yachtin' man.  I don't care
+for yachtin' either, but I like to see my friends.  I've got some
+lunch, Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you'd like to 'ave
+some; not much--just a small one--in my car."
+
+"Thanks," said Val; "very good of you.  I'll come along in about
+quarter of an hour."
+
+"Over there.  Mr. Forsyde's comin'," and Monsieur Profond "poinded"
+with a yellow-gloved finger; "small car, with a small lunch"; he
+moved on, groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte following,
+neat, huge, and with his jesting air.
+
+Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly.  George Forsyte, of course,
+was an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val
+felt extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which
+those two had laughed.  The animal had lost reality.
+
+"That 'small' mare"--he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur Profond-
+-"what do you see in her?--we must all die!"
+
+And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still!  The Mayfly
+strain--was it any better than any other?  He might just as well have
+a flutter with his money instead.
+
+"No, by gum!" he muttered suddenly, "if it's no good breeding horses,
+it's no good doing anything.  What did I come for?  I'll buy her."
+
+He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the
+stand.  Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers
+looking as if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their
+lives; tall, flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women;
+young men with an air as if trying to take it seriously--two or three
+of them with only one arm.
+
+'Life over here's a game!'  thought Val.  'Muffin bell rings, horses
+run, money changes hands; ring again, run again, money changes back.'
+
+But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to
+watch the Mayfly filly canter down.  She moved well; and he made his
+way over to the "small" car.  The "small" lunch was the sort a man
+dreams of but seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond
+walked back with him to the paddock.
+
+"Your wife's a nice woman," was his surprising remark.
+
+"Nicest woman I know," returned Val dryly.
+
+"Yes," said Monsieur Profond; "she has a nice face.  I admire nice
+women."
+
+Val looked at him suspiciously, but something kindly and direct in
+the heavy diabolism of his companion disarmed him for the moment.
+
+"Any time you like to come on my yacht, I'll give her a small
+cruise."
+
+"Thanks," said Val, in arms again, "she hates the sea."
+
+"So do I," said Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Then why do you yacht?"
+
+The Belgian's eyes smiled.  "Oh! I don't know.  I've done everything;
+it's the last thing I'm doin'."
+
+"It must be d-d expensive.  I should want more reason than that."
+
+Monsieur Prosper Profond raised his eyebrows, and puffed out a heavy
+lower lip.
+
+"I'm an easy-goin' man," he said.
+
+"Were you in the War?" asked Val.
+
+"Ye-es.  I've done that too.  I was gassed; it was a small bit
+unpleasant."  He smiled with a deep and sleepy air of prosperity, as
+if he had caught it from his name.
+
+Whether his saying "small" when he ought to have said "little" was
+genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
+evidently capable of anything.
+
+Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
+Monsieur Profond said:
+
+"You goin' to bid?"
+
+Val nodded.  With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of
+faith.  Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the
+forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year
+to which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her
+grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could touch,
+having spent most of what he had realised from his South African farm
+on his establishment in Sussex.  And very soon he was thinking: 'Dash
+it! she's going beyond me!'  His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he
+dropped out of the bidding.  The Mayfly filly passed under the hammer
+at seven hundred and fifty guineas.  He was turning away vexed when
+the slow voice of Monsieur Profond said in his ear:
+
+"Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you take
+her and give her to your wife."
+
+Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour
+in his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.
+
+"I made a small lot of money in the War," began Monsieur Profond in
+answer to that look.  "I 'ad armament shares.  I like to give it
+away.  I'm always makin' money.  I want very small lot myself.  I
+like my friends to 'ave it."
+
+"I'll buy her of you at the price you gave," said Val with sudden
+resolution.
+
+"No," said Monsieur Profond.  "You take her.  I don' want her."
+
+"Hang it! one doesn't--"
+
+"Why not?" smiled Monsieur Profond.  "I'm a friend of your family."
+
+"Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars," said Val
+impatiently.
+
+"All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you like
+with her."
+
+"So long as she's yours," said Val.  "I don't mind that."
+
+"That's all right," murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.
+
+Val watched; he might be "a good devil," but then again he might not.
+He saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no more.
+
+He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
+Street.
+
+Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering
+the three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague
+Dartie, till almost happily released by a French staircase.  It was
+to her a vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from
+South Africa after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and
+to have taken a fancy to his wife.  Winifred, who in the late
+seventies, before her marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom,
+pleasure, and fashion, confessed her youth outclassed by the
+donzellas of the day.  They seemed, for instance, to regard marriage
+as an incident, and Winifred sometimes regretted that she had not
+done the same; a second, third, fourth incident might have secured
+her a partner of less dazzling inebriety; though, after all, he had
+left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a colonel and unharmed
+by the War)--none of whom had been divorced as yet.  The steadiness of
+her children often amazed one who remembered their father; but, as
+she was fond of believing, they were really all Forsytes, favouring
+herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen.  Her brother's
+"little girl" Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred.  The child was as
+restless as any of these modern young women--"She's a small flame in
+a draught," Prosper Profond had said one day after dinner--but she
+did not flop, or talk at the top of her voice.  The steady Forsyteism
+in Winifred's own character instinctively resented the feeling in the
+air, the modern girl's habits and her motto: "All's much of a
+muchness!  Spend, to-morrow we shall be poor!"  She found it a saving
+grace in Fleur that, having set her heart on a thing, she had no
+change of heart until she got it--though--what happened after, Fleur
+was, of course, too young to have made evident.  The child was a
+"very pretty little thing," too, and quite a credit to take about,
+with her mother's French taste and gift for wearing clothes;
+everybody turned to look at Fleur--great consideration to Winifred, a
+lover of the style and distinction which had so cruelly deceived her
+in the case of Montague Dartie.
+
+In discussing her with Val, at breakfast on Saturday morning,
+Winifred dwelt on the family skeleton.
+
+"That little affair of your father-in-law and your Aunt Irene, Val--
+it's old as the hills, of course, Fleur need know nothing about it--
+making a fuss.  Your Uncle Soames is very particular about that.  So
+you'll be careful."
+
+"Yes!  But it's dashed awkward--Holly's young half-brother is coming
+to live with us while he learns farming.  He's there already."
+
+"Oh!" said Winifred.  "That is a gaff!  What is he like?"
+
+"Only saw him once--at Robin Hill, when we were home in 1909; he was
+naked and painted blue and yellow in stripes--a jolly little chap."
+
+Winifred thought that "rather nice," and added comfortably: "Well,
+Holly's sensible; she'll know how to deal with it.  I shan't tell
+your uncle.  It'll only bother him.  It's a great comfort to have you
+back, my dear boy, now that I'm getting on."
+
+"Getting on!  Why!  you're as young as ever.  That chap Profond,
+Mother, is he all right?"
+
+"Prosper Profond!  Oh! the most amusing man I know."
+
+Val grunted, and recounted the story of the Mayfly filly.
+
+"That's so like him," murmured Winifred.  "He does all sorts of
+things."
+
+"Well," said Val shrewdly, "our family haven't been too lucky with
+that kind of cattle; they're too light-hearted for us."
+
+It was true, and Winifred's blue study lasted a full minute before
+she answered:
+
+"Oh! well!  He's a foreigner, Val; one must make allowances."
+
+"All right, I'll use his filly and make it up to him, somehow."
+
+And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and left
+her for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria station.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+JON
+
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen
+deeply in love, fortunately with something of her own, for the object
+of her passion was the prospect in front of her windows, the cool
+clear light on the green Downs.  It was England again, at last!
+England more beautiful than she had dreamed.  Chance had, in fact,
+guided the Val Darties to a spot where the South Downs had real charm
+when the sun shone.  Holly had enough of her father's eye to
+apprehend the rare quality of their outlines and chalky radiance; to
+go up there by the ravine-like lane and wander along toward
+Chanctonbury or Amberley, was still a delight which she hardly
+attempted to share with Val, whose admiration of Nature was confused
+by a Forsyte's instinct for getting something out of it, such as the
+condition of the turf for his horses' exercise.
+
+Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she
+promised herself that the first use she would make of Jon would be to
+take him up there, and show him "the view" under this May-day sky.
+
+She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a motherliness
+not exhausted by Val.  A three-day visit to Robin Hill, soon after
+their arrival home, had yielded no sight of him--he was still at
+school; so that her recollection, like Val's, was of a little sunny-
+haired boy, striped blue and yellow, down by the pond.
+
+Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad, embarrassing.
+Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's courtship; the ageing
+of her father, not seen for twenty years, something funereal in his
+ironic gentleness which did not escape one who had much subtle
+instinct; above all, the presence of her stepmother, whom she could
+still vaguely remember as the "lady in grey" of days when she was
+little and grandfather alive and Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because
+that intruder gave her music lessons--all these confused and
+tantalised a spirit which had longed to find Robin Hill untroubled.
+But Holly was adept at keeping things to herself, and all had seemed
+to go quite well.
+
+Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she was
+sure had trembled.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said, "the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has it?
+If only you could have brought Jolly back with you!  I say, can you
+stand this spiritualistic racket?  When the oak-tree dies, it dies,
+I'm afraid."
+
+>From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had let
+the cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.
+
+"Spiritualism--queer word, when the more they manifest the more they
+prove that they've got hold of matter."
+
+"How?" said Holly.
+
+"Why!  Look at their photographs of auric presences.  You must have
+something material for light and shade to fall on before you can take
+a photograph.  No, it'll end in our calling all matter spirit, or all
+spirit matter--I don't know which."
+
+"But don't you believe in survival, Dad?"
+
+Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face
+impressed her deeply.
+
+"Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death.  I've
+been looking into it a bit.  But for the life of me I can't find
+anything that telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from the
+storehouse of this world can't account for just as well.  Wish I
+could!  Wishes father thought but they don't breed evidence."
+Holly had pressed her lips again to his forehead with the feeling
+that it confirmed his theory that all matter was becoming spirit--his
+brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.
+
+But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been watching,
+unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter from Jon.  It
+was--she decided--the prettiest sight she had ever seen.  Irene, lost
+as it were in the letter of her boy, stood at a window where the
+light fell on her face and her fine grey hair; her lips were moving,
+smiling, her dark eyes laughing, dancing, and the hand which did not
+hold the letter was pressed against her breast.  Holly withdrew as
+from a vision of perfect love, convinced that Jon must be nice.
+
+When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in either
+hand, she was confirmed in her predisposition.  He was a little like
+Jolly, that long-lost idol of her childhood, but eager-looking and
+less formal, with deeper eyes and brighter-coloured hair, for he wore
+no hat; altogether a very interesting "little" brother!
+
+His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance
+in the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him
+home, instead of his driving her.  Shouldn't he have a shot?  They
+hadn't a car at Robin Hill since the War, of course, and he had only
+driven once, and landed up a bank, so she oughtn't to mind his
+trying.  His laugh, soft and infectious, was very attractive, though
+that word, she had heard, was now quite old-fashioned.  When they
+reached the house he pulled out a crumpled letter which she read
+while he was washing--a quite short letter, which must have cost her
+father many a pang to write.
+
+
+"MY DEAR,
+
+"You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of
+family history.  His mother and I think he is too young at present.
+The boy is very dear, and the apple of her eye.  Verbum sapientibus.
+your loving father,
+
+"J. F."
+
+
+That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur was
+coming.
+
+After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up the
+hill.  They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit grown
+over with brambles and goosepenny.  Milkwort and liverwort starred
+the green slope, the larks sang, and thrushes in the brake, and now
+and then a gull flighting inland would wheel very white against the
+paling sky, where the vague moon was coming up.  Delicious fragrance
+came to them, as if little invisible creatures were running and
+treading scent out of the blades of grass.
+
+Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:
+
+"I say, this is wonderful!  There's no fat on it at all.  Gull's
+flight and sheep-bells"
+
+"'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'!  You're a poet, my dear!"
+
+Jon sighed.
+
+"Oh, Golly!  No go!"
+
+"Try!  I used to at your age."
+
+"Did you?  Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so rotten.  Have you any of
+yours for me to see?"
+
+"My dear," Holly murmured, "I've been married nineteen years.  I only
+wrote verses when I wanted to be."
+
+"Oh!" said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she could
+see was a charming colour.  Was Jon "touched in the wind," then, as
+Val would have called it?  Already?  But, if so, all the better, he
+would take no notice of young Fleur.  Besides, on Monday he would
+begin his farming.  And she smiled.  Was it Burns who followed the
+plough, or only Piers Plowman?  Nearly every young man and most young
+women seemed to be poets now, judging from the number of their books
+she had read out in South Africa, importing them from Hatchus and
+Bumphards; and quite good--oh! quite; much better than she had been
+herself!  But then poetry had only really come in since her day--with
+motor-cars.  Another long talk after dinner over a wood fire in the
+low hall, and there seemed little left to know about Jon except
+anything of real importance.  Holly parted from him at his bedroom
+door, having seen twice over that he had everything, with the
+conviction that she would love him, and Val would like him.  He was
+eager, but did not gush; he was a splendid listener, sympathetic,
+reticent about himself.  He evidently loved their father, and adored
+his mother.  He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games.
+He saved moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them
+out of doors in screws of paper sooner than kill them.  In a word, he
+was amiable.  She went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer
+horribly if anybody hurt him; but who would hurt him?
+
+Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of paper
+and a pencil, writing his first "real poem" by the light of a candle
+because there was not enough moon to see by, only enough to make the
+night seem fluttery and as if engraved on silver.  Just the night for
+Fleur to walk, and turn her eyes, and lead on-over the hills and far
+away.  And Jon, deeply furrowed in his ingenuous brow, made marks on
+the paper and rubbed them out and wrote them in again, and did all
+that was necessary for the completion of a work of art; and he had a
+feeling such as the winds of Spring must have, trying their first
+songs among the coming blossom.  Jon was one of those boys (not many)
+in whom a home-trained love of beauty had survived school life.  He
+had had to keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the
+drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear
+within him.  And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the
+night was winged.  But he kept it, all the same.  It was a "beast,"
+but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible.  And
+he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show it
+to Mother.'  He slept terribly well, when he did sleep, overwhelmed
+by novelty.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FLEUR
+
+
+To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be answered,
+all that had been told Jon was:
+
+"There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end."
+
+For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: "We've got a
+youngster staying with us."
+
+The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met therefore
+in a manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be desired.
+They were thus introduced by Holly:
+
+"This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon."
+
+Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong
+sunlight, was so confounded by the providential nature of this
+miracle, that he had time to hear Fleur say calmly: "Oh, how do you
+do?" as if he had never seen her, and to understand dimly from the
+quickest imaginable little movement of her head that he never had
+seen her.  He bowed therefore over her hand in an intoxicated manner,
+and became more silent than the grave.  He knew better than to speak.
+Once in his early life, surprised reading by a nightlight, he had
+said fatuously "I was just turning over the leaves, Mum," and his
+mother had replied: "Jon, never tell stories, because of your face
+nobody will ever believe them."
+
+The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to the
+success of spoken untruth.  He listened therefore to Fleur's swift
+and rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied her with
+scones and jam, and got away as soon as might be.  They say that in
+delirium tremens you see a fixed object, preferably dark, which
+suddenly changes shape and position.  Jon saw the fixed object; it
+had dark eyes and passably dark hair, and changed its position, but
+never its shape.  The knowledge that between him and that object
+there was already a secret understanding (however impossible to
+understand) thrilled him so that he waited feverishly, and began to
+copy out his poem--which of course he would never dare to--show her--
+till the sound of horses' hoofs roused him, and, leaning from his
+window, he saw her riding forth with Val.  It was clear that she
+wasted no time, but the sight filled him with grief.  He wasted his.
+If he had not bolted, in his fearful ecstasy, he might have been
+asked to go too.  And from his window he sat and watched them
+disappear, appear again in the chine of the road, vanish, and emerge
+once more for a minute clear on the outline of the Down.  'Silly
+brute!' he thought; 'I always miss my chances.'
+
+Why couldn't he be self-confident and ready?  And, leaning his chin
+on his hands, he imagined the ride he might have had with her.  A
+week-end was but a week-end, and he had missed three hours of it.
+Did he know any one except himself who would have been such a flat?
+He did not.
+
+He dressed for dinner early, and was first down.  He would miss no
+more.  But he missed Fleur, who came down last.  He sat opposite her
+at dinner, and it was terrible--impossible to say anything for fear
+of saying the wrong thing, impossible to keep his eyes fixed on her
+in the only natural way; in sum, impossible to treat normally one
+with whom in fancy he had already been over the hills and far away;
+conscious, too, all the time, that he must seem to her, to all of
+them, a dumb gawk.  Yes, it was terrible!  And she was talking so
+well--swooping with swift wing this way and that.  Wonderful how she
+had learned an art which he found so disgustingly difficult.  She
+must think him hopeless indeed!
+
+His sister's eyes, fixed on him with a certain astonishment, obliged
+him at last to look at Fleur; but instantly her eyes, very wide and
+eager, seeming to say, "Oh! for goodness' sake!" obliged him to look
+at Val, where a grin obliged him to look at his cutlet--that, at
+least, had no eyes, and no grin, and he ate it hastily.
+
+"Jon is going to be a farmer," he heard Holly say; "a farmer and a
+poet."
+
+He glanced up reproachfully, caught the comic lift of her eyebrow
+just like their father's, laughed, and felt better.
+
+Val recounted the incident of Monsieur Prosper Profond; nothing could
+have been more favourable, for, in relating it, he regarded Holly,
+who in turn regarded him, while Fleur seemed to be regarding with a
+slight frown some thought of her own, and Jon was really free to look
+at her at last.  She had on a white frock, very simple and well made;
+her arms were bare, and her hair had a white rose in it.  In just
+that swift moment of free vision, after such intense discomfort, Jon
+saw her sublimated, as one sees in the dark a slender white fruit-
+tree; caught her like a verse of poetry flashed before the eyes of
+the mind, or a tune which floats out in the distance and dies.
+He wondered giddily how old she was--she seemed so much more self-
+possessed and experienced than himself.  Why mustn't he say they had
+met?  He remembered suddenly his mother's face; puzzled, hurt-
+looking, when she answered: "Yes, they're relations, but we don't
+know them."  Impossible that his mother, who loved beauty, should not
+admire Fleur if she did know her.
+
+Alone with Val after dinner, he sipped port deferentially and
+answered the advances of this new-found brother-in-law.  As to riding
+(always the first consideration with Val) he could have the young
+chestnut, saddle and unsaddle it himself, and generally look after it
+when he brought it in.  Jon said he was accustomed to all that at
+home, and saw that he had gone up one in his host's estimation.
+
+"Fleur," said Val, "can't ride much yet, but she's keen.  Of course,
+her father doesn't know a horse from a cart-wheel.  Does your Dad
+ride?"
+
+"He used to; but now he's--you know, he's--"He stopped, so hating the
+word "old."  His father was old, and yet not old; no--never!
+
+"Quite," muttered Val.  "I used to know your brother up at Oxford,
+ages ago, the one who died in the Boer War.  We had a fight in New
+College Gardens.  That was a queer business," he added, musing; "a
+good deal came out of it."
+
+Jon's eyes opened wide; all was pushing him toward historical
+research, when his sister's voice said gently from the doorway:
+
+"Come along, you two," and he rose, his heart pushing him toward
+something far more modern.
+
+Fleur having declared that it was "simply too wonderful to stay
+indoors," they all went out.  Moonlight was frosting the dew, and an
+old sundial threw a long shadow.  Two box hedges at right angles,
+dark and square, barred off the orchard.  Fleur turned through that
+angled opening.
+
+"Come on!" she called.  Jon glanced at the others, and followed.  She
+was running among the trees like a ghost.  All was lovely and
+foamlike above her, and there was a scent of old trunks, and of
+nettles.  She vanished.  He thought he had lost her, then almost ran
+into her standing quite still.
+
+"Isn't it jolly?" she cried, and Jon answered:
+
+"Rather!"
+
+She reached up, twisted off a blossom and, twirling it in her
+fingers, said:
+
+"I suppose I can call you Jon?"
+
+"I should think so just."
+
+"All right!  But you know there's a feud between our families?"
+
+Jon stammered: "Feud?  Why?"
+
+"It's ever so romantic and silly.  That's why I pretended we hadn't
+met.  Shall we get up early to-morrow morning and go for a walk
+before breakfast and have it out?  I hate being slow about things,
+don't you?"
+
+Jon murmured a rapturous assent.
+
+"Six o'clock, then.  I think your mother's beautiful"
+
+Jon said fervently: "Yes, she is."
+
+"I love all kinds of beauty," went on Fleur, "when it's exciting.  I
+don't like Greek things a bit."
+
+"What!  Not Euripides?"
+
+"Euripides?  Oh! no, I can't bear Greek plays; they're so long.  I
+think beauty's always swift.  I like to look at one picture, for
+instance, and then run off.  I can't bear a lot of things together.
+Look!"  She held up her blossom in the moonlight.  "That's better
+than all the orchard, I think."
+
+And, suddenly, with her other hand she caught Jon's.
+
+"Of all things in the world, don't you think caution's the most
+awful?  Smell the moonlight!"
+
+She thrust the blossom against his face; Jon agreed giddily that of
+all things in the world caution was the worst, and bending over,
+kissed the hand which held his.
+
+"That's nice and old-fashioned," said Fleur calmly.  "You're
+frightfully silent, Jon.  Still I like silence when it's swift."  She
+let go his hand.  "Did you think I dropped my handkerchief on
+purpose?"
+
+"No!" cried Jon, intensely shocked.
+
+"Well, I did, of course.  Let's get back, or they'll think we're
+doing this on purpose too."  And again she ran like a ghost among the
+trees.  Jon followed, with love in his heart, Spring in his heart,
+and over all the moonlit white unearthly blossom.  They came out
+where they had gone in, Fleur walking demurely.
+
+"It's quite wonderful in there," she said dreamily to Holly.
+
+Jon preserved silence, hoping against hope that she might be thinking
+it swift.
+
+She bade him a casual and demure good-night, which made him think he
+had been dreaming....
+
+In her bedroom Fleur had flung off her gown, and, wrapped in a
+shapeless garment, with the white flower still in her hair, she
+looked like a mousme, sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing by
+candlelight.
+
+
+"DEAREST CHERRY,
+
+"I believe I'm in love.  I've got it in the neck, only the feeling is
+really lower down.  He's a second cousin-such a child, about six
+months older and ten years younger than I am.  Boys always fall in
+love with their seniors, and girls with their juniors or with old men
+of forty.  Don't laugh, but his eyes are the truest things I ever
+saw; and he's quite divinely silent!  We had a most romantic first
+meeting in London under the Vospovitch Juno.  And now he's sleeping
+in the next room and the moonlight's on the blossom; and to-morrow
+morning, before anybody's awake, we're going to walk off into Down
+fairyland.  There's a feud between our families, which makes it
+really exciting.  Yes! and I may have to use subterfuge and come on
+you for invitations--if so, you'll know why!  My father doesn't want
+us to know each other, but I can't help that.  Life's too short.
+He's got the most beautiful mother, with lovely silvery hair and a
+young face with dark eyes.  I'm staying with his sister--who married
+my cousin; it's all mixed up, but I mean to pump her to-morrow.
+We've often talked about love being a spoil-sport; well, that's all
+tosh, it's the beginning of sport, and the sooner you feel it, my
+dear, the better for you.
+
+"Jon (not simplified spelling, but short for Jolyon, which is a name
+in my family, they say) is the sort that lights up and goes out;
+about five feet ten, still growing, and I believe he's going to be a
+poet.  If you laugh at me I've done with you forever.  I perceive all
+sorts of difficulties, but you know when I really want a thing I get
+it.  One of the chief effects of love is that you see the air sort of
+inhabited, like seeing a face in the moon; and you feel--you feel
+dancey and soft at the same time, with a funny sensation--like a
+continual first sniff of orange--blossom--Just above your stays.
+This is my first, and I feel as if it were going to be my last, which
+is absurd, of course, by all the laws of Nature and morality.  If you
+mock me I will smite you, and if you tell anybody I will never
+forgive you.  So much so, that I almost don't think I'll send this
+letter.  Anyway, I'll sleep over it.  So good-night, my Cherry--oh!
+"Your,
+
+"FLEUR."
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+IDYLL ON GRASS
+
+When those two young Forsytes emerged from the chine lane, and set
+their faces east toward the sun, there was not a cloud in heaven, and
+the Downs were dewy.  They had come at a good bat up the slope and
+were a little out of breath; if they had anything to say they did not
+say it, but marched in the early awkwardness of unbreakfasted morning
+under the songs of the larks.  The stealing out had been fun, but
+with the freedom of the tops the sense of conspiracy ceased, and gave
+place to dumbness.
+
+"We've made one blooming error," said Fleur, when they had gone half
+a mile.  "I'm hungry."
+
+Jon produced a stick of chocolate.  They shared it and their tongues
+were loosened.  They discussed the nature of their homes and previous
+existences, which had a kind of fascinating unreality up on that
+lonely height.  There remained but one thing solid in Jon's past--his
+mother; but one thing solid in Fleur's--her father; and of these
+figures, as though seen in the distance with disapproving faces, they
+spoke little.
+
+The Down dipped and rose again toward Chanctonbury Ring; a sparkle of
+far sea came into view, a sparrow-hawk hovered in the sun's eye so
+that the blood-nourished brown of his wings gleamed nearly red.  Jon
+had a passion for birds, and an aptitude for sitting very still to
+watch them; keen-sighted, and with a memory for what interested him,
+on birds he was almost worth listening to.  But in Chanctonbury Ring
+there were none--its great beech temple was empty of life, and almost
+chilly at this early hour; they came out willingly again into the sun
+on the far side.  It was Fleur's turn now.  She spoke of dogs, and
+the way people treated them.  It was wicked to keep them on chains!
+She would like to flog people who did that.  Jon was astonished to
+find her so humanitarian.  She knew a dog, it seemed, which some
+farmer near her home kept chained up at the end of his chicken run,
+in all weathers, till it had almost lost its voice from barking!
+
+"And the misery is," she said vehemently, "that if the poor thing
+didn't bark at every one who passes it wouldn't be kept there.  I do
+think men are cunning brutes.  I've let it go twice, on the sly; it's
+nearly bitten me both times, and then it goes simply mad with joy;
+but it always runs back home at last, and they chain it up again.  If
+I had my way, I'd chain that man up."  Jon saw her teeth and her eyes
+gleam.  "I'd brand him on his forehead with the word 'Brute'; that
+would teach him!"
+
+Jon agreed that it would be a good remedy.
+
+"It's their sense of property," he said, "which makes people chain
+things.  The last generation thought of nothing but property; and
+that's why there was the War."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur, "I never thought of that.  Your people and mine
+quarrelled about property.  And anyway we've all got it--at least, I
+suppose your people have."
+
+"Oh! yes, luckily; I don't suppose I shall be any good at making
+money."
+
+"If you were, I don't believe I should like you."
+
+Jon slipped his hand tremulously under her arm.  Fleur looked
+straight before her and chanted:
+
+"Jon, Jon, the farmer's son,
+Stole a pig, and away he run!"
+
+Jon's arm crept round her waist.
+
+"This is rather sudden," said Fleur calmly; "do you often do it?"
+
+Jon dropped his arm.  But when she laughed his arm stole back again;
+and Fleur began to sing:
+
+"O who will oer the downs so free,
+O who will with me ride?
+O who will up and follow me---"
+
+"Sing, Jon!"
+
+Jon sang.  The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning
+church far away over in Steyning.  They went on from tune to tune,
+till Fleur said:
+
+"My God!  I am hungry now!"
+
+"Oh! I am sorry!"
+
+She looked round into his face.
+
+"Jon, you're rather a darling."
+
+And she pressed his hand against her waist.  Jon almost reeled from
+happiness.  A yellow-and-white dog coursing a hare startled them
+apart.  They watched the two vanish down the slope, till Fleur said
+with a sigh: "He'll never catch it, thank goodness!  What's the time?
+Mine's stopped.  I never wound it."
+
+Jon looked at his watch.  "By Jove!" he said, "mine's stopped; too."
+
+They walked on again, but only hand in hand.
+
+"If the grass is dry," said Fleur, "let's sit down for half a
+minute."
+
+Jon took off his coat, and they shared it.
+
+"Smell!  Actually wild thyme!"
+
+With his arm round her waist again, they sat some minutes in silence.
+
+"We are goats!" cried Fleur, jumping up; "we shall be most fearfully
+late, and look so silly, and put them on their guard.  Look here, Jon
+We only came out to get an appetite for breakfast, and lost our way.
+See?"
+
+"Yes," said Jon.
+
+"It's serious; there'll be a stopper put on us.  Are you a good
+liar?"
+
+"I believe not very; but I can try."
+
+Fleur frowned.
+
+"You know," she said, "I realize that they don't mean us to be
+friends."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I told you why."
+
+"But that's silly."
+
+"Yes; but you don't know my father!"
+
+"I suppose he's fearfully fond of you."
+
+"You see, I'm an only child.  And so are you--of your mother.  Isn't
+it a bore?  There's so much expected of one.  By the time they've
+done expecting, one's as good as dead."
+
+"Yes," muttered Jon, "life's beastly short.  One wants to live
+forever, and know everything."
+
+"And love everybody?"
+
+"No," cried Jon; "I only want to love once--you."
+
+"Indeed!  You're coming on!  Oh! Look!  There's the chalk-pit; we
+can't be very far now.  Let's run."
+
+Jon followed, wondering fearfully if he had offended her.
+
+The chalk-pit was full of sunshine and the murmuration of bees.
+Fleur flung back her hair.
+
+"Well," she said, "in case of accidents, you may give me one kiss,
+Jon," and she pushed her cheek forward.  With ecstasy he kissed that
+hot soft cheek.
+
+"Now, remember!  We lost our way; and leave it to me as much as you
+can.  I'm going to be rather beastly to you; it's safer; try and be
+beastly to me!"
+
+Jon shook his head.  "That's impossible."
+
+"Just to please me; till five o'clock, at all events."
+
+"Anybody will be able to see through it," said Jon gloomily.
+
+"Well, do your best.  Look!  There they are!  Wave your hat!  Oh! you
+haven't got one.  Well, I'll cooee!  Get a little away from me, and
+look sulky."
+
+Five minutes later, entering the house and doing his utmost to look
+sulky, Jon heard her clear voice in the dining-room:
+
+"Oh! I'm simply ravenous!  He's going to be a farmer--and he loses
+his way!  The boy's an idiot!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+GOYA
+
+
+Lunch was over and Soames mounted to the picture-gallery in his house
+near Mapleduram.  He had what Annette called "a grief."  Fleur was
+not yet home.  She had been expected on Wednesday; had wired that it
+would be Friday; and again on Friday that it would be Sunday
+afternoon; and here were her aunt, and her cousins the Cardigans, and
+this fellow Profond, and everything flat as a pancake for the want of
+her.  He stood before his Gauguin--sorest point of his collection.
+He had bought the ugly great thing with two early Matisses before the
+War, because there was such a fuss about those Post-Impressionist
+chaps.  He was wondering whether Profond would take them off his
+hands--the fellow seemed not to know what to do with his money--when
+he heard his sister's voice say: "I think that's a horrid thing,
+Soames," and saw that Winifred had followed him up.
+
+"Oh! you do?" he said dryly; "I gave five hundred for it."
+
+"Fancy!  Women aren't made like that even if they are black."
+
+Soames uttered a glum laugh.  "You didn't come up to tell me that."
+
+"No.  Do you know that Jolyon's boy is staying with Val and his
+wife?"
+
+Soames spun round.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Yes," drawled Winifred; "he's gone to live with them there while he
+learns farming."
+
+Soames had turned away, but her voice pursued him as he walked up and
+down.  "I warned Val that neither of them was to be spoken to about
+old matters."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me before?"
+
+Winifred shrugged her substantial shoulders.
+
+"Fleur does what she likes.  You've always spoiled her.  Besides, my
+dear boy, what's the harm?"
+
+"The harm!" muttered Soames.  "Why, she--" he checked himself.  The
+Juno, the handkerchief, Fleur's eyes, her questions, and now this
+delay in her return--the symptoms seemed to him so sinister that,
+faithful to his nature, he could not part with them.
+
+"I think you take too much care," said Winifred.  "If I were you, I
+should tell her of that old matter.  It's no good thinking that girls
+in these days are as they used to be.  Where they pick up their
+knowledge I can't tell, but they seem to know everything."
+
+Over Soames' face, closely composed, passed a sort of spasm, and
+Winifred added hastily:
+
+"If you don't like to speak of it, I could for you."
+
+Soames shook his head.  Unless there was absolute necessity the
+thought that his adored daughter should learn of that old scandal
+hurt his pride too much.
+
+"No," he said, "not yet.  Never if I can help it.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear.  Think what people are!"
+
+"Twenty years is a long time," muttered Soames.  "Outside our family,
+who's likely to remember?"
+
+Winifred was silenced.  She inclined more and more to that peace and
+quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in her youth.
+And, since pictures always depressed her, she soon went down again.
+
+Soames passed into the corner where, side by side, hung his real Goya
+and the copy of the fresco "La Vendimia."  His acquisition of the
+real Goya rather beautifully illustrated the cobweb of vested
+interests and passions which mesh the bright-winged fly of human
+life.  The real Goya's noble owner's ancestor had come into
+possession of it during some Spanish war--it was in a word loot.  The
+noble owner had remained in ignorance of its value until in the
+nineties an enterprising critic discovered that a Spanish painter
+named Goya was a genius.  It was only a fair Goya, but almost unique
+in England, and the noble owner became a marked man.  Having many
+possessions and that aristocratic culture which, independent of mere
+sensuous enjoyment, is founded on the sounder principle that one must
+know everything and be fearfully interested in life, he had fully
+intended to keep an article which contributed to his reputation while
+he was alive, and to leave it to the nation after he was dead.
+Fortunately for Soames, the House of Lords was violently attacked in
+1909, and the noble owner became alarmed and angry.  'If,' he said to
+himself, 'they think they can have it both ways they are very much
+mistaken.  So long as they leave me in quiet enjoyment the nation can
+have some of my pictures at my death.  But if the nation is going to
+bait me, and rob me like this, I'm damned if I won't sell the lot.
+They can't have my private property and my public spirit-both.'  He
+brooded in this fashion for several months till one morning, after
+reading the speech of a certain statesman, he telegraphed to his
+agent to come down and bring Bodkin.  On going over the collection
+Bodkin, than whose opinion on market values none was more sought,
+pronounced that with a free hand to sell to America, Germany, and
+other places where there was an interest in art, a lot more money
+could be made than by selling in England.  The noble owner's public
+spirit--he said--was well known but the pictures were unique.  The
+noble owner put this opinion in his pipe and smoked it for a year.
+At the end of that time he read another speech by the same statesman,
+and telegraphed to his agents: "Give Bodkin a free hand."  It was at
+this juncture that Bodkin conceived the idea which salved the Goya
+and two other unique pictures for the native country of the noble
+owner.  With one hand Bodkin proffered the pictures to the foreign
+market, with the other he formed a list of private British
+collectors.  Having obtained what he considered the highest possible
+bids from across the seas, he submitted pictures and bids to the
+private British collectors, and invited them, of their public spirit,
+to outbid.  In three instances (including the Goya) out of twenty-one
+he was successful.  And why?  One of the private collectors made
+buttons--he had made so many that he desired that his wife should be
+called Lady "Buttons."  He therefore bought a unique picture at great
+cost, and gave it to the nation.  It was "part," his friends said,
+"of his general game."  The second of the private collectors was an
+Americophobe, and bought an unique picture to "spite the damned
+Yanks."  The third of the private collectors was Soames, who--more
+sober than either of the, others--bought after a visit to Madrid,
+because he was certain that Goya was still on the up grade.  Goya was
+not booming at the moment, but he would come again; and, looking at
+that portrait, Hogarthian, Manetesque in its directness, but with its
+own queer sharp beauty of paint, he was perfectly satisfied still
+that he had made no error, heavy though the price had been--heaviest
+he had ever paid.  And next to it was hanging the copy of "La
+Vendimia."  There she was--the little wretch-looking back at him in
+her dreamy mood, the mood he loved best because he felt so much safer
+when she looked like that.
+
+He was still gazing when the scent of a cigar impinged on his
+nostrils, and a voice said:
+
+"Well, Mr. Forsyde, what you goin' to do with this small lot?"
+
+That Belgian chap, whose mother-as if Flemish blood were not enough--
+had been Armenian!  Subduing a natural irritation, he said:
+
+"Are you a judge of pictures?"
+
+"Well, I've got a few myself."
+
+"Any Post-Impressionists?"
+
+"Ye-es, I rather like them."
+
+"What do you think of this?" said Soames, pointing to the Gauguin.
+
+Monsieur Profond protruded his lower lip and short pointed beard.
+
+"Rather fine, I think," he said; "do you want to sell it?"
+
+Soames checked his instinctive "Not particularly"--he would not
+chaffer with this alien.
+
+"Yes," he said.
+
+"What do you want for it?"
+
+"What I gave."
+
+"All right," said Monsieur Profond.  "I'll be glad to take that small
+picture.  Post-Impressionists--they're awful dead, but they're
+amusin'.  I don' care for pictures much, but I've got some, just a
+small lot."
+
+"What do you care for?"
+
+Monsieur Profond shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Life's awful like a lot of monkeys scramblin' for empty nuts."
+
+"You're young," said Soames.  If the fellow must make a
+generalization, he needn't suggest that the forms of property lacked
+solidity!
+
+"I don' worry," replied Monsieur Profond smiling; "we're born, and we
+die.  Half the world's starvin'.  I feed a small lot of babies out in
+my mother's country; but what's the use?  Might as well throw my
+money in the river."
+
+Soames looked at him, and turned back toward his Goya.  He didn't
+know what the fellow wanted.
+
+"What shall I make my cheque for?" pursued Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Five hundred," said Soames shortly; "but I don't want you to take it
+if you don't care for it more than that."
+
+"That's all right," said Monsieur Profond; "I'll be 'appy to 'ave
+that picture."
+
+He wrote a cheque with a fountain-pen heavily chased with gold.
+Soames watched the process uneasily.  How on earth had the fellow
+known that he wanted to sell that picture?  Monsieur Profond held out
+the cheque.
+
+"The English are awful funny about pictures," he said.  "So are the
+French, so are my people.  They're all awful funny."
+
+"I don't understand you," said Soames stiffly.
+
+"It's like hats," said Monsieur Profond enigmatically, "small or
+large, turnin' up or down--just the fashion.  Awful funny."  And,
+smiling, he drifted out of the gallery again, blue and solid like the
+smoke of his excellent cigar.
+
+Soames had taken the cheque, feeling as if the intrinsic value of
+ownership had been called in question.  'He's a cosmopolitan,' he
+thought, watching Profond emerge from under the verandah with
+Annette, and saunter down the lawn toward the river.  What his wife
+saw in the fellow he didn't know, unless it was that he could speak
+her language; and there passed in Soames what Monsieur Profond would
+have called a "small doubt" whether Annette was not too handsome to
+be walking with any one so "cosmopolitan."  Even at that distance he
+could see the blue fumes from Profond's cigar wreath out in the quiet
+sunlight; and his grey buckskin shoes, and his grey hat--the fellow
+was a dandy!  And he could see the quick turn of his wife's head, so
+very straight on her desirable neck and shoulders.  That turn of her
+neck always seemed to him a little too showy, and in the "Queen of
+all I survey" manner--not quite distinguished.  He watched them walk
+along the path at the bottom of the garden.  A young man in flannels
+joined them down there--a Sunday caller no doubt, from up the river.
+He went back to his Goya.  He was still staring at that replica of
+Fleur, and worrying over Winifred's news, when his wife's voice said:
+
+"Mr. Michael Mont, Soames.  You invited him to see your pictures."
+
+There was the cheerful young man of the Gallery off Cork Street!
+
+"Turned up, you see, sir; I live only four miles from Pangbourne.
+Jolly day, isn't it?"
+
+Confronted with the results of his expansiveness, Soames scrutinized
+his visitor.  The young man's mouth was excessively large and curly--
+he seemed always grinning.  Why didn't he grow the rest of those
+idiotic little moustaches, which made him look like a music-hall
+buffoon?  What on earth were young men about, deliberately lowering
+their class with these tooth-brushes, or little slug whiskers?  Ugh!
+Affected young idiots!  In other respects he was presentable, and his
+flannels very clean.
+
+"Happy to see you!" he said.
+
+The young man, who had been turning his head from side to side,
+became transfixed.  "I say!" he said, "'some' picture!"
+
+Soames saw, with mixed sensations, that he had addressed the remark
+to the Goya copy.
+
+"Yes," he said dryly, "that's not a Goya.  It's a copy.  I had it
+painted because it reminded me of my daughter."
+
+"By Jove!  I thought I knew the face, sir.  Is she here?"
+
+The frankness of his interest almost disarmed Soames.
+
+"She'll be in after tea," he said.  "Shall we go round the pictures?"
+
+And Soames began that round which never tired him.  He had not
+anticipated much intelligence from one who had mistaken a copy for an
+original, but as they passed from section to section, period to
+period, he was startled by the young man's frank and relevant
+remarks.  Natively shrewd himself, and even sensuous beneath his
+mask, Soames had not spent thirty-eight years over his one hobby
+without knowing something more about pictures than their market
+values.  He was, as it were, the missing link between the artist and
+the commercial public.  Art for art's sake and all that, of course,
+was cant.  But aesthetics and good taste were necessary.  The
+appreciation of enough persons of good taste was what gave a work of
+art its permanent market value, or in other words made it "a work of
+art."  There was no real cleavage.  And he was sufficiently
+accustomed to sheep-like and unseeing visitors, to be intrigued by
+one who did not hesitate to say of Mauve: "Good old haystacks!" or of
+James Maris: "Didn't he just paint and paper 'em!  Mathew was the
+real swell, sir; you could dig into his surfaces!"  It was after the
+young man had whistled before a Whistler, with the words, "D'you
+think he ever really saw a naked woman, sir?" that Soames remarked:
+
+"What are you, Mr. Mont, if I may ask?"
+
+"I, sir?  I was going to be a painter, but the War knocked that.
+Then in the trenches, you know, I used to dream of the Stock
+Exchange, snug and warm and just noisy enough.  But the Peace knocked
+that, shares seem off, don't they?  I've only been demobbed about a
+year.  What do you recommend, sir?"
+
+"Have you got money?"
+
+"Well," answered the young man, "I've got a father; I kept him alive
+during the War, so he's bound to keep me alive now.  Though, of
+course, there's the question whether he ought to be allowed to hang
+on to his property.  What do you think about that, sir?"
+
+Soames, pale and defensive, smiled.
+
+"The old man has fits when I tell him he may have to work yet.  He's
+got land, you know; it's a fatal disease."
+
+"This is my real Goya," said Soames dryly.
+
+"By George!  He was a swell.  I saw a Goya in Munich once that bowled
+me middle stump.  A most evil-looking old woman in the most gorgeous
+lace.  He made no compromise with the public taste.  That old boy was
+'some' explosive; he must have smashed up a lot of convention in his
+day.  Couldn't he just paint!  He makes Velasquez stiff, don't you
+think?"
+
+"I have no Velasquez," said Soames.
+
+The young man stared.  "No," he said; "only nations or profiteers can
+afford him, I suppose.  I say, why shouldn't all the bankrupt nations
+sell their Velasquez and Titians and other swells to the profiteers
+by force, and then pass a law that any one who holds a picture by an
+Old Master--see schedule--must hang it in a public gallery?  There
+seems something in that."
+
+"Shall we go down to tea?" said Soames.
+
+The young man's ears seemed to droop on his skull.  'He's not dense,'
+thought Soames, following him off the premises.
+
+Goya, with his satiric and surpassing precision, his original "line,"
+and the daring of his light and shade, could have reproduced to
+admiration the group assembled round Annette's tea-tray in the ingle-
+nook below.  He alone, perhaps, of painters would have done justice
+to the sunlight filtering through a screen of creeper, to the lovely
+pallor of brass, the old cut glasses, the thin slices of lemon in
+pale amber tea; justice to Annette in her black lacey dress; there
+was something of the fair Spaniard in her beauty, though it lacked
+the spirituality of that rare type; to Winifred's grey-haired,
+corseted solidity; to Soames, of a certain grey and flat-cheeked
+distinction; to the vivacious Michael Mont, pointed in ear and eye;
+to Imogen, dark, luscious of glance, growing a little stout; to
+Prosper Profond, with his expression as who should say, "Well, Mr.
+Goya, what's the use of paintin' this small party?" finally, to Jack
+Cardigan, with his shining stare and tanned sanguinity betraying the
+moving principle: "I'm English, and I live to be fit."
+
+Curious, by the way, that Imogen, who as a girl had declared solemnly
+one day at Timothy's that she would never marry a good man--they were
+so dull--should have married Jack Cardigan, in whom health had so
+destroyed all traces of original sin, that she might have retired to
+rest with ten thousand other Englishmen without knowing the
+difference from the one she had chosen to repose beside.  "Oh!" she
+would say of him, in her "amusing" way, "Jack keeps himself so
+fearfully fit; he's never had a day's illness in his life.  He went
+right through the War without a finger-ache.  You really can't
+imagine how fit he is!"  Indeed, he was so "fit" that he couldn't see
+when she was flirting, which was such a comfort in a way.  All the
+same she was quite fond of him, so far as one could be of a sports-
+machine, and of the two little Cardigans made after his pattern.  Her
+eyes just then were comparing him maliciously with Prosper Profond.
+There was no "small" sport or game which Monsieur Profond had not
+played at too, it seemed, from skittles to tarpon-fishing, and worn
+out every one.  Imogen would sometimes wish that they had worn out
+Jack, who continued to play at them and talk of them with the simple
+zeal of a school-girl learning hockey; at the age of Great-uncle
+Timothy she well knew that Jack would be playing carpet golf in her
+bedroom, and "wiping somebody's eye."
+
+He was telling them now how he had "pipped the pro--a charmin'
+fellow, playin' a very good game," at the last hole this morning; and
+how he had pulled down to Caversham since lunch, and trying to incite
+Prosper Profond to play him a set of tennis after tea--do him good-
+"keep him fit.
+
+"But what's the use of keepin' fit?" said Monsieur Profond.
+
+"Yes, sir," murmured Michael Mont, "what do you keep fit for?"
+
+"Jack," cried Imogen, enchanted, "what do you keep fit for?"
+
+Jack Cardigan stared with all his health.  The questions were like
+the buzz of a mosquito, and he put up his hand to wipe them away.
+During the War, of course, he had kept fit to kill Germans; now that
+it was over he either did not know, or shrank in delicacy from
+explanation of his moving principle.
+
+"But he's right," said Monsieur Profond unexpectedly, "there's
+nothin' left but keepin' fit."
+
+The saying, too deep for Sunday afternoon, would have passed
+unanswered, but for the mercurial nature of young Mont.
+
+"Good!" he cried.  "That's the great discovery of the War.  We all
+thought we were progressing--now we know we're only changing."
+
+"For the worse," said Monsieur Profond genially.
+
+"How you are cheerful, Prosper!" murmured Annette.
+
+"You come and play tennis!" said Jack Cardigan; "you've got the hump.
+We'll soon take that down.  D'you play, Mr. Mont?"
+
+"I hit the ball about, sir."
+
+At this juncture Soames rose, ruffled in that deep instinct of
+preparation for the future which guided his existence.
+
+"When Fleur comes--" he heard Jack Cardigan say.
+
+Ah! and why didn't she come?  He passed through drawing-room, hall,
+and porch out on to the drive, and stood there listening for the car.
+All was still and Sundayfied; the lilacs in full flower scented the
+air.  There were white clouds, like the feathers of ducks gilded by
+the sunlight.  Memory of the day when Fleur was born, and he had
+waited in such agony with her life and her mother's balanced in his
+hands, came to him sharply.  He had saved her then, to be the flower
+of his life.  And now! was she going to give him trouble--pain--give
+him trouble?  He did not like the look of things!  A blackbird broke
+in on his reverie with an evening song--a great big fellow up in that
+acacia-tree.  Soames had taken quite an interest in his birds of late
+years; he and Fleur would walk round and watch them; her eyes were
+sharp as needles, and she knew every nest.  He saw her dog, a
+retriever, lying on the drive in a patch of sunlight, and called to
+him.  "Hallo, old fellow-waiting for her too!"  The dog came slowly
+with a grudging tail, and Soames mechanically laid a pat on his head.
+The dog, the bird, the lilac, all were part of Fleur for him; no
+more, no less.  'Too fond of her!' he thought, 'too fond!'  He was
+like a man uninsured, with his ships at sea.  Uninsured again--as in
+that other time, so long ago, when he would wander dumb and jealous
+in the wilderness of London, longing for that woman--his first wife--
+the mother of this infernal boy.  Ah!  There was the car at last!  It
+drew up, it had luggage, but no Fleur.
+
+"Miss Fleur is walking up, sir, by the towing-path."
+
+Walking all those miles?  Soames stared.  The man's face had the
+beginning of a smile on it.  What was he grinning at?  And very
+quickly he turned, saying, "All right, Sims!" and went into the
+house.  He mounted to the picture-gallery once more.  He had from
+there a view of the river bank, and stood with his eyes fixed on it,
+oblivious of the fact that it would be an hour at least before her
+figure showed there.  Walking up! And that fellow's grin!  The boy--!
+He turned abruptly from the window.  He couldn't spy on her.  If she
+wanted to keep things from him--she must; he could not spy on her.
+His heart felt empty, and bitterness mounted from it into his very
+mouth.  The staccato shouts of Jack Cardigan pursuing the ball, the
+laugh of young Mont rose in the stillness and came in.  He hoped they
+were making that chap Profond run.  And the girl in "La Vendimia"
+stood with her arm akimbo arid her dreamy eyes looking past him.
+'I've done all I could for you,' he thought, 'since you were no
+higher than my knee.  You aren't going to--to--hurt me, are you?'
+
+But the Goya copy answered not, brilliant in colour just beginning to
+tone down.  'There's no real life in it,' thought Soames.  'Why
+doesn't she come?'
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+TRIO
+
+
+Among those four Forsytes of the third, and, as one might say, fourth
+generation, at Wansdon under the Downs, a week-end prolonged unto the
+ninth day had stretched the crossing threads of tenacity almost to
+snapping-point.  Never had Fleur been so "fine," Holly so watchful,
+Val so stable-secretive, Jon so silent and disturbed.  What he
+learned of farming in that week might have been balanced on the point
+of a penknife and puffed off.  He, whose nature was essentially
+averse from intrigue, and whose adoration of Fleur disposed him to
+think that any need for concealing it was "skittles," chafed and
+fretted, yet obeyed, taking what relief he could in the few moments
+when they were alone.  On Thursday, while they were standing in the
+bay window of the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, she said to him:
+
+"Jon, I'm going home on Sunday by the 3.40 from Paddington; if you
+were to go home on Saturday you could come up on Sunday and take me
+down, and just get back here by the last train, after.  You were
+going home anyway, weren't you?"
+
+Jon nodded.
+
+"Anything to be with you," he said; "only why need I pretend--"
+
+Fleur slipped her little finger into his palm:
+
+"You have no instinct, Jon; you must leave things to me.  It's
+serious about our people.  We've simply got to be secret at present,
+if we want to be together."  The door was opened, and she added
+loudly: "You are a duffer, Jon."
+
+Something turned over within Jon; he could not bear this subterfuge
+about a feeling so natural, so overwhelming, and so sweet.
+
+On Friday night about eleven he had packed his bag, and was leaning
+out of his window, half miserable, and half lost in a dream of
+Paddington station, when he heard a tiny sound, as of a finger-nail
+tapping on his door.  He rushed to it and listened.  Again the sound.
+It was a nail.  He opened.  Oh! What a lovely thing came in!
+
+"I wanted to show you my fancy dress," it said, and struck an
+attitude at the foot of his bed.
+
+Jon drew a long breath and leaned against the door.  The apparition
+wore white muslin on its head, a fichu round its bare neck over a
+wine-coloured dress, fulled out below its slender waist.
+
+It held one arm akimbo, and the other raised, right-angled, holding a
+fan which touched its head.
+
+"This ought to be a basket of grapes," it whispered, "but I haven't
+got it here.  It's my Goya dress.  And this is the attitude in the
+picture.  Do you like it?"
+
+"It's a dream."
+
+The apparition pirouetted.  "Touch it, and see."
+
+Jon knelt down and took the skirt reverently.
+
+"Grape colour," came the whisper, "all grapes--La Vendimia--the
+vintage."
+
+Jon's fingers scarcely touched each side of the waist; he looked up,
+with adoring eyes.
+
+"Oh! Jon," it whispered; bent, kissed his forehead, pirouetted again,
+and, gliding out, was gone.
+
+Jon stayed on his knees, and his head fell forward against the bed.
+How long he stayed like that he did not know.  The little noises--of
+the tapping nail, the feet, the skirts rustling--as in a dream--went
+on about him; and before his closed eyes the figure stood and smiled
+and whispered, a faint perfume of narcissus lingering in the air.
+And his forehead where it had been kissed had a little cool place
+between the brows, like the imprint of a flower.  Love filled his
+soul, that love of boy for girl which knows so little, hopes so much,
+would not brush the down off for the world, and must become in time a
+fragrant memory--a searing passion--a humdrum mateship--or, once in
+many times, vintage full and sweet with sunset colour on the grapes.
+
+Enough has been said about Jon Forsyte here and in another place to
+show what long marches lay between him and his great-great-
+grandfather, the first Jolyon, in Dorset down by the sea.  Jon was
+sensitive as a girl, more sensitive than nine out of ten girls of the
+day; imaginative as one of his half-sister June's "lame duck"
+painters; affectionate as a son of his father and his mother
+naturally would be.  And yet, in his inner tissue, there was
+something of the old founder of his family, a secret tenacity of
+soul, a dread of showing his feelings, a determination not to know
+when he was beaten.  Sensitive, imaginative, affectionate boys get a
+bad time at school, but Jon had instinctively kept his nature dark,
+and been but normally unhappy there.  Only with his mother had he, up
+till then, been absolutely frank and natural; and when he went home
+to Robin Hill that Saturday his heart was heavy because Fleur had
+said that he must not be frank and natural with her from whom he had
+never yet kept anything, must not even tell her that they had met
+again, unless he found that she knew already.  So intolerable did
+this seem to him that he was very near to telegraphing an excuse and
+staying up in London.  And the first thing his mother said to him
+was:
+
+"So you've had our little friend of the confectioner's there, Jon.
+What is she like on second thoughts?"
+
+With relief, and a high colour, Jon answered:
+
+"Oh! awfully jolly, Mum."
+
+Her arm pressed his.
+
+Jon had never loved her so much as in that minute which seemed to
+falsify Fleur's fears and to release his soul.  He turned to look at
+her, but something in her smiling face--something which only he
+perhaps would have caught--stopped the words bubbling up in him.
+Could fear go with a smile?  If so, there was fear in her face.  And
+out of Jon tumbled quite other words, about farming, Holly, and the
+Downs.  Talking fast, he waited for her to come back to Fleur.  But
+she did not.  Nor did his father mention her, though of course he,
+too, must know.  What deprivation, and killing of reality was in his
+silence about Fleur--when he was so full of her; when his mother was
+so full of Jon, and his father so full of his mother!  And so the
+trio spent the evening of that Saturday.
+
+After dinner his mother played; she seemed to play all the things he
+liked best, and he sat with one knee clasped, and his hair standing
+up where his fingers had run through it.  He gazed at his mother
+while she played, but he saw Fleur--Fleur in the moonlit orchard,
+Fleur in the sunlit gravel-pit, Fleur in that fancy dress, swaying,
+whispering, stooping, kissing his forehead.  Once, while he listened,
+he forgot himself and glanced at his father in that other easy chair.
+What was Dad looking like that for?  The expression on his face was
+so sad and puzzling.  It filled him with a sort of remorse, so that
+he got up and went and sat on the arm of his father's chair.  From
+there he could not see his face; and again he saw Fleur--in his
+mother's hands, slim and white on the keys, in the profile of her
+face and her powdery hair; and down the long room in the open window
+where the May night walked outside.
+
+When he went up to bed his mother came into his room.  She stood at
+the window, and said:
+
+"Those cypresses your grandfather planted down there have done
+wonderfully.  I always think they look beautiful under a dropping
+moon.  I wish you had known your grandfather, Jon."
+
+"Were you married to father when he was alive?" asked Jon suddenly.
+
+"No, dear; he died in '92--very old--eighty-five, I think."
+
+"Is Father like him?"
+
+"A little, but more subtle, and not quite so solid."
+
+"I know, from grandfather's portrait; who painted that?"
+
+"One of June's 'lame ducks.'  But it's quite good."
+
+Jon slipped his hand through his mother's arm.  "Tell me about the
+family quarrel, Mum."
+
+He felt her arm quivering.  "No, dear; that's for your Father some
+day, if he thinks fit."
+
+"Then it was serious," said Jon, with a catch in his breath.
+
+"Yes."  And there was a silence, during which neither knew whether
+the arm or the hand within it were quivering most.
+
+"Some people," said Irene softly, "think the moon on her back is
+evil; to me she's always lovely.  Look at those cypress shadows!
+Jon, Father says we may go to Italy, you and I, for two months.
+Would you like?"
+
+Jon took his hand from under her arm; his sensation was so sharp and
+so confused.  Italy with his mother!  A fortnight ago it would have
+been perfection; now it filled him with dismay; he felt that the
+sudden suggestion had to do with Fleur.  He stammered out:
+
+"Oh! yes; only--I don't know.  Ought I--now I've just begun?  I'd
+like to think it over."
+
+Her voice answered, cool and gentle:
+
+"Yes, dear; think it over.  But better now than when you've begun
+farming seriously.  Italy with you!  It would be nice!"
+
+Jon put his arm round her waist, still slim and firm as a girl's.
+
+"Do you think you ought to leave Father?" he said feebly, feeling
+very mean.
+
+"Father suggested it; he thinks you ought to see Italy at least
+before you settle down to anything."
+
+The sense of meanness died in Jon; he knew, yes--he knew--that his
+father and his mother were not speaking frankly, no more than he
+himself.  They wanted to keep him from Fleur.  His heart hardened.
+And, as if she felt that process going on, his mother said:
+
+"Good-night, darling.  Have a good sleep and think it over.  But it
+would be lovely!"
+
+She pressed him to her so quickly that he did not see her face.  Jon
+stood feeling exactly as he used to when he was a naughty little boy;
+sore because he was not loving, and because he was justified in his
+own eyes.
+
+But Irene, after she had stood a moment in her own room, passed
+through the dressing-room between it and her husband's.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He will think it over, Jolyon."
+
+Watching her lips that wore a little drawn smile, Jolyon said
+quietly:
+
+"You had better let me tell him, and have done with it.  After all,
+Jon has the instincts of a gentleman.  He has only to understand--"
+
+"Only!  He can't understand; that's impossible."
+
+"I believe I could have at his age."
+
+Irene caught his hand.  "You were always more of a realist than Jon;
+and never so innocent."
+
+"That's true," said Jolyon.  "It's queer, isn't it?  You and I would
+tell our stories to the world without a particle of shame; but our
+own boy stumps us."
+
+"We've never cared whether the world approves or not."
+
+"Jon would not disapprove of us!"
+
+"Oh! Jolyon, yes.  He's in love, I feel he's in love.  And he'd say:
+'My mother once married without love!  How could she have!'  It'll
+seem to him a crime!  And so it was!"
+
+Jolyon took her hand, and said with a wry smile:
+
+"Ah! why on earth are we born young?  Now, if only we were born old
+and grew younger year by year, we should understand how things
+happen, and drop all our cursed intolerance.  But you know if the boy
+is really in love, he won't forget, even if he goes to Italy.  We're
+a tenacious breed; and he'll know by instinct why he's being sent.
+Nothing will really cure him but the shock of being told."
+
+"Let me try, anyway."
+
+Jolyon stood a moment without speaking.  Between this devil and this
+deep sea--the pain of a dreaded disclosure and the grief of losing
+his wife for two months--he secretly hoped for the devil; yet if she
+wished for the deep sea he must put up with it.  After all, it would
+be training for that departure from which there would be no return.
+And, taking her in his arms, he kissed her eyes, and said:
+
+"As you will, my love."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+DUET
+
+
+That "small" emotion, love, grows amazingly when threatened with
+extinction.  Jon reached Paddington station half an hour before his
+time and a full week after, as it seemed to him.  He stood at the
+appointed bookstall, amid a crowd of Sunday travellers, in a Harris
+tweed suit exhaling, as it were, the emotion of his thumping heart.
+He read the names of the novels on the book-stall, and bought one at
+last, to avoid being regarded with suspicion by the book-stall clerk.
+It was called "The Heart of the Trail!" which must mean something,
+though it did not seem to.  He also bought "The Lady's Mirror" and
+"The Landsman."  Every minute was an hour long, and full of horrid
+imaginings.  After nineteen had passed, he saw her with a bag and a
+porter wheeling her luggage.  She came swiftly; she came cool.  She
+greeted him as if he were a brother.
+
+"First class," she said to the porter, "corner seats; opposite."
+
+Jon admired her frightful self-possession.
+
+"Can't we get a carriage to ourselves," he whispered.
+
+"No good; it's a stopping train.  After Maidenhead perhaps.  Look
+natural, Jon."
+
+Jon screwed his features into a scowl.  They got in--with two other
+beasts!--oh! heaven!  He tipped the porter unnaturally, in his
+confusion.  The brute deserved nothing for putting them in there, and
+looking as if he knew all about it into the bargain.
+
+Fleur hid herself behind "The Lady's Mirror."  Jon imitated her
+behind "The Landsman."  The train started.  Fleur let "The Lady's
+Mirror" fall and leaned forward.
+
+"Well?" she said.
+
+"It's seemed about fifteen days."
+
+She nodded, and Jon's face lighted up at once.
+
+"Look natural," murmured Fleur, and went off into a bubble of
+laughter.  It hurt him.  How could he look natural with Italy hanging
+over him?  He had meant to break it to her gently, but now he blurted
+it out.
+
+"They want me to go to Italy with Mother for two months."
+
+Fleur drooped her eyelids; turned a little pale, and bit her lips.
+"Oh!" she said.  It was all, but it was much.
+
+That "Oh!" was like the quick drawback of the wrist in fencing ready
+for riposte.  It came.
+
+"You must go!"
+
+"Go?" said Jon in a strangled voice.
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But--two months--it's ghastly."
+
+"No," said Fleur, "six weeks.  You'll have forgotten me by then.
+We'll meet in the National Gallery the day after you get back."
+
+Jon laughed.
+
+"But suppose you've forgotten me," he muttered into the noise of the
+train.
+
+Fleur shook her head.
+
+"Some other beast--" murmured Jon.
+
+Her foot touched his.
+
+"No other beast," she said, lifting "The Lady's Mirror."
+
+The train stopped; two passengers got out, and one got in.
+
+'I shall die,' thought Jon, 'if we're not alone at all.'
+
+The train went on; and again Fleur leaned forward.
+
+"I never let go," she said; "do you?"
+
+Jon shook his head vehemently.
+
+"Never!" he said.  "Will you write to me?"
+
+"No; but you can--to my Club."
+
+She had a Club; she was wonderful!
+
+"Did you pump Holly?" he muttered.
+
+"Yes, but I got nothing.  I didn't dare pump hard."
+
+"What can it be?" cried Jon.
+
+"I shall find out all right."
+
+A long silence followed till Fleur said: "This is Maidenhead; stand
+by, Jon!"
+
+The train stopped.  The remaining passenger got out.  Fleur drew down
+her blind.
+
+"Quick!" she cried.  "Hang out!  Look as much of a beast as you can."
+
+Jon blew his nose, and scowled; never in all his life had he scowled
+like that!  An old lady recoiled, a young one tried the handle.  It
+turned, but the door would not open.  The train moved, the young lady
+darted to another carriage.
+
+"What luck!" cried Jon.  "It Jammed."
+
+"Yes," said Fleur; "I was holding it."
+
+The train moved out, and Jon fell on his knees.
+
+"Look out for the corridor," she whispered; "and--quick!"
+
+Her lips met his.  And though their kiss only lasted perhaps ten
+seconds, Jon's soul left his body and went so far beyond, that, when
+he was again sitting opposite that demure figure, he was pale as
+death.  He heard her sigh, and the sound seemed to him the most
+precious he had ever heard--an exquisite declaration that he meant
+something to her.
+
+"Six weeks isn't really long," she said; "and you can easily make it
+six if you keep your head out there, and never seem to think of me."
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+"This is just what's really wanted, Jon, to convince them, don't you
+see?  If we're just as bad when you come back they'll stop being
+ridiculous about it.  Only, I'm sorry it's not Spain; there's a girl
+in a Goya picture at Madrid who's like me, Father says.  Only she
+isn't--we've got a copy of her."
+
+It was to Jon like a ray of sunshine piercing through a fog.  "I'll
+make it Spain," he said, "Mother won't mind; she's never been there.
+And my Father thinks a lot of Goya."
+
+"Oh! yes, he's a painter--isn't he?"
+
+"Only water-colour," said Jon, with honesty.
+
+"When we come to Reading, Jon, get out first and go down to Caversham
+lock and wait for me.  I'll send the car home and we'll walk by the
+towing-path."
+
+Jon seized her hand in gratitude, and they sat silent, with the world
+well lost, and one eye on the corridor.  But the train seemed to run
+twice as fast now, and its sound was almost lost in that of Jon's
+sighing.
+
+"We're getting near," said Fleur; "the towing-path's awfully exposed.
+One more!  Oh! Jon, don't forget me."
+
+Jon answered with his kiss.  And very soon, a flushed, distracted-
+looking youth could have been seen--as they say--leaping from the
+train and hurrying along the platform, searching his pockets for his
+ticket.
+
+When at last she rejoined him on the towing-path a little beyond
+Caversham lock he had made an effort, and regained some measure of
+equanimity.  If they had to part, he would not make a scene!  A
+breeze by the bright river threw the white side of the willow leaves
+up into the sunlight, and followed those two with its faint rustle.
+
+"I told our chauffeur that I was train-giddy," said Fleur.  "Did you
+look pretty natural as you went out?"
+
+"I don't know.  What is natural?"
+
+"It's natural to you to look seriously happy.  When I first saw you I
+thought you weren't a bit like other people."
+
+"Exactly what I thought when I saw you.  I knew at once I should
+never love anybody else."
+
+Fleur laughed.
+
+"We're absurdly young.  And love's young dream is out of date, Jon.
+Besides, it's awfully wasteful.  Think of all the fun you might have.
+You haven't begun, even; it's a shame, really.  And there's me.  I
+wonder!"
+
+Confusion came on Jon's spirit.  How could she say such things just
+as they were going to part?
+
+"If you feel like that," he said, "I can't go.  I shall tell Mother
+that I ought to try and work.  There's always the condition of the
+world!"
+
+"The condition of the world!"
+
+Jon thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
+
+"But there is," he said; "think of the people starving!"
+
+Fleur shook her head.  "No, no, I never, never will make myself
+miserable for nothing."
+
+"Nothing!  But there's an awful state of things, and of course one
+ought to help."
+
+"Oh! yes, I know all that.  But you can't help people, Jon; they're
+hopeless.  When you pull them out they only get into another hole.
+Look at them, still fighting and plotting and struggling, though
+they're dying in heaps all the time.  Idiots!"
+
+"Aren't you sorry for them?"
+
+"Oh! sorry--yes, but I'm not going to make myself unhappy about it;
+that's no good."
+
+And they were silent, disturbed by this first glimpse of each other's
+natures.
+
+"I think people are brutes and idiots," said Fleur stubbornly.
+
+"I think they're poor wretches," said Jon.  It was as if they had
+quarrelled--and at this supreme and awful moment, with parting
+visible out there in that last gap of the willows!
+
+"Well, go and help your poor wretches, and don't think of me."
+
+Jon stood still.  Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his limbs
+trembled.  Fleur too had stopped, and was frowning at the river.
+
+"I must believe in things," said Jon with a sort of agony; "we're all
+meant to enjoy life."
+
+Fleur laughed.  "Yes; and that's what you won't do, if you don't take
+care.  But perhaps your idea of enjoyment is to make yourself
+wretched.  There are lots of people like that, of course."
+
+She was pale, her eyes had darkened, her lips had thinned.  Was it
+Fleur thus staring at the water?  Jon had an unreal feeling as if he
+were passing through the scene in a book where the lover has to
+choose between love and duty.  But just then she looked round at him.
+Never was anything so intoxicating as that vivacious look.  It acted
+on him exactly as the tug of a chain acts on a dog--brought him up to
+her with his tail wagging and his tongue out.
+
+"Don't let's be silly," she said, "time's too short.  Look, Jon, you
+can just see where I've got to cross the river.  There, round the
+bend, where the woods begin."
+
+Jon saw a gable, a chimney or two, a patch of wall through the trees-
+-and felt his heart sink.
+
+"I mustn't dawdle any more.  It's no good going beyond the next
+hedge, it gets all open.  Let's get on to it and say good-bye."
+
+They went side by side, hand in hand, silently toward the hedge,
+where the may-flower, both pink and white, was in full bloom.
+
+"My Club's the 'Talisman,' Stratton Street, Piccadilly.  Letters
+there will be quite safe, and I'm almost always up once a week."
+
+Jon nodded.  His face had become extremely set, his eyes stared
+straight before him.
+
+"To-day's the twenty-third of May," said Fleur; "on the ninth of July
+I shall be in front of the 'Bacchus and Ariadne' at three o'clock;
+will you?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"If you feel as bad as I it's all right.  Let those people pass!"
+
+A man and woman airing their children went by strung out in Sunday
+fashion.
+
+The last of them passed the wicket gate.
+
+"Domesticity!" said Fleur, and blotted herself against the hawthorn
+hedge.  The blossom sprayed out above her head, and one pink cluster
+brushed her cheek.  Jon put up his hand jealously to keep it off.
+
+"Good-bye, Jon."  For a second they stood with hands hard clasped.
+Then their lips met for the third time, and when they parted Fleur
+broke away and fled through the wicket gate.  Jon stood where she had
+left him, with his forehead against that pink cluster.  Gone!  For an
+eternity--for seven weeks all but two days!  And here he was, wasting
+the last sight of her!  He rushed to the gate.  She was walking
+swiftly on the heels of the straggling children.  She turned her
+head, he saw her hand make a little flitting gesture; then she sped
+on, and the trailing family blotted her out from his view.
+
+The words of a comic song--
+
+        "Paddington groan-worst ever known--
+        He gave a sepulchral Paddington groan--"
+
+came into his head, and he sped incontinently back to Reading
+station.  All the way up to London and down to Wansdon he sat with
+"The Heart of the Trail" open on his knee, knitting in his head a
+poem so full of feeling that it would not rhyme.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+CAPRICE
+
+
+Fleur sped on.  She had need of rapid motion; she was late, and
+wanted all her wits about her when she got in.  She passed the
+islands, the station, and hotel, and was about to take the ferry,
+when she saw a skiff with a young man standing up in it, and holding
+to the bushes.
+
+"Miss Forsyte," he said; "let me put you across.  I've come on
+purpose."
+
+She looked at him in blank amazement.
+
+"It's all right, I've been having tea with your people.  I thought
+I'd save you the last bit.  It's on my way, I'm just off back to
+Pangbourne.  My name's Mont.  I saw you at the picture-gallery--you
+remember--when your father invited me to see his pictures."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur; "yes--the handkerchief."
+
+To this young man she owed Jon; and, taking his hand, she stepped
+down into the skiff.  Still emotional, and a little out of breath,
+she sat silent; not so the young man.  She had never heard any one
+say so much in so short a time.  He told her his age, twenty-four;
+his weight, ten stone eleven; his place of residence, not far away;
+described his sensations under fire, and what it felt like to be
+gassed; criticized the Juno, mentioned his own conception of that
+goddess; commented on the Goya copy, said Fleur was not too awfully
+like it; sketched in rapidly the condition of England; spoke of
+Monsieur Profond--or whatever his name was--as "an awful sport";
+thought her father had some "ripping" pictures and some rather "dug-
+up"; hoped he might row down again and take her on the river because
+he was quite trustworthy; inquired her opinion of Tchekov, gave her
+his own; wished they could go to the Russian ballet together some
+time--considered the name Fleur Forsyte simply topping; cursed his
+people for giving him the name of Michael on the top of Mont;
+outlined his father, and said that if she wanted a good book she
+should read "Job"; his father was rather like Job while Job still had
+land.
+
+"But Job didn't have land," Fleur murmured; "he only had flocks and
+herds and moved on."
+
+"Ah!" answered Michael Mont, "I wish my gov'nor would move on.  Not
+that I want his land.  Land's an awful bore in these days, don't you
+think?"
+
+"We never have it in my family," said Fleur.  "We have everything
+else.  I believe one of my great-uncles once had a sentimental farm
+in Dorset, because we came from there originally, but it cost him
+more than it made him happy."
+
+"Did he sell it?"
+
+"No; he kept it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because nobody would buy it."
+
+"Good for the old boy!"
+
+"No, it wasn't good for him.  Father says it soured him.  His name
+was Swithin."
+
+"What a corking name!"
+
+"Do you know that we're getting farther off, not nearer?  This river
+flows."
+
+"Splendid!" cried Mont, dipping his sculls vaguely; "it's good to
+meet a girl who's got wit."
+
+"But better to meet a young man who's got it in the plural."
+
+Young Mont raised a hand to tear his hair.
+
+"Look out!" cried Fleur.  "Your scull!"
+
+"All right!  It's thick enough to bear a scratch."
+
+"Do you mind sculling?" said Fleur severely.  "I want to get in."
+
+"Ah!" said Mont; "but when you get in, you see, I shan't see you any
+more to-day.  Fini, as the French girl said when she jumped on her
+bed after saying her prayers.  Don't you bless the day that gave you
+a French mother, and a name like yours?"
+
+"I like my name, but Father gave it me.  Mother wanted me called
+Marguerite."
+
+"Which is absurd.  Do you mind calling me M. M.  and letting me call
+you F. F.?  It's in the spirit of the age."
+
+"I don't mind anything, so long as I get in."
+
+Mont caught a little crab, and answered: "That was a nasty one!"
+
+"Please row."
+
+"I am."  And he did for several strokes, looking at her with rueful
+eagerness.  "Of course, you know," he ejaculated, pausing, "that I
+came to see you, not your father's pictures."
+
+Fleur rose.
+
+"If you don't row, I shall get out and swim."
+
+"Really and truly?  Then I could come in after you."
+
+"Mr. Mont, I'm late and tired; please put me on shore at once."
+
+When she stepped out on to the garden landing-stage he rose, and
+grasping his hair with both hands, looked at her.
+
+Fleur smiled.
+
+"Don't!" cried the irrepressible Mont.  "I know you're going to say:
+'Out, damned hair!'"
+
+Fleur whisked round, threw him a wave of her hand.  "Good-bye, Mr.
+M.M.!" she called, and was gone among the rose-trees.  She looked at
+her wrist-watch and the windows of the house.  It struck her as
+curiously uninhabited.  Past six!  The pigeons were just gathering to
+roost, and sunlight slanted on the dovecot, on their snowy feathers,
+and beyond in a shower on the top boughs of the woods.  The click of
+billiard-balls came from the ingle-nook--Jack Cardigan, no doubt; a
+faint rustling, too, from an eucalyptus-tree, startling Southerner in
+this old English garden.  She reached the verandah and was passing
+in, but stopped at the sound of voices from the drawing-room to her
+left.  Mother!  Monsieur Profond!  From behind the verandah screen
+which fenced the ingle-nook she heard these words:
+
+"I don't, Annette."
+
+Did Father know that he called her mother "Annette"?  Always on the
+side of her Father--as children are ever on one side or the other in
+houses where relations are a little strained--she stood, uncertain.
+Her mother was speaking in her low, pleasing, slightly metallic
+voice--one word she caught: "Demain."  And Profond's answer: "All
+right."  Fleur frowned.  A little sound came out into the stillness.
+Then Profond's voice: "I'm takin' a small stroll."
+
+Fleur darted through the window into the morning-room.  There he came
+from the drawing-room, crossing the verandah, down the lawn; and the
+click of billiard-balls which, in listening for other sounds, she had
+ceased to hear, began again.  She shook herself, passed into the
+hall, and opened the drawing-room door.  Her mother was sitting on
+the sofa between the windows, her knees crossed, her head resting on
+a cushion, her lips half parted, her eyes half closed.  She looked
+extraordinarily handsome.
+
+"Ah!  Here you are, Fleur!  Your father is beginning to fuss."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In the picture-gallery.  Go up!"
+
+"What are you going to do to-morrow, Mother?"
+
+"To-morrow?  I go up to London with your aunt."
+
+"I thought you might be.  Will you get me a quite plain parasol?"
+What colour?"
+
+"Green.  They're all going back, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, all; you will console your father.  Kiss me, then."
+
+Fleur crossed the room, stooped, received a kiss on her forehead, and
+went out past the impress of a form on the sofa-cushions in the other
+corner.  She ran up-stairs.
+
+Fleur was by no means the old-fashioned daughter who demands the
+regulation of her parents' lives in accordance with the standard
+imposed upon herself.  She claimed to regulate her own life, not
+those of others; besides, an unerring instinct for what was likely to
+advantage her own case was already at work.  In a disturbed domestic
+atmosphere the heart she had set on Jon would have a better chance.
+None the less was she offended, as a flower by a crisping wind.  If
+that man had really been kissing her mother it was--serious, and her
+father ought to know.  "Demain!"  "All right!"  And her mother going
+up to Town!  She turned into her bedroom and hung out of the window
+to cool her face, which had suddenly grown very hot.  Jon must be at
+the station by now!  What did her father know about Jon?  Probably
+everything--pretty nearly!
+
+She changed her dress, so as to look as if she had been in some time,
+and ran up to the gallery.
+
+Soames was standing stubbornly still before his Alfred Stevens--the
+picture he loved best.  He did not turn at the sound of the door, but
+she knew he had heard, and she knew he was hurt.  She came up softly
+behind him, put her arms round his neck, and poked her face over his
+shoulder till her cheek lay against his.  It was an advance which had
+never yet failed, but it failed her now, and she augured the worst.
+"Well," he said stonily, "so you've come!"
+
+"Is that all," murmured Fleur, "from a bad parent?" And she rubbed
+her cheek against his.
+
+Soames shook his head so far as that was possible.
+
+"Why do you keep me on tenterhooks like this, putting me off and
+off?"
+
+"Darling, it was very harmless."
+
+"Harmless!  Much you know what's harmless and what isn't."
+
+Fleur dropped her arms.
+
+"Well, then, dear, suppose you tell me; and be quite frank about it."
+
+And she went over to the window-seat.
+
+Her father had turned from his picture, and was staring at his feet.
+He looked very grey.  'He has nice small feet,' she thought, catching
+his eye, at once averted from her.
+
+"You're my only comfort," said Soames suddenly, "and you go on like
+this."
+
+Fleur's heart began to beat.
+
+"Like what, dear?"
+
+Again Soames gave her a look which, but for the affection in it,
+might have been called furtive.
+
+"You know what I told you," he said.  "I don't choose to have
+anything to do with that branch of our family."
+
+"Yes, ducky, but I don't know why I shouldn't."
+
+Soames turned on his heel.
+
+"I'm not going into the reasons," he said; "you ought to trust me,
+Fleur!"
+
+The way he spoke those words affected Fleur, but she thought of Jon,
+and was silent, tapping her foot against the wainscot.  Unconsciously
+she had assumed a modern attitude, with one leg twisted in and out of
+the other, with her chin on one bent wrist, her other arm across her
+chest, and its hand hugging her elbow; there was not a line of her
+that was not involuted, and yet--in spite of all--she retained a
+certain grace.
+
+"You knew my wishes," Soames went on, "and yet you stayed on there
+four days.  And I suppose that boy came with you to-day."
+
+Fleur kept her eyes on him.
+
+"I don't ask you anything," said Soames; "I make no inquisition where
+you're concerned."
+
+Fleur suddenly stood up, leaning out at the window with her chin on
+her hands.  The sun had sunk behind trees, the pigeons were perched,
+quite still, on the edge of the dove-cot; the click of the billiard-
+balls mounted, and a faint radiance shone out below where Jack
+Cardigan had turned the light up.
+
+"Will it make you any happier," she said suddenly, "if I promise you
+not to see him for say--the next six weeks?" She was not prepared for
+a sort of tremble in the blankness of his voice.
+
+"Six weeks?  Six years--sixty years more like.  Don't delude
+yourself, Fleur; don't delude yourself!"
+
+Fleur turned in alarm.
+
+"Father, what is it?"
+
+Soames came close enough to see her face.
+
+"Don't tell me," he said, "that you're foolish enough to have any
+feeling beyond caprice.  That would be too much!"  And he laughed.
+
+Fleur, who had never heard him laugh like that, thought: 'Then it is
+deep!  Oh! what is it?'  And putting her hand through his arm she
+said lightly:
+
+"No, of course; caprice.  Only, I like my caprices and I don't like
+yours, dear."
+
+"Mine!" said Soames bitterly, and turned away.
+
+The light outside had chilled, and threw a chalky whiteness on the
+river.  The trees had lost all gaiety of colour.  She felt a sudden
+hunger for Jon's face, for his hands, and the feel of his lips again
+on hers.  And pressing her arms tight across her breast she forced
+out a little light laugh.
+
+"O la! la!  What a small fuss! as Profond would say.  Father, I don't
+like that man."
+
+She saw him stop, and take something out of his breast pocket.
+
+"You don't?" he said.  "Why?"
+
+"Nothing," murmured Fleur; "just caprice!"
+
+"No," said Soames; "not caprice!" And he tore what was in his hands
+across.  "You're right.  I don't like him either!"
+
+"Look!" said Fleur softly.  "There he goes!  I hate his shoes; they
+don't make any noise."
+
+Down in the failing light Prosper Profond moved, his hands in his
+side pockets, whistling softly in his beard; he stopped, and glanced
+up at the sky, as if saying: "I don't think much of that small moon."
+
+Fleur drew back.  "Isn't he a great cat?" she whispered; and the
+sharp click of the billiard-balls rose, as if Jack Cardigan had
+capped the cat, the moon, caprice, and tragedy with: "In off the
+red!"
+
+Monsieur Profond had resumed his stroll, to a teasing little tune in
+his beard.  What was it?  Oh! yes, from "Rigoletto": "Donna a
+mobile."  Just what he would think!  She squeezed her father's arm.
+
+"Prowling!" she muttered, as he turned the corner of the house.  It
+was past that disillusioned moment which divides the day and night-
+still and lingering and warm, with hawthorn scent and lilac scent
+clinging on the riverside air.  A blackbird suddenly burst out.  Jon
+would be in London by now; in the Park perhaps, crossing the
+Serpentine, thinking of her!  A little sound beside her made her turn
+her eyes; her father was again tearing the paper in his hands.  Fleur
+saw it was a cheque.
+
+"I shan't sell him my Gauguin," he said.  "I don't know what your
+aunt and Imogen see in him."
+
+"Or Mother."
+
+"Your mother!" said Soames.
+
+'Poor Father!' she thought.  'He never looks happy--not really happy.
+I don't want to make him worse, but of course I shall have to, when
+Jon comes back.  Oh! well, sufficient unto the night!'
+
+"I'm going to dress," she said.
+
+In her room she had a fancy to put on her "freak" dress.  It was of
+gold tissue with little trousers of the same, tightly drawn in at the
+ankles, a page's cape slung from the shoulders, little gold shoes,
+and a gold-winged Mercury helmet; and all over her were tiny gold
+bells, especially on the helmet; so that if she shook her head she
+pealed.  When she was dressed she felt quite sick because Jon could
+not see her; it even seemed a pity that the sprightly young man
+Michael Mont would not have a view.  But the gong had sounded, and
+she went down.
+
+She made a sensation in the drawing-room.  Winifred thought it "Most
+amusing."  Imogen was enraptured.  Jack Cardigan called it
+"stunning," "ripping," "topping," and "corking."
+
+Monsieur Profond, smiling with his eyes, said: "That's a nice small
+dress!"  Her mother, very handsome in black, sat looking at her, and
+said nothing.  It remained for her father to apply the test of common
+sense.  "What did you put on that thing for?  You're not going to
+dance."
+
+Fleur spun round, and the bells pealed.
+
+"Caprice!"
+
+Soames stared at her, and, turning away, gave his arm to Winifred.
+Jack Cardigan took her mother.  Prosper Profond took Imogen.  Fleur
+went in by herself, with her bells jingling....
+
+The "small" moon had soon dropped down, and May night had fallen soft
+and warm, enwrapping with its grape-bloom colour and its scents the
+billion caprices, intrigues, passions, longings, and regrets of men
+and women.  Happy was Jack Cardigan who snored into Imogen's white
+shoulder, fit as a flea; or Timothy in his "mausoleum," too old for
+anything but baby's slumber.  For so many lay awake, or dreamed,
+teased by the criss-cross of the world.
+
+The dew fell and the flowers closed; cattle grazed on in the river
+meadows, feeling with their tongues for the grass they could not see;
+and the sheep on the Downs lay quiet as stones.  Pheasants in the
+tall trees of the Pangbourne woods, larks on their grassy nests above
+the gravel-pit at Wansdon, swallows in the eaves at Robin Hill, and
+the sparrows of Mayfair, all made a dreamless night of it, soothed by
+the lack of wind.  The Mayfly filly, hardly accustomed to her new
+quarters, scraped at her straw a little; and the few night-flitting
+things--bats, moths, owls--were vigorous in the warm darkness; but
+the peace of night lay in the brain of all day-time Nature,
+colourless and still.  Men and women, alone, riding the hobby-horses
+of anxiety or love, burned their wavering tapers of dream and thought
+into the lonely hours.
+
+Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled
+chime of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of an
+aspen's leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the river, the
+distant rumble of a night train, and time and again the sounds which
+none can put a name to in the darkness, soft obscure expressions of
+uncatalogued emotions from man and beast, bird and machine, or,
+maybe, from departed Forsytes, Darties, Cardigans, taking night
+strolls back into a world which had once suited their embodied
+spirits.  But Fleur heeded not these sounds; her spirit, far from
+disembodied, fled with swift wing from railway-carriage to flowery
+hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious of his forbidden image, and the
+sound of his voice, which was taboo.  And she crinkled her nose,
+retrieving from the perfume of the riverside night that moment when
+his hand slipped between the mayflowers and her cheek.  Long she
+leaned out in her freak dress, keen to burn her wings at life's
+candle; while the moths brushed her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the
+lamp on her dressing-table, ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there
+is no open flame.  But at last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting
+her bells, drew quickly in.
+
+Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
+wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken
+from stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could hear
+such sounds.
+
+'Caprice!' he thought.  'I can't tell.  She's wilful.  What shall I
+do?  Fleur!'
+
+And long into the "small" night he brooded.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+I
+
+MOTHER AND SON
+
+
+To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly
+would scarcely have been adequate.  He went as a well-natured dog
+goes for a walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on
+the lawn.  He went looking back at it.  Forsytes deprived of their
+mutton-bones are wont to sulk.  But Jon had little sulkiness in his
+composition.  He adored his mother, and it was his first travel.
+Spain had become Italy by his simply saying: "I'd rather go to Spain,
+Mum; you've been to Italy so many times; I'd like it new to both of
+us."
+
+The fellow was subtle besides being naive.  He never forgot that he
+was going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must
+therefore show no sign of wishing to do so.  For one with so enticing
+a mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling
+companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food,
+and thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most
+travelled Englishman.  Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was
+profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or
+fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and
+tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing
+cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats,
+olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages,
+watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and
+swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.
+
+It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.
+Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not
+English, was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own
+countrymen.  He felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more
+practical view of things than himself.  He confided to his mother
+that he must be an unsociable beast--it was jolly to be away from
+everybody who could talk about the things people did talk about.  To
+which Irene had replied simply:
+
+"Yes, Jon, I know."
+
+In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating
+what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother's
+love.  Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt,
+unduly sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for
+her type of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called
+Spanish, but which he now perceived to be no such thing.  Her beauty
+was neither English, French, Spanish, nor Italian--it was special!
+He appreciated, too, as never before, his mother's subtlety of
+instinct.  He could not tell, for instance, whether she had noticed
+his absorption in that Goya picture, "La Vendimia," or whether she
+knew that he had slipped back there after lunch and again next
+morning, to stand before it full half an hour, a second and third
+time.  It was not Fleur, of course, but like enough to give him
+heartache--so dear to lovers--remembering her standing at the foot of
+his bed with her hand held above her head.  To keep a postcard
+reproduction of this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at
+became for Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
+themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy.  And his
+mother's were sharpened by all three.  In Granada he was fairly
+caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little battlemented
+garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have been looking at
+the view.  His mother, he had thought, was examining the potted
+stocks between the polled acacias, when her voice said:
+
+"Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?"
+
+He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at school
+to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered: "Yes."
+
+"It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the 'Quitasol'
+Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe he saw them
+when he was in Spain in '92."
+
+In '92--nine years before he had been born!  What had been the
+previous existences of his father and his mother?  If they had a
+right to share in his future, surely he had a right to share in their
+pasts.  He looked up at her.  But something in her face--a look of
+life hard-lived, the mysterious impress of emotions, experience, and
+suffering-seemed, with its incalculable depth, its purchased
+sanctity, to make curiosity impertinent.  His mother must have had a
+wonderfully interesting life; she was so beautiful, and so--so--but
+he could not frame what he felt about her.  He got up, and stood
+gazing down at the town, at the plain all green with crops, and the
+ring of mountains glamorous in sinking sunlight.  Her life was like
+the past of this old Moorish city, full, deep, remote--his own life
+as yet such a baby of a thing, hopelessly ignorant and innocent!
+They said that in those mountains to the West, which rose sheer from
+the blue-green plain, as if out of a sea, Phoenicians had dwelt--a
+dark, strange, secret race, above the land!  His mother's life was as
+unknown to him, as secret, as that Phoenician past was to the town
+down there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played and
+clamoured so gaily, day in, day out.  He felt aggrieved that she
+should know all about him and he nothing about her except that she
+loved him and his father, and was beautiful.  His callow ignorance--
+he had not even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody
+else!--made him small in his own eyes.
+
+That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the
+roof of the town--as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and
+gold; and, long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the
+sentry as the hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:
+
+     "Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping
+     Spanish city darkened under her white stars!
+
+     "What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish?
+     Just the watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety?
+     Just a road-man, flinging to the moon his song?
+
+     "No!  Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping,
+     Just his cry: 'How long?'"
+
+The word "deprived" seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but
+"bereaved" was too final, and no other word of two syllables short-
+long came to him, which would enable him to keep "whose lover's heart
+is weeping."  It was past two by the time he had finished it, and
+past three before he went to sleep, having said it over to himself at
+least twenty-four times.  Next day he wrote it out and enclosed it in
+one of those letters to Fleur which he always finished before he went
+down, so as to have his mind free and companionable.
+
+About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he
+felt a sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in
+the eyes, and sickness.  The sun had touched him too affectionately.
+The next three days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled,
+aching indifference to all except the feel of ice on his forehead and
+his mother's smile.  She never moved from his room, never relaxed her
+noiseless vigilance, which seemed to Jon angelic.  But there were
+moments when he was extremely sorry for himself, and wished terribly
+that Fleur could see him.  Several times he took a poignant imaginary
+leave of her and of the earth, tears oozing out of his eyes.  He even
+prepared the message he would send to her by his mother--who would
+regret to her dying day that she had ever sought to separate them--
+his poor mother!  He was not slow, however, in perceiving that he had
+now his excuse for going home.
+
+Toward half-past six each evening came a "gasgacha" of bells--a
+cascade of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and falling
+back chime on chime.  After listening to them on the fourth day he
+said suddenly:
+
+"I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot."
+
+"Very well, darling.  As soon as you're fit to travel"  And at once
+he felt better, and--meaner.
+
+They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home.  Jon's
+head was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to a
+hat lined by his mother with many layers of orange and green silk and
+he still walked from choice in the shade.  As the long struggle of
+discretion between them drew to its close, he wondered more and more
+whether she could see his eagerness to get back to that which she had
+brought him away from.  Condemned by Spanish Providence to spend a
+day in Madrid between their trains, it was but natural to go again to
+the Prado.  Jon was elaborately casual this time before his Goya
+girl.  Now that he was going back to her, he could afford a lesser
+scrutiny.  It was his mother who lingered before the picture, saying:
+
+"The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite."
+
+Jon heard her uneasily.  Did she understand?  But he felt once more
+that he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety.  She
+could, in some supersensitive way, of which he had not the secret,
+feel the pulse of his thoughts; she knew by instinct what he hoped
+and feared and wished.  It made him terribly uncomfortable and
+guilty, having, beyond most boys, a conscience.  He wished she would
+be frank with him, he almost hoped for an open struggle.  But none
+came, and steadily, silently, they travelled north.  Thus did he
+first learn how much better than men women play a waiting game.  In
+Paris they had again to pause for a day.  Jon was grieved because it
+lasted two, owing to certain matters in connection with a dressmaker;
+as if his mother, who looked beautiful in anything, had any need of
+dresses!  The happiest moment of his travel was that when he stepped
+on to the Folkestone boat.
+
+Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said
+
+"I'm afraid you haven't enjoyed it much, Jon.  But you've been very
+sweet to me."
+
+Jon squeezed her arm.
+
+"Oh I yes, I've enjoyed it awfully-except for my head lately."
+
+And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of
+glamour over the past weeks--a kind of painful pleasure, such as he
+had tried to screw into those lines about the voice in the night
+crying; a feeling such as he had known as a small boy listening
+avidly to Chopin, yet wanting to cry.  And he wondered why it was
+that he couldn't say to her quite simply what she had said to him:
+
+"You were very sweet to me."  Odd--one never could be nice and
+natural like that!  He substituted the words: "I expect we shall be
+sick."
+
+They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away
+six weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject
+which had hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
+
+
+Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found
+the solitude at Robin Hill intolerable.  A philosopher when he has
+all that he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not.
+Accustomed, however, to the idea, if not to the reality of
+resignation, he would perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter
+June.  He was a "lame duck" now, and on her conscience.  Having
+achieved--momentarily--the rescue of an etcher in low circumstances,
+which she happened to have in hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a
+fortnight after Irene and Jon had gone.  June was living now in a
+tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick.  A Forsyte of the best
+period, so far as the lack of responsibility was concerned, she had
+overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a manner satisfactory
+to herself and her father.  The rent of the Gallery off Cork Street
+which he had bought for her and her increased income tax happening to
+balance, it had been quite simpl--she no longer paid him the rent.
+The Gallery might be expected now at any time, after eighteen years
+of barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure her father
+would not feel it.  Through this device she still had twelve hundred
+a year, and by reducing what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians
+in a poor way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically the
+same surplus for the relief of genius.  After three days at Robin
+Hill she carried her father back with her to Town.  In those three
+days she had stumbled on the secret he had kept for two years, and
+had instantly decided to cure him.  She knew, in fact, the very man.
+He had done wonders with.  Paul Post--that painter a little in
+advance of Futurism; and she was impatient with her father because
+his eyebrows would go up, and because he had heard of neither.  Of
+course, if he hadn't "faith" he would never get well!  It was absurd
+not to have faith in the man who had healed Paul Post so that he had
+only just relapsed, from having overworked, or overlived, himself
+again.  The great thing about this healer was that he relied on
+Nature.  He had made a special study of the symptoms of Nature--when
+his patient failed in any natural symptom he supplied the poison
+which caused it--and there you were!  She was extremely hopeful.  Her
+father had clearly not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and
+she intended to provide the symptoms.  He was--she felt--out of touch
+with the times, which was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating.
+In the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian--a grateful soul,
+so devoted to June for rescuing her that she was in danger of decease
+from overwork--stimulated Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him
+for his cure.  But they could not keep his eyebrows down; as, for
+example, when the Austrian woke him at eight o'clock just as he was
+going to sleep, or June took The Times away from him, because it was
+unnatural to read "that stuff" when he ought to be taking an interest
+in "life."  He never failed, indeed, to be astonished at her
+resource, especially in the evenings.  For his benefit, as she
+declared, though he suspected that she also got something out of it,
+she assembled the Age so far as it was satellite to genius; and with
+some solemnity it would move up and down the studio before him in the
+Fox-trot, and that more mental form of dancing--the One-step--which
+so pulled against the music, that Jolyon's eyebrows would be almost
+lost in his hair from wonder at the strain it must impose on the
+dancer's will-power.  Aware that, hung on the line in the Water
+Colour Society, he was a back number to those with any pretension to
+be called artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he could find,
+and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago he had been raised.
+And when June brought some girl or young man up to him, he would rise
+humbly to their level so far as that was possible, and think: 'Dear
+me!  This is very dull for them!'  Having his father's perennial
+sympathy with Youth, he used to get very tired from entering into
+their points of view.  But it was all stimulating, and he never
+failed in admiration of his daughter's indomitable spirit.  Even
+genius itself attended these gatherings now and then, with its nose
+on one side; and June always introduced it to her father.  This, she
+felt, was exceptionally good for him, for genius was a natural
+symptom he had never had--fond as she was of him.
+
+Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often
+wondered whence she got herself--her red-gold hair, now greyed into a
+special colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own
+rather folded and subtilised countenance, her little lithe figure,
+when he and most of the Forsytes were tall.  And he would dwell on
+the origin of species, and debate whether she might be Danish or
+Celtic.  Celtic, he thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in
+fillets and djibbahs.  It was not too much to say that he preferred
+her to the Age with which she was surrounded, youthful though, for
+the greater part, it was.  She took, however, too much interest in
+his teeth, for he still had some of those natural symptoms.  Her
+dentist at once found "Staphylococcus aureus present in pure culture"
+(which might cause boils, of course), and wanted to take out all the
+teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of unnatural
+symptoms.  Jolyon's native tenacity was roused, and in the studio
+that evening he developed his objections.  He had never had any
+boils, and his own teeth would last his time.  Of course--June
+admitted--they would last his time if he didn't have them out!  But
+if he had more teeth he would have a better heart and his time would
+be longer.  His recalcitrance--she said--was a symptom of his whole
+attitude; he was taking it lying down.  He ought to be fighting.
+When was he going to see the man who had cured Paul Post?  Jolyon was
+very sorry, but the fact was he was not going to see him.  June
+chafed.  Pondridge--she said--the healer, was such a fine man, and he
+had such difficulty in making two ends meet, and getting his theories
+recognised.  It was just such indifference and prejudice as her
+father manifested which was keeping him back.  It would be so
+splendid for both of them!
+
+"I perceive," said Jolyon, "that you are trying to kill two birds
+with one stone."
+
+"To cure, you mean!" cried June.
+
+"My dear, it's the same thing."
+
+June protested.  It was unfair to say that without a trial.
+
+Jolyon thought he might not have the chance, of saying it after.
+
+"Dad!" cried June, "you're hopeless."
+
+"That," said Jolyon, "is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as
+long as possible.  I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child.  They are
+quiet at present."
+
+"That's not giving science a chance," cried June.  "You've no idea
+how devoted Pondridge is.  He puts his science before everything."
+
+"Just," replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he was
+reduced, "as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh?  Art for Art's sake--
+Science for the sake of Science.  I know those enthusiastic egomaniac
+gentry.  They vivisect you without blinking.  I'm enough of a Forsyte
+to give them the go-by, June."
+
+"Dad," said June, "if you only knew how old-fashioned that sounds!
+Nobody can afford to be half-hearted nowadays."
+
+"I'm afraid," murmured Jolyon, with his smile, "that's the only
+natural symptom with which Mr. Pondridge need not supply me.  We are
+born to be extreme or to be moderate, my dear; though, if you'll
+forgive my saying so, half the people nowadays who believe they're
+extreme are really very moderate.  I'm getting on as well as I can
+expect, and I must leave it at that."
+
+June was silent, having experienced in her time the inexorable
+character of her father's amiable obstinacy so far as his own freedom
+of action was concerned.
+
+How he came to let her know why Irene had taken Jon to Spain puzzled
+Jolyon, for he had little confidence in her discretion.  After she
+had brooded on the news, it brought a rather sharp discussion, during
+which he perceived to the full the fundamental opposition between her
+active temperament and his wife's passivity.  He even gathered that a
+little soreness still remained from that generation-old struggle
+between them over the body of Philip Bosinney, in which the passive
+had so signally triumphed over the active principle.
+
+According to June, it was foolish and even cowardly to hide the past
+from Jon.  Sheer opportunism, she called it.
+
+"Which," Jolyon put in mildly, "is the working principle of real
+life, my dear."
+
+"Oh!" cried June, "you don't really defend her for not telling Jon,
+Dad.  If it were left to you, you would."
+
+"I might, but simply because I know he must find out, which will be
+worse than if we told him."
+
+"Then why don't you tell him?  It's just sleeping dogs again."
+
+"My dear," said Jolyon, "I wouldn't for the world go against Irene's
+instinct.  He's her boy."
+
+"Yours too," cried June.
+
+"What is a man's instinct compared with a mother's?"
+
+"Well, I think it's very weak of you."
+
+"I dare say," said Jolyon, "I dare say."
+
+And that was all she got from him; but the matter rankled in her
+brain.  She could not bear sleeping dogs.  And there stirred in her a
+tortuous impulse to push the matter toward decision.  Jon ought to be
+told, so that either his feeling might be nipped in the bud, or,
+flowering in spite of the past, come to fruition.  And she determined
+to see Fleur, and judge for herself.  When June determined on
+anything, delicacy became a somewhat minor consideration.  After all,
+she was Soames' cousin, and they were both interested in pictures.
+She would go and tell him that he ought to buy a Paul Post, or
+perhaps a piece of sculpture by Boris Strumolowski, and of course she
+would say nothing to her father.  She went on the following Sunday,
+looking so determined that she had some difficulty in getting a cab
+at Reading station.  The river country was lovely in those days of
+her own month, and June ached at its loveliness.  She who had passed
+through this life without knowing what union was had a love of
+natural beauty which was almost madness.  And when she came to that
+choice spot where Soames had pitched his tent, she dismissed her cab,
+because, business over, she wanted to revel in the bright water and
+the woods.  She appeared at his front door, therefore, as a mere
+pedestrian, and sent in her card.  It was in June's character to know
+that when her nerves were fluttering she was doing something worth
+while.  If one's nerves did not flutter, she was taking the line of
+least resistance, and knew that nobleness was not obliging her.  She
+was conducted to a drawing-room, which, though not in her style,
+showed every mark of fastidious elegance.  Thinking, 'Too much taste-
+-too many knick-knacks,' she saw in an old lacquer-framed mirror the
+figure of a girl coming in from the verandah.  Clothed in white, and
+holding some white roses in her hand, she had, reflected in that
+silvery-grey pool of glass, a vision-like appearance, as if a pretty
+ghost had come out of the green garden.
+
+"How do you do?" said June, turning round.  "I'm a cousin of your
+father's."
+
+"Oh, yes; I saw you in that confectioner's."
+
+"With my young stepbrother.  Is your father in?"
+
+"He will be directly.  He's only gone for a little walk."
+
+June slightly narrowed her blue eyes, and lifted her decided chin.
+
+"Your name's Fleur, isn't it?  I've heard of you from Holly.  What do
+you think of Jon?"
+
+The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered
+calmly:
+
+"He's quite a nice boy."
+
+"Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+'She's cool,' thought June.
+
+And suddenly the girl said: "I wish you'd tell me why our families
+don't get on?"
+
+Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer,
+June was silent; whether because this girl was trying to get
+something out of her, or simply because what one would do
+theoretically is not always what one will do when
+it comes to the point.
+
+"You know," said the girl, "the surest way to make people find out
+the worst is to keep them ignorant.  My father's told me it was a
+quarrel about property.  But I don't believe it; we've both got
+heaps.  They wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that."
+
+June flushed.  The word applied to her grandfather and father
+offended her.
+
+"My grandfather," she said, "was very generous, and my father is,
+too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois."
+
+"Well, what was it then?" repeated the girl: Conscious that this
+young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined
+to prevent her, and to get something for herself instead.
+
+"Why do you want to know?"
+
+The girl smelled at her roses.  "I only want to know because they
+won't tell me."
+
+"Well, it was about property, but there's more than one kind."
+
+"That makes it worse.  Now I really must know."
+
+June's small and resolute face quivered.  She was wearing a round
+cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it.  She looked quite young
+at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.
+
+"You know," she said, "I saw you drop your handkerchief.  Is there
+anything between you and Jon?  Because, if so, you'd better drop that
+too."
+
+The girl grew paler, but she smiled.
+
+"If there were, that isn't the way to make me."
+
+At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.
+
+"I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have.  We may as
+well be frank."
+
+"Did you come down to tell him that?"
+
+June laughed.  "No; I came down to see you."
+
+"How delightful of you."
+
+This girl could fence.
+
+"I'm two and a half times your age," said June, "but I quite
+sympathize.  It's horrid not to have one's own way."
+
+The girl smiled again.  "I really think you might tell me."
+
+How the child stuck to her point
+
+"It's not my secret.  But I'll see what I can do, because I think
+both you and Jon ought to be told.  And now I'll say good-bye."
+
+"Won't you wait and see Father?"
+
+June shook her head.  "How can I get over to the other side?"
+
+"I'll row you across."
+
+"Look!" said June impulsively, "next time you're in London, come and
+see me.  This is where I live.  I generally have young people in the
+evening.  But I shouldn't tell your father that you're coming."
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's awfully
+pretty and well made.  I never thought Soames would have a daughter
+as  pretty as this.  She and Jon would make a lovely couple.
+
+The instinct to couple, starved within herself,  was always at work
+in June.  She stood watching  Fleur row back; the girl took her hand
+off a scull  to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between
+the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart.  Youth to
+youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the
+sun warming them through and through.  Her  youth!  So long ago--when
+Phil and she--And since?  Nothing--no one had been quite what she had
+wanted.  And so she had missed it all.  But  what a coil was round
+those two young things, if they really were in love, as Holly would
+have it--as her father, and Irene, and Soames himself seemed to
+dread.  What a coil, and what a barrier!  And the itch for the
+future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast, which forms
+the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever believed
+that what one wanted was more important than what other people did
+not want.  From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer stillness, she
+watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the fishes rising;
+sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how she could
+force everybody to be happy.  Jon and Fleur!  Two little lame ducks--
+charming callow yellow little ducks!  A great pity!  Surely something
+could be done!  One must not take such situations lying down.  She
+walked on, and reached a station, hot and cross.
+
+That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which
+made many people avoid her, she said to her father:
+
+"Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur.  I think she's very
+attractive.  It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?"
+
+The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began crumbling
+his bread.
+
+"It's what you appear to be doing," he said.  "Do you realise whose
+daughter she is?"
+
+"Can't the dead past bury its dead?"
+
+Jolyon rose.
+
+"Certain things can never be buried."
+
+"I disagree," said June.  "It's that which stands in the way of all
+happiness and progress.  You don't understand the Age, Dad.  It's got
+no use for outgrown things.  Why do you think it matters so terribly
+that Jon should know about his mother?  Who pays any attention to
+that sort of thing now?  The marriage laws are just as they were when
+Soames and Irene couldn't get a divorce, and you had to come in.
+We've moved, and they haven't.  So nobody cares.  Marriage without a
+decent chance of relief is only a sort of slave-owning; people
+oughtn't to own each other.  Everybody sees that now.  If Irene broke
+such laws, what does it matter?"
+
+"It's not for me to disagree there," said Jolyon; "but that's all
+quite beside the mark.  This is a matter of human feeling."
+
+"Of course it is," cried June, "the human feeling of those two young
+things."
+
+"My dear," said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; "you're talking
+nonsense."
+
+"I'm not.  If they prove to be really fond of each other, why should
+they be made unhappy because of the past?"
+
+"You haven't lived that past.  I have--through the feelings of my
+wife; through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is
+devoted can."
+
+June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.
+
+"If," she said suddenly, "she were the daughter of Philip Bosinney, I
+could understand you better.  Irene loved him, she never loved
+Soames."
+
+Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant
+woman utters to her mule.  His heart had begun beating furiously, but
+he paid no attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.
+
+"That shows how little you understand.  Neither I nor Jon, if I know
+him, would mind a love-past.  It's the brutality of a union without
+love.  This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's
+mother as a negro-slave was owned.  You can't lay that ghost; don't
+try to, June!  It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and
+blood of the man who possessed Jon's mother against her will.  It's
+no good mincing words; I want it clear once for all.  And now I
+mustn't talk any more, or I shall have to sit up with this all
+night."  And, putting his hand over his heart, Jolyon turned his back
+on his daughter and stood looking at the river Thames.
+
+June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her
+head into it, was seriously alarmed.  She came and slipped her arm
+through his.  Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong,
+because that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed
+by the obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him.  She
+rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, and said nothing.
+
+After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once,
+but pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine.  The peaceful
+beauty of the afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to
+the vague and poetic.  In the field beyond the bank where her skiff
+lay up, a machine drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of
+hay.  She watched the grass cascading over and behind the light
+wheels with fascination--it looked so cool and fresh.  The click and
+swish blended with the rustle of the willows and the poplars, and the
+cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true river song.  Alongside, in the
+deep green water, weeds, like yellow snakes, were writhing and nosing
+with the current; pied cattle on the farther side stood in the shade
+lazily swishing their tails.  It was an afternoon to dream.  And she
+took out Jon's letters--not flowery effusions, but haunted in their
+recital of things seen and done by a longing very agreeable to her,
+and all ending "Your devoted J."  Fleur was not sentimental, her
+desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but what poetry there
+was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly in those
+weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon.  They all
+belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water.  She
+enjoyed him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose.  The stars
+could persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of
+the map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy
+sparkle and promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon
+personified to her.
+
+Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his
+letters, followed by their brood of six young swans in a line, with
+just so much water between each tail and head, a flotilla of grey
+destroyers.  Fleur thrust her letters back, got out her sculls, and
+pulled up to the landing-stage.  Crossing the lawn, she wondered
+whether she should tell her father of June's visit.  If he learned of
+it from the butler, he might think it odd if she did not.  It gave
+her, too, another chance to startle out of him the reason of the
+feud.  She went, therefore, up the road to meet him.
+
+Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
+Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with weak
+lungs.  Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part in
+local affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going up.
+He could not, however, remain indifferent to this new and dangerous
+scheme.  The site was not half a mile from his own house.  He was
+quite of opinion that the country should stamp out tuberculosis; but
+this was not the place.  It should be done farther away.  He took,
+indeed, an attitude common to all true Forsytes, that disability of
+any sort in other people was not his affair, and the State should do
+its business without prejudicing in any way the natural advantages
+which he had acquired or inherited.  Francie, the most free-spirited
+Forsyte of his generation (except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had
+once asked him in her malicious way: "Did you ever see the name
+Forsyte in a subscription list, Soames?  "That was as it might be,
+but a Sanatorium would depreciate the neighbourhood, and he should
+certainly sign the petition which was being got up against it.
+Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw Fleur coming.
+
+She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time down
+here with her in this summer weather had been making him feel quite
+young; Annette was always running up to Town for one thing or
+another, so that he had Fleur to himself almost as much as he could
+wish.  To be sure, young Mont had formed a habit of appearing on his
+motor-cycle almost every other day.  Thank goodness, the young fellow
+had shaved off his half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a
+mountebank!  With a girl friend of Fleur's who was staying in the
+house, and a neighbouring youth or so, they made two couples after
+dinner, in the hall, to the music of the electric pianola, which
+performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a surprised shine on its
+expressive surface.  Annette, even, now and then passed gracefully up
+and down in the arms of one or other of the young men.  And Soames,
+coming to the drawing-room door, would lift his nose a little
+sideways, and watch them, waiting to catch a smile from Fleur; then
+move back to his chair by the drawing-room hearth, to peruse The
+Times or some other collector's price list.  To his ever-anxious eyes
+Fleur showed no signs of remembering that caprice of hers.
+
+When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand within
+her arm.
+
+"Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad?  She couldn't wait!
+Guess!"
+
+"I never guess," said Soames uneasily.  "Who?"
+
+"Your cousin, June Forsyte."
+
+Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm.  "What did she want?"
+
+"I don't know.  But it was rather breaking through the feud, wasn't
+it?"
+
+"Feud?  What feud?"
+
+"The one that exists in your imagination, dear."
+
+Soames dropped her arm.  Was she mocking, or trying to draw him on?
+
+"I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture," he said at last.
+
+"I don't think so.  Perhaps it was just family affection."
+
+"She's only a first cousin once removed," muttered Soames.
+
+"And the daughter of your enemy."
+
+"What d'you mean by that?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was."
+
+"Enemy!" repeated Soames.  "It's ancient history.  I don't know where
+you get your notions."
+
+"From June Forsyte."
+
+It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew, or
+were on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.
+
+Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and tenacity.
+
+"If you know," he said coldly, "why do you plague me?"
+
+Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.
+
+"I don't want to plague you, darling.  As you say, why want to know
+more?  Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery--Je m'en
+fiche, as Profond says?"
+
+"That chap!" said Soames profoundly.
+
+That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this
+summer--for he had not turned up again.  Ever since the Sunday when
+Fleur had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had
+thought of him a good deal, and always in connection with Annette,
+for no reason, except that she was looking handsomer than for some
+time past.  His possessive instinct, subtle, less formal, more
+elastic since the War, kept all misgiving underground.  As one looks
+on some American river, quiet and pleasant, knowing that an alligator
+perhaps is lying in the mud with his snout just raised and
+indistinguishable from a snag of wood--so Soames looked on the river
+of his own existence, subconscious of Monsieur Profond, refusing to
+see more than the suspicion of his snout.  He had at this epoch in
+his life practically all he wanted, and was as nearly happy as his
+nature would permit.  His senses were at rest; his affections found
+all the vent they needed in his daughter; his collection was well
+known, his money well invested; his health excellent, save for a
+touch of liver now and again; he had not yet begun to worry seriously
+about what would happen after death, inclining to think that nothing
+would happen.  He resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and
+to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would
+be, he felt instinctively, perverse and retrogressive.  Those two
+crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout,
+would level away if he lay on them industriously.
+
+That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested
+Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands.  Her father came down to
+dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose.
+
+"I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and ran upstairs.  In the
+sachet where she sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--
+there were two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was
+buttoned, and contained something flat and hard.  By some childish
+impulse Fleur unbuttoned it.  There was a frame and in it a
+photograph of herself as a little girl.  She gazed at it, fascinated,
+as one is by one's own presentment.  It slipped under her fidgeting
+thumb, and she saw that another photograph was behind.  She pressed
+her own down further, and perceived a face, which she seemed to know,
+of a young woman, very good-looking, in a very old style of evening
+dress.  Slipping her own photograph up over it again, she took out a
+handkerchief and went down.  Only on the stairs did she identify that
+face.  Surely--surely Jon's mother!  The conviction came as a shock.
+And she stood still in a flurry of thought.  Why, of course!  Jon's
+father had married the woman her father had wanted to marry, had
+cheated him out of her, perhaps.  Then, afraid of showing by her
+manner that she had lighted on his secret, she refused to think
+further, and, shaking out the silk handkerchief, entered the dining-
+room.
+
+"I chose the softest, Father."
+
+"H'm!" said Soames; "I only use those after a cold.  Never mind!"
+
+That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together;
+recalling the look on her father's face in the confectioner's shop--a
+look strange and coldly intimate, a queer look.  He must have loved
+that woman very much to have kept her photograph all this time, in
+spite of having lost her.  Unsparing and matter-of-fact, her mind
+darted to his relations with her own mother.  Had he ever really
+loved her?  She thought not.  Jon was the son of the woman he had
+really loved.  Surely, then, he ought not to mind his daughter loving
+him; it only wanted getting used to.  And a sigh of sheer relief was
+caught in the folds of her nightgown slipping over her head.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+MEETINGS
+
+
+Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts.  Jon, for one, had
+never really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain.  The
+face of the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock--
+it looked so wan and old.  His father's mask had been forced awry by
+the emotion of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how
+much he must have felt their absence.  He summoned to his aid the
+thought: 'Well, I didn't want to go!'  It was out of date for Youth
+to defer to Age.  But Jon was by no means typically modern.  His
+father had always been "so jolly" to him, and to feel that one meant
+to begin again at once the conduct which his father had suffered six
+weeks' loneliness to cure was not agreeable.
+
+At the question, "Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike you?"
+his conscience pricked him badly.  The great Goya only existed
+because he had created a face which resembled Fleur's.
+
+On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction; but
+awoke full of anticipation.  It was only the fifth of July, and no
+meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth.  He was to have three
+days at home before going back to farm.  Somehow he must contrive to
+see her!
+
+In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for
+trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny.  On the second day,
+therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by
+ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face
+toward Piccadilly.  Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined
+Devonshire House.  It would be the merest chance that she should be
+at her Club.  But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart,
+noticing the superiority of all other young men to himself.  They
+wore their clothes with such an air; they had assurance; they were
+old.  He was suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must
+have forgotten him.  Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these
+weeks, he had mislaid that possibility.  The corners of his mouth
+drooped, his hands felt clammy.  Fleur with the pick of youth at the
+beck of her smile-Fleur incomparable!  It was an evil moment.  Jon,
+however, had a great idea that one must be able to face anything.
+And he braced himself with that dour refection in front of a bric-a-
+brac shop.  At this high-water mark of what was once the London
+season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except a grey
+top hat or two, and the sun.  Jon moved on, and turning the corner
+into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club,
+to which he had just been elected.
+
+"Hallo!  young man!  Where are you off to?"
+
+Jon gushed.  "I've just been to my tailor's."
+
+Val looked him up and down.  "That's good!  I'm going in here to
+order some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch."
+
+Jon thanked him.  He might get news of her from Val!
+
+The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men,
+was seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's which they
+now entered.
+
+"Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with.
+Bless me!  Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from--let me see--
+the year Melton won the Derby.  One of my very best customers he
+was."  A faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face.  "Many's the
+tip he's given me, to be sure!  I suppose he took a couple of hundred
+of these every week, year in, year out, and never changed his
+cigarette.  Very affable gentleman, brought me a lot of custom.  I
+was sorry he met with that accident.  One misses an old customer like
+him."
+
+Val smiled.  His father's decease had closed an account which had
+been running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke
+puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again
+his father's face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy,
+in the only halo it had earned.  His father had his fame here,
+anyway--a man who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could
+give tips, and run accounts for ever!  To his tobacconist a hero!
+Even that was some distinction to inherit!
+
+"I pay cash," he said; "how much?"
+
+"To his son, sir, and cash--ten and six.  I shall never forget Mr.
+Montague Dartie.  I've known him stand talkin' to me half an hour.
+We don't get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry.  The
+War was bad for manners, sir--it was bad for manners.  You were in
+it, I see."
+
+"No," said Val, tapping his knee, "I got this in the war before.
+Saved my life, I expect.  Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?"
+
+Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, "I don't smoke, you know," and saw the
+tobacconist's lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say "Good
+God!" or "Now's your chance, sir!"
+
+"That's right," said Val; "keep off it while you can.  You'll want it
+when you take a knock.  This is really the same tobacco, then?"
+
+"Identical, sir; a little dearer, that's all.  Wonderful staying
+power--the British Empire, I always say."
+
+"Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it
+monthly.  Come on, Jon."
+
+Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity.  Except to lunch now and then
+at the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London
+Club.  The Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could
+not, so long as George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his
+culinary acumen was almost the controlling force.  The Club had made
+a stand against the newly rich, and it had taken all George Forsyte's
+prestige, and praise of him as a "good sportsman," to bring in
+Prosper Profond.
+
+The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law entered
+the dining-room, and attracted by George's forefinger, sat down at
+their table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with
+solemn lips and an attractive shyness in his glance.  There was an
+air of privilege around that corner table, as though past masters
+were eating there.  Jon was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere.
+The waiter, lean in the chaps, pervaded with such free-masonical
+deference.  He seemed to hang on George Forsyte's lips, to watch the
+gloat in his eye with a kind of sympathy, to follow the movements of
+the heavy club-marked silver fondly.  His liveried arm and
+confidential voice alarmed Jon, they came so secretly over his
+shoulder.
+
+Except for George's "Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a deuced
+good judge of a cigar!" neither he nor the other past master took any
+notice of him, and he was grateful for this.  The talk was all about
+the breeding, points, and prices of horses, and he listened to it
+vaguely at first, wondering how it was possible to retain so much
+knowledge in a head.  He could not take his eyes off the dark past
+master--what he said was so deliberate and discouraging--such heavy,
+queer, smiled-out words.  Jon was thinking of butterflies, when he
+heard him say:
+
+"I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses."
+
+"Old Soames!  He's too dry a file!"
+
+With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past
+master went on.
+
+"His daughter's an attractive small girl.  Mr. Soames Forsyde is a
+bit old-fashioned.  I want to see him have a pleasure some day."
+George Forsyte grinned.
+
+"Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as he looks.  He'll never
+show he's enjoying anything--they might try and take it from him.
+Old Soames!  Once bit, twice shy!"
+
+"Well, Jon," said Val, hastily, "if you've finished, we'll go and
+have coffee."
+
+"Who were those?" Jon asked, on the stairs.  "I didn't quite---"
+
+"Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's and of my
+Uncle Soames.  He's always been here.  The other chap, Profond, is a
+queer fish.  I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you ask me!"
+
+Jon looked at him, startled.  "But that's awful," he said: "I mean--
+for Fleur."
+
+"Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very up-to-date."
+
+"Her mother!"
+
+"You're very green, Jon."
+
+Jon grew red.  "Mothers," he stammered angrily, "are different."
+
+"You're right," said Val suddenly; "but things aren't what they were
+when I was your age.  There's a 'To-morrow we die' feeling.  That's
+what old George meant about my Uncle Soames.  He doesn't mean to die
+to-morrow."
+
+Jon said, quickly: "What's the matter between him and my father?"
+
+"Stable secret, Jon.  Take my advice, and bottle up.  You'll do no
+good by knowing.  Have a liqueur?"
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+"I hate the way people keep things from one," he muttered, "and then
+sneer at one for being green."
+
+"Well, you can ask Holly.  If she won't tell you, you'll believe it's
+for your own good, I suppose."
+
+Jon got up.  "I must go now; thanks awfully for the lunch."
+
+Val smiled up at him half-sorry, and yet amused.  The boy looked so
+upset.
+
+"All right!  See you on Friday."
+
+"I don't know," murmured Jon.
+
+And he did not.  This conspiracy of silence made him desperate.  It
+was humiliating to be treated like a child!  He retraced his moody
+steps to Stratton Street.  But he would go to her Club now, and find
+out the worst!  To his enquiry the reply was that Miss Forsyte was
+not in the Club. She might be in perhaps later.  She was often in on
+Monday--they could not say.  Jon said he would call again, and,
+crossing into the Green Park, flung himself down under a tree.  The
+sun was bright, and a breeze fluttered the leaves of the young lime-
+tree beneath which he lay; but his heart ached.  Such darkness seemed
+gathered round his happiness.  He heard Big Ben chime "Three" above
+the traffic.  The sound moved something in him, and, taking out a
+piece of paper, he began to scribble on it with a pencil.  He had
+jotted a stanza, and was searching the grass for another verse, when
+something hard touched his shoulder-a green parasol.  There above him
+stood Fleur!
+
+"They told me you'd been, and were coming back.  So I thought you
+might be out here; and you are--it's rather wonderful!"
+
+"Oh, Fleur!  I thought you'd have forgotten me."
+
+"When I told you that I shouldn't!"
+
+Jon seized her arm.
+
+"It's too much luck!  Let's get away from this side."  He almost
+dragged her on through that too thoughtfully regulated Park, to find
+some cover where they could sit and hold each other's hands.
+
+"Hasn't anybody cut in?" he said, gazing round at her lashes, in
+suspense above her cheeks.
+
+"There is a young idiot, but he doesn't count."
+
+Jon felt a twitch of compassion for the-young idiot.
+
+"You know I've had sunstroke; I didn't tell you."
+
+"Really!  Was it interesting?"
+
+"No.  Mother was an angel.  Has anything happened to you?"
+
+"Nothing.  Except that I think I've found out what's wrong between
+our families, Jon."
+
+His heart began beating very fast.
+
+"I believe my father wanted to marry your mother, and your father got
+her instead."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"I came on a photo of her; it was in a frame behind a photo of me.
+Of course, if he was very fond of her, that would have made him
+pretty mad, wouldn't it?"
+
+Jon thought for a minute.  "Not if she loved my father best."
+
+"But suppose they were engaged?"
+
+"If we were engaged, and you found you loved somebody better, I might
+go cracked, but I shouldn't grudge it you."
+
+"I should.  You mustn't ever do that with me, Jon.
+
+"My God!  Not much!"
+
+"I don't believe that he's ever really cared for my mother."
+
+Jon was silent.  Val's words--the two past masters in the Club!
+
+"You see, we don't know," went on Fleur; "it may have been a great
+shock.  She may have behaved badly to him.  People do."
+
+"My mother wouldn't."
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders.  "I don't think we know much about our
+fathers and mothers.  We just see them in the light of the way they
+treat us; but they've treated other people, you know, before we were
+born-plenty, I expect.  You see, they're both old. Look at your
+father, with three separate families!"
+
+"Isn't there any place," cried Jon, "in all this beastly London where
+we can be alone?"
+
+"Only a taxi."
+
+"Let's get one, then."
+
+When they were installed, Fleur asked suddenly: "Are you going back
+to Robin Hill?  I should like to see where you live, Jon.  I'm
+staying with my aunt for the night, but I could get back in time for
+dinner.  I wouldn't come to the house, of course."
+
+Jon gazed at her enraptured.
+
+"Splendid! I can show it you from the copse, we shan't meet anybody.
+There's a train at four."
+
+The god of property and his Forsytes great and small, leisured,
+official, commercial, or professional, like the working classes,
+still worked their seven hours a day, so that those two of the fourth
+generation travelled down to Robin Hill in an empty first-class
+carriage, dusty and sun-warmed, of that too early train.  They
+travelled in blissful silence, holding each other's hands.
+
+At the station they saw no one except porters, and a villager or two
+unknown to Jon, and walked out up the lane, which smelled of dust and
+honeysuckle.
+
+For Jon--sure of her now, and without separation before him--it was a
+miraculous dawdle, more wonderful than those on the Downs, or along
+the river Thames.  It was love-in-a-mist--one of those illumined
+pages of Life, where every word and smile, and every light touch they
+gave each other were as little gold and red and blue butterflies and
+flowers and birds scrolled in among the text--a happy communing,
+without afterthought, which lasted thirty-seven minutes.  They
+reached the coppice at the milking hour.  Jon would not take her as
+far as the farmyard; only to where she could see the field leading up
+to the gardens, and the house beyond.  They turned in among the
+larches, and suddenly, at the winding of the path, came on Irene,
+sitting on an old log seat.
+
+There are various kinds of shocks: to the vertebrae; to the nerves;
+to moral sensibility; and, more potent and permanent, to personal
+dignity.  This last was the shock Jon received, coming thus on his
+mother.  He became suddenly conscious that he was doing an indelicate
+thing.  To have brought Fleur down openly--yes!  But to sneak her in
+like this!  Consumed with shame, he put on a front as brazen as his
+nature would permit.
+
+Fleur was smiling, a little defiantly; his mother's startled face was
+changing quickly to the impersonal and gracious.  It was she who
+uttered the first words:
+
+"I'm very glad to see you.  It was nice of Jon to think of bringing
+you down to us."
+
+"We weren't coming to the house," Jon blurted out.  "I just wanted
+Fleur to see where I lived."
+
+His mother said quietly:
+
+"Won't you come up and have tea?"
+
+Feeling that he had but aggravated his breach of breeding, he heard
+Fleur answer:
+
+"Thanks very much; I have to get back to dinner.  I met Jon by
+accident, and we thought it would be rather jolly just to see his
+home."
+
+How self-possessed she was!
+
+"Of course; but you must have tea.  We'll send you down to the
+station.  My husband will enjoy seeing you."
+
+The expression of his mother's eyes, resting on him for a moment,
+cast Jon down level with the ground--a true worm.  Then she led on,
+and Fleur followed her.  He felt like a child, trailing after those
+two, who were talking so easily about Spain and Wansdon, and the
+house up there beyond the trees and the grassy slope.  He watched the
+fencing of their eyes, taking each other in--the two beings he loved
+most in the world.
+
+He could see his father sitting under the oaktree; and suffered in
+advance all the loss of caste he must go through in the eyes of that
+tranquil figure, with his knees crossed, thin, old, and elegant;
+already he could feel the faint irony which would come into his voice
+and smile.
+
+"This is Fleur Forsyte, Jolyon; Jon brought her down to see the
+house.  Let's have tea at once--she has to catch a train.  Jon, tell
+them, dear, and telephone to the Dragon for a car."
+
+To leave her alone with them was strange, and yet, as no doubt his
+mother had foreseen, the least of evils at the moment; so he ran up
+into the house.  Now he would not see Fleur alone again--not for a
+minute, and they had arranged no further meeting!  When he returned
+under cover of the maids and teapots, there was not a trace of
+awkwardness beneath the tree; it was all within himself, but not the
+less for that.  They were talking of the Gallery off Cork Street.
+
+"We back numbers," his father was saying, "are awfully anxious to
+find out why we can't appreciate the new stuff; you and Jon must tell
+us."
+
+"It's supposed to be satiric, isn't it?" said Fleur.
+
+He saw his father's smile.
+
+"Satiric?  Oh! I think it's more than that.  What do you say, Jon?"
+
+"I don't know at all," stammered Jon.  His father's face had a sudden
+grimness.
+
+"The young are tired of us, our gods and our ideals.  Off with their
+heads, they say--smash their idols!  And let's get back to-nothing!
+And, by Jove, they've done it!  Jon's a poet.  He'll be going in,
+too, and stamping on what's left of us.  Property, beauty, sentiment-
+-all smoke.  We mustn't own anything nowadays, not even our feelings.
+They stand in the way of--Nothing."
+
+Jon listened, bewildered, almost outraged by his father's words,
+behind which he felt a meaning that he could not reach.  He didn't
+want to stamp on anything!
+
+"Nothing's the god of to-day," continued Jolyon; "we're back where
+the Russians were sixty years ago, when they started Nihilism."
+
+"No, Dad," cried Jon suddenly, "we only want to live, and we don't
+know how, because of the Past--that's all!"
+
+"By George!" said Jolyon, "that's profound, Jon.  Is it your own?
+The Past!  Old ownerships, old passions, and their aftermath.  Let's
+have cigarettes."
+
+Conscious that his mother had lifted her hand to her lips, quickly,
+as if to hush something, Jon handed the cigarettes.  He lighted his
+father's and Fleur's, then one for himself.  Had he taken the knock
+that Val had spoken of?  The smoke was blue when he had not puffed,
+grey when he had; he liked the sensation in his nose, and the sense
+of equality it gave him.  He was glad no one said: "So you've begun!"
+He felt less young.
+
+Fleur looked at her watch, and rose.  His mother went with her into
+the house.  Jon stayed with his father, puffing at the cigarette.
+
+"See her into the car, old man," said Jolyon; "and when she's gone,
+ask your mother to come back to me."
+
+Jon went.  He waited in the hall.  He saw her into the car.  There
+was no chance for any word; hardly for a pressure of the hand.  He
+waited all that evening for something to be said to him.  Nothing was
+said.  Nothing might have happened.  He went up to bed, and in the
+mirror on his dressing-table met himself.  He did not speak, nor did
+the image; but both looked as if they thought the more.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN GREEN STREET
+
+
+Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous
+should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a
+remark of Fleur's: "He's like the hosts of Midian--he prowls and
+prowls around"; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: "What's
+the use of keepin' fit?" or, more simply, to the fact that he was a
+foreigner, or alien as it was now called.  Certain, that Annette was
+looking particularly handsome, and that Soames--had sold him a
+Gauguin and then torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself
+had said: "I didn't get that small picture I bought from Mr.
+Forsyde."
+
+However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's
+evergreen little house in Green Street, with a good-natured
+obtuseness which no one mistook for naiv ete, a word hardly
+applicable to Monsieur Prosper Profond.  Winifred still found him
+"amusing," and would write him little notes saying: "Come and have a
+'jolly' with us"--it was breath of life to her to keep up with the
+phrases of the day.
+
+The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
+having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in
+it--which was unnatural.  The English type of disillusionment was
+familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable
+circles.  It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got
+something out of it.  But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose,
+but because there was nothing in anything, was not English; and that
+which was not English one could not help secretly feeling dangerous,
+if not precisely bad form.  It was like having the mood which the War
+had left, seated--dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent--in your Empire
+chair; it was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink
+lips above a little diabolic beard.  It was, as Jack Cardigan
+expressed it--for the English character at large--"a bit too thick"--
+for if nothing was really worth getting excited about, there were
+always games, and one could make it so!  Even Winifred, ever a
+Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had out of such a
+mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be there.
+Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country which
+decently veiled such realities.
+
+When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to
+dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of
+Winifred's little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with
+an air of seeing nothing in it.  And Fleur gazed promptly into the
+fireplace with an air of seeing a fire which was not there.
+
+Monsieur Profond came from the window.  He was in full fig, with a
+white waistcoat and a white flower in his buttonhole.
+
+"Well, Miss Forsyde," he said, "I'm awful pleased to see you.  Mr.
+Forsyde well?  I was sayin' to-day I want to see him have some
+pleasure.  He worries."
+
+"You think so?" said Fleur shortly.
+
+"Worries," repeated Monsieur Profond, burring the r's.
+
+Fleur spun round.  "Shall I tell you," she said, "what would give him
+pleasure?"  But the words, "To hear that you had cleared out," died
+at the expression on his face.  All his fine white teeth were
+showing.
+
+"I was hearin' at the Club to-day about his old trouble."
+Fleur opened her eyes.  "What do you mean?"
+
+Monsieur Profond moved his sleek head as if to minimize his
+statement.
+
+"Before you were born," he said; "that small business."
+
+Though conscious that he had cleverly diverted her from his own share
+in her father's worry, Fleur was unable to withstand a rush of
+nervous curiosity.  "Tell me what you heard."
+
+"Why!" murmured Monsieur Profond, "you know all that."
+
+"I expect I do.  But I should like to know that you haven't heard it
+all wrong."
+
+"His first wife," murmured Monsieur Profond.
+
+Choking back the words, "He was never married before," she said:
+"Well, what about her?"
+
+"Mr. George Forsyde was tellin' me about your father's first wife
+marryin' his cousin Jolyon afterward.  It was a small bit unpleasant,
+I should think.  I saw their boy--nice boy!"
+
+Fleur looked up.  Monsieur Profond was swimming, heavily diabolical,
+before her.  That--the reason!  With the most heroic effort of her
+life so far, she managed to arrest that swimming figure.  She could
+not tell whether he had noticed.  And just then Winifred came in.
+
+"Oh! here you both are already; Imogen and I have had the most
+amusing afternoon at the Babies' bazaar."
+
+"What babies?" said Fleur mechanically.
+
+"The 'Save the Babies.'  I got such a bargain, my dear.  A piece of
+old Armenian work--from before the Flood.  I want your opinion on it,
+Prosper."
+
+"Auntie," whispered Fleur suddenly.
+
+At the tone in the girl's voice Winifred closed in on her.'
+
+"What's the matter?  Aren't you well?"
+
+Monsieur Profond had withdrawn into the window, where he was
+practically out of hearing.
+
+"Auntie, he-he told me that father has been married before.  Is it
+true that he divorced her, and she married Jon Forsyte's father?"
+
+Never in all the life of the mother of four little Darties had
+Winifred felt more seriously embarrassed.  Her niece's face was so
+pale, her eyes so dark, her voice so whispery and strained.
+
+"Your father didn't wish you to hear," she said, with all the aplomb
+she could muster.  "These things will happen.  I've often told him he
+ought to let you know."
+
+"Oh!" said Fleur, and that was all, but it made Winifred pat her
+shoulder--a firm little shoulder, nice and white!  She never could
+help an appraising eye and touch in the matter of her niece, who
+would have to be married, of course--though not to that boy Jon.
+
+"We've forgotten all about it years and years ago," she said
+comfortably.  "Come and have dinner!"
+
+"No, Auntie.  I don't feel very well.  May I go upstairs?"
+
+"My dear!" murmured Winifred, concerned, "you're not taking this to
+heart?  Why, you haven't properly come out yet!  That boy's a child!"
+
+"What boy?  I've only got a headache.  But I can't stand that man to-
+night."
+
+"Well, well," said Winifred, "go and lie down.  I'll send you some
+bromide, and I shall talk to Prosper Profond.  What business had he
+to gossip?  Though I must say I think it's much better you should
+know."
+
+Fleur smiled.  "Yes," she said, and slipped from the room.
+
+She went up with her head whirling, a dry sensation in her throat, a
+guttered frightened feeling in her breast.  Never in her life as yet
+had she suffered from even momentary fear that she would not get what
+she had set her heart on.  The sensations of the afternoon had been
+full and poignant, and this gruesome discovery coming on the top of
+them had really made her head ache.  No wonder her father had hidden
+that photograph, so secretly behind her own-ashamed of having kept
+it!  But could he hate Jon's mother and yet keep her photograph?  She
+pressed her hands over her forehead, trying to see things clearly.
+Had they told Jon--had her visit to Robin Hill forced them to tell
+him?  Everything now turned on that!  She knew, they all knew,
+except--perhaps--Jon!
+
+She walked up and down, biting her lip and thinking desperately hard.
+Jon loved his mother.  If they had told him, what would he do?  She
+could not tell.  But if they had not told him, should she not--could
+she not get him for herself--get married to him, before he knew?  She
+searched her memories of Robin Hill.  His mother's face so passive--
+with its dark eyes and as if powdered hair, its reserve, its smile--
+baffled her; and his father's--kindly, sunken, ironic.  Instinctively
+she felt they would shrink from telling Jon, even now, shrink from
+hurting him--for of course it would hurt him awfully to know!
+
+Her aunt must be made not to tell her father that she knew.  So long
+as neither she herself nor Jon were supposed to know, there was still
+a chance--freedom to cover one's tracks, and get what her heart was
+set on.  But she was almost overwhelmed by her isolation.  Every
+one's hand was against her--every one's!  It was as Jon had said--he
+and she just wanted to live and the past was in their way, a past
+they hadn't shared in, and didn't understand!  Oh! What a shame!  And
+suddenly she thought of June.  Would she help them?  For somehow June
+had left on her the impression that she would be sympathetic with
+their love, impatient of obstacle.  Then, instinctively, she thought:
+'I won't give anything away, though, even to her.  I daren't.  I mean
+to have Jon; against them all.'
+
+Soup was brought up to her, and one of Winifred's pet headache
+cachets.  She swallowed both.  Then Winifred herself appeared.  Fleur
+opened her campaign with the words:
+
+"You know, Auntie, I do wish people wouldn't think I'm in love with
+that boy.  Why, I've hardly seen him!"
+
+Winifred, though experienced, was not "fine."  She accepted the
+remark with considerable relief.  Of course, it was not pleasant for
+the girl to hear of the family scandal, and she set herself to
+minimise the matter, a task for which she was eminently qualified,
+"raised" fashionably under a comfortable mother and a father whose
+nerves might not be shaken, and for many years the wife of Montague
+Dartie.  Her description was a masterpiece of understatement.
+Fleur's father's first wife had been very foolish.  There had been a
+young man who had got run over, and she had left Fleur's father.
+Then, years after, when it might all have come--right again, she had
+taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of course, her father had
+been obliged to have a divorce.  Nobody remembered anything of it
+now, except just the family.  And, perhaps, it had all turned out for
+the best; her father had Fleur; and Jolyon and Irene had been quite
+happy, they said, and their boy was a nice boy.  "Val having Holly,
+too, is a sort of plaster, don't you know?"  With these soothing
+words, Winifred patted her niece's shoulder; thought: 'She's a nice,
+plump little thing!' and went back to Prosper Profond, who, in spite
+of his indiscretion, was very "amusing" this evening.
+
+For some minutes after her aunt had gone Fleur remained under
+influence of bromide material and spiritual.  But then reality came
+back.  Her aunt had left out all that mattered--all the feeling, the
+hate, the love, the unforgivingness of passionate hearts.  She, who
+knew so little of life, and had touched only the fringe of love, was
+yet aware by instinct that words have as little relation to fact and
+feeling as coin to the bread it buys.  'Poor Father!' she thought.
+'Poor me!  Poor Jon!  But I don't care, I mean to have him!'  From
+the window of her darkened room she saw "that man" issue from the
+door below and "prowl" away.  If he and her mother--how would that
+affect her chance?  Surely it must make her father cling to her more
+closely, so that he would consent in the end to anything she wanted,
+or become reconciled the sooner to what she did without his
+knowledge.
+
+She took some earth from the flower-box in the window, and with all
+her might flung it after that disappearing figure.  It fell short,
+but the action did her good.
+
+And a little puff of air came up from Green Street, smelling of
+petrol, not sweet.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
+
+
+Soames, coming up to the City, with the intention of calling in at
+Green Street at the end of his day and taking Fleur back home with
+him, suffered from rumination.  Sleeping partner that he was, he
+seldom visited the City now, but he still had a room of his own at
+Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte's, and one special clerk and a half
+assigned to the management of purely Forsyte affairs.  They were
+somewhat in flux just now--an auspicious moment for the disposal of
+house property.  And Soames was unloading the estates of his father
+and Uncle Roger, and to some extent of his Uncle Nicholas.  His
+shrewd and matter-of-course probity in all money concerns had made
+him something of an autocrat in connection with these trusts.  If
+Soames thought this or thought that, one had better save oneself the
+bother of thinking too.  He guaranteed, as it were, irresponsibility
+to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth generations.  His fellow
+trustees, such as his cousins Roger or Nicholas, his cousins-in-law
+Tweetyman and Spender, or his sister Cicely's husband, all trusted
+him; he signed first, and where he signed first they signed after,
+and nobody was a penny the worse.  Just now they were all a good many
+pennies the better, and Soames was beginning to see the close of
+certain trusts, except for distribution of the income from securities
+as gilt-edged as was compatible with the period.
+
+Passing the more feverish parts of the City toward the most perfect
+backwater in London, he ruminated.  Money was extraordinarily tight;
+and morality extraordinarily loose!  The War had done it.  Banks were
+not lending; people breaking contracts all over the place.  There was
+a feeling in the air and a look on faces that he did not like.  The
+country seemed in for a spell of gambling and bankruptcies.  There
+was satisfaction in the thought that neither he nor his trusts had an
+investment which could be affected by anything less maniacal than
+national repudiation or a levy on capital.  If Soames had faith, it
+was in what he called "English common sense"--or the power to have
+things, if not one way then another.  He might--like his father James
+before him--say he didn't know what things were coming to, but he
+never in his heart believed they were.  If it rested with him, they
+wouldn't--and, after all, he was only an Englishman like any other,
+so quietly tenacious of what he had that he knew he would never
+really part with it without something more or less equivalent in
+exchange.  His mind was essentially equilibristic in material
+matters, and his way of putting the national situation difficult to
+refute in a world composed of human beings.  Take his own case, for
+example!  He was well off.  Did that do anybody harm?  He did not eat
+ten meals a day; he ate no more than, perhaps not so much as, a poor
+man.  He spent no money on vice; breathed no more air, used no more
+water to speak of than the mechanic or the porter.  He certainly had
+pretty things about him, but they had given employment in the making,
+and somebody must use them.  He bought pictures, but Art must be
+encouraged.  He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which
+money flowed, employing labour.  What was there objectionable in
+that?  In his charge money was in quicker and more useful flux than
+it would be in charge of the State and a lot of slow-fly money-
+sucking officials.  And as to what he saved each year--it was just as
+much in flux as what he didn't save, going into Water Board or
+Council Stocks, or something sound and useful.  The State paid him no
+salary for being trustee of his own or other people's money he did
+all that for nothing.  Therein lay the whole case against
+nationalisation--owners of private property were unpaid, and yet had
+every incentive to quicken up the flux.  Under nationalisation--just
+the opposite!  In a country smarting from officialism he felt that he
+had a strong case.
+
+It particularly annoyed him, entering that backwater of perfect
+peace, to think that a lot of unscrupulous Trusts and Combinations
+had been cornering the market in goods of all kinds, and keeping
+prices at an artificial height.  Such abusers of the individualistic
+system were the ruffians who caused all the trouble, and it was some
+satisfaction to see them getting into a stew at fast lest the whole
+thing might come down with a run--and land them in the soup.
+
+The offices of Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte occupied the ground and
+first floors of a house on the right-hand side; and, ascending to his
+room, Soames thought: 'Time we had a coat of paint.'
+
+His old clerk Gradman was seated, where he always was, at a huge
+bureau with countless pigeonholes.  Half-the-clerk stood beside him,
+with a broker's note recording investment of the proceeds from sale
+of the Bryanston Square house, in Roger Forsyte's estate.  Soames
+took it, and said:
+
+"Vancouver City Stock.  H'm.  It's down today!"
+
+With a sort of grating ingratiation old Gradman answered him:
+
+"Ye-es; but everything's down, Mr. Soames."  And half-the-clerk
+withdrew.
+
+Soames skewered the document on to a number of other papers and hung
+up his hat.
+
+"I want to look at my Will and Marriage Settlement, Gradman."
+
+Old Gradman, moving to the limit of his swivel chair, drew out two
+drafts from the bottom lefthand drawer.  Recovering his body, he
+raised his grizzle-haired face, very red from stooping.
+
+"Copies, Sir."
+
+Soames took them.  It struck him suddenly how like Gradman was to the
+stout brindled yard dog they had been wont to keep on his chain at
+The Shelter, till one day Fleur had come and insisted it should be
+let loose, so that it had at once bitten the cook and been destroyed.
+If you let Gradman off his chain, would he bite the cook?
+
+Checking this frivolous fancy, Soames unfolded his Marriage
+Settlement.  He had not looked at it for over eighteen years, not
+since he remade his Will when his father died and Fleur was born.  He
+wanted to see whether the words "during coverture" were in.  Yes,
+they were--odd expression, when you thought of it, and derived
+perhaps from horse-breeding!  Interest on fifteen thousand pounds
+(which he paid her without deducting income tax) so long as she
+remained his wife, and afterward during widowhood "dum casta"--old-
+fashioned and rather pointed words, put in to insure the conduct of
+Fleur's mother.  His Will made it up to an annuity of a thousand
+under the same conditions.  All right!  He returned the copies to
+Gradman, who took them without looking up, swung the chair, restored
+the papers to their drawer, and went on casting up.
+
+"Gradman! I don't like the condition of the country; there are a lot
+of people about without any common sense.  I want to find a way by
+which I can safeguard Miss Fleur against anything which might arise."
+
+Gradman wrote the figure "2" on his blotting-paper.
+
+"Ye-es," he said; "there's a nahsty spirit."
+
+"The ordinary restraint against anticipation doesn't meet the case."
+
+"Nao," said Gradman.
+
+"Suppose those Labour fellows come in, or worse!  It's these people
+with fixed ideas who are the danger.  Look at Ireland!"
+
+"Ah!" said Gradman.
+
+"Suppose I were to make a settlement on her at once with myself as
+beneficiary for life, they couldn't take anything but the interest
+from me, unless of course they alter the law."
+
+Gradman moved his head and smiled.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "they wouldn't do tha-at!"
+
+"I don't know," muttered Soames; "I don't trust them."
+
+"It'll take two years, sir, to be valid against death duties."
+
+Soames sniffed.  Two years!  He was only sixty-five!
+
+"That's not the point.  Draw a form of settlement that passes all my
+property to Miss Fleur's children in equal shares, with antecedent
+life-interests first to myself and then to her without power of
+anticipation, and add a clause that in the event of anything
+happening to divert her life-interest, that interest passes to the
+trustees, to apply for her benefit, in their absolute discretion."
+
+Gradman grated: "Rather extreme at your age, sir; you lose control."
+
+"That's my business," said Soames sharply.
+
+Gradman wrote on a piece of paper: "Life-interest--anticipation--
+divert interest--absolute discretion...." and said:
+
+"What trustees?  There's young Mr. Kingson; he's a nice steady young
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, he might do for one.  I must have three.  There isn't a Forsyte
+now who appeals to me."
+
+"Not young Mr. Nicholas?  He's at the Bar.  We've given 'im briefs."
+
+"He'll never set the Thames on fire," said Soames.
+
+A smile oozed out on Gradman's face, greasy from countless mutton-
+chops, the smile of a man who sits all day.
+
+"You can't expect it, at his age, Mr. Soames."
+
+"Why?  What is he?  Forty?"
+
+"Ye-es, quite a young fellow."
+
+"Well, put him in; but I want somebody who'll take a personal
+interest.  There's no one that I can see."
+
+"What about Mr. Valerius, now he's come home?"
+
+"Val Dartie?  With that father?"
+
+"We-ell," murmured Gradman, "he's been dead seven years--the Statute
+runs against him."
+
+"No," said Soames.  "I don't like the connection."  He rose.  Gradman
+said suddenly:
+
+"If they were makin' a levy on capital, they could come on the
+trustees, sir.  So there you'd be just the same.  I'd think it over,
+if I were you."
+
+"That's true," said Soames.  "I will.  What have you done about that
+dilapidation notice in Vere Street?"
+
+"I 'aven't served it yet.  The party's very old.  She won't want to
+go out at her age."
+
+"I don't know.  This spirit of unrest touches every one."
+
+"Still, I'm lookin' at things broadly, sir.  She's eighty-one."
+
+"Better serve it," said Soames, "and see what she says.  Oh! and Mr.
+Timothy?  Is everything in order in case of--"
+
+"I've got the inventory of his estate all ready; had the furniture
+and pictures valued so that we know what reserves to put on.  I shall
+be sorry when he goes, though.  Dear me!  It is a time since I first
+saw Mr. Timothy!"
+
+"We can't live for ever," said Soames, taking down his hat.
+
+"Nao," said Gradman; "but it'll be a pity--the last of the old
+family!  Shall I take up the matter of that nuisance in Old Compton
+Street?  Those organs--they're nahsty things."
+
+"Do.  I must call for Miss Fleur and catch the four o'clock.  Good-
+day, Gradman."
+
+"Good-day, Mr. Soames.  I hope Miss Fleur--"
+
+"Well enough, but gads about too much."
+
+"Ye-es," grated Gradman; "she's young."
+
+Soames went out, musing: "Old Gradman!  If he were younger I'd put
+him in the trust.  There's nobody I can depend on to take a real
+interest."
+
+Leaving the bilious and mathematical exactitude, the preposterous
+peace of that backwater, he thought suddenly: 'During coverture!  Why
+can't they exclude fellows like Profond, instead of a lot of hard-
+working Germans?' and was surprised at the depth of uneasiness which
+could provoke so unpatriotic a thought.  But there it was!  One never
+got a moment of real peace.  There was always something at the back
+of everything!  And he made his way toward Green Street.
+
+Two hours later by his watch, Thomas Gradman, stirring in his swivel
+chair, closed the last drawer of his bureau, and putting into his
+waistcoat pocket a bunch of keys so fat that they gave him a
+protuberance on the liver side, brushed his old top hat round with
+his sleeve, took his umbrella, and descended.  Thick, short, and
+buttoned closely into his old frock coat, he walked toward Covent
+Garden market.  He never missed that daily promenade to the Tube for
+Highgate, and seldom some critical transaction on the way in
+connection with vegetables and fruit.  Generations might be born, and
+hats might change, wars be fought, and Forsytes fade away, but Thomas
+Gradman, faithful and grey, would take his daily walk and buy his
+daily vegetable.  Times were not what they were, and his son had lost
+a leg, and they never gave him those nice little plaited baskets to
+carry the stuff in now, and these Tubes were convenient things--still
+he mustn't complain; his health was good considering his time of
+life, and after fifty-four years in the Law he was getting a round
+eight hundred a year and a little worried of late, because it was
+mostly collector's commission on the rents, and with all this
+conversion of Forsyte property going on, it looked like drying up,
+and the price of living still so high; but it was no good worrying--"
+The good God made us all"--as he was in the habit of saying; still,
+house property in London--he didn't know what Mr. Roger or Mr. James
+would say if they could see it being sold like this--seemed to show a
+lack of faith; but Mr. Soames--he worried.  Life and lives in being
+and twenty-one years after--beyond that you couldn't go; still, he
+kept his health wonderfully--and Miss Fleur was a pretty little
+thing--she was; she'd marry; but lots of people had no children
+nowadays--he had had his first child at twenty-two; and Mr. Jolyon,
+married while he was at Cambridge, had his child the same year--
+gracious Peter!  That was back in '69, a long time before old Mr.
+Jolyon--fine judge of property--had taken his Will away from Mr.
+James--dear, yes!  Those were the days when they were buyin' property
+right and left, and none of this khaki and fallin' over one another
+to get out of things; and cucumbers at twopence; and a melon--the old
+melons, that made your mouth water!  Fifty years since he went into
+Mr. James' office, and Mr. James had said to him: "Now, Gradman,
+you're only a shaver--you pay attention, and you'll make your five
+hundred a year before you've done."  And he had, and feared God, and
+served the Forsytes, and kept a vegetable diet at night.  And, buying
+a copy of John Bull--not that he approved of it, an extravagant
+affair--he entered the Tube elevator with his mere brown-paper
+parcel, and was borne down into the bowels of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SOAMES' PRIVATE LIFE
+
+
+On his way to Green Street it occurred to Soames that he ought to go
+into Dumetrius' in Suffolk Street about the possibility of the
+Bolderby Old Crome.  Almost worth while to have fought the war to
+have the Bolderby Old Crome, as it were, in flux!  Old Bolderby had
+died, his son and grandson had been killed--a cousin was coming into
+the estate, who meant to sell it, some said because of the condition
+of England, others said because he had asthma.
+
+If Dumetrius once got hold of it the price would become prohibitive;
+it was necessary for Soames to find out whether Dumetrius had got it,
+before he tried to get it himself.  He therefore confined himself to
+discussing with Dumetrius whether Monticellis would come again now
+that it was the fashion for a picture to be anything except a
+picture; and the future of Johns, with a side-slip into Buxton
+Knights.  It was only when leaving that he added: "So they're not
+selling the Bolderby Old Crome, after all?  "In sheer pride of racial
+superiority, as he had calculated would be the case, Dumetrius
+replied:
+
+"Oh! I shall get it, Mr. Forsyte, sir!"
+
+The flutter of his eyelid fortified Soames in a resolution to write
+direct to the new Bolderby, suggesting that the only dignified way of
+dealing with an Old Crome was to avoid dealers.  He therefore said,
+"Well, good-day!" and went, leaving Dumetrius the wiser.
+
+At Green Street he found that Fleur was out and would be all the
+evening; she was staying one more night in London.  He cabbed on
+dejectedly, and caught his train.
+
+He reached his house about six o'clock.  The air was heavy, midges
+biting, thunder about.  Taking his letters he went up to his
+dressing-room to cleanse himself of London.
+
+An uninteresting post.  A receipt, a bill for purchases on behalf of
+Fleur.  A circular about an exhibition of etchings.  A letter
+beginning:
+
+"SIR,
+"I feel it my duty..."
+
+That would be an appeal or something unpleasant.  He looked at once
+for the signature.  There was none! Incredulously he turned the page
+over and examined each corner.  Not being a public man, Soames had
+never yet had an anonymous letter, and his first impulse was to tear
+it up, as a dangerous thing; his second to read it, as a thing still
+more dangerous.
+
+"SIR,
+"I feel it my duty to inform you that having no interest in the
+matter your lady is carrying on with a foreigner--"
+
+Reaching that word Soames stopped mechanically and examined the
+postmark.  So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in
+which the Post Office had wrapped it, there was something with a
+"sea" at the end and a "t" in it.  Chelsea?  No! Battersea?  Perhaps!
+He read on.
+
+"These foreigners are all the same.  Sack the lot.  This one meets
+your lady twice a week.  I know it of my own knowledge--and to see an
+Englishman put on goes against the grain.  You watch it and see if
+what I say isn't true.  I shouldn't meddle if it wasn't a dirty
+foreigner that's in it.  Yours obedient."
+
+The sensation with which Soames dropped the letter was similar to
+that he would have had entering his bedroom and finding it full of
+black-beetles.  The meanness of anonymity gave a shuddering obscenity
+to the moment.  And the worst of it was that this shadow had been at
+the back of his mind ever since the Sunday evening when Fleur had
+pointed down at Prosper Profond strolling on the lawn, and said:
+"Prowling cat!"  Had he not in connection therewith, this very day,
+perused his Will and Marriage Settlement?  And now this anonymous
+ruffian, with nothing to gain, apparently, save the venting of his
+spite against foreigners, had wrenched it out of the obscurity in
+which he had hoped and wished it would remain.  To have such
+knowledge forced on him, at his time of life, about Fleur's mother I
+He picked the letter up from the carpet, tore it across, and then,
+when it hung together by just the fold at the back, stopped tearing,
+and reread it.  He was taking at that moment one of the decisive
+resolutions of his life.  He would not be forced into another
+scandal.  No!  However he decided to deal with this matter--and it
+required the most far-sighted and careful consideration he would do
+nothing that might injure Fleur. That resolution taken, his mind
+answered the helm again, and he made his ablutions.  His hands
+trembled as he dried them.  Scandal he would not have, but something
+must be done to stop this sort of thing!  He went into his wife's
+room and stood looking around him.  The idea of searching for
+anything which would incriminate, and entitle him to hold a menace
+over her, did not even come to him.  There would be nothing--she was
+much too practical.  The idea of having her watched had been
+dismissed before it came--too well he remembered his previous
+experience of that.  No!  He had nothing but this torn-up letter from
+some anonymous ruffian, whose impudent intrusion into his private
+life he so violently resented.  It was repugnant to him to make use
+of it, but he might have to.  What a mercy Fleur was not at home to-
+night!  A tap on the door broke up his painful cogitations.
+
+"Mr. Michael Mont, sir, is in the drawing-room.  Will you see him?"
+
+"No," said Soames; "yes.  I'll come down."
+
+Anything that would take his mind off for a few minutes!
+
+Michael Mont in flannels stood on the verandah smoking a cigarette.
+He threw it away as Soames came up, and ran his hand through his
+hair.
+
+Soames' feeling toward this young man was singular.  He was no doubt
+a rackety, irresponsible young fellow according to old standards, yet
+somehow likeable, with his extraordinarily cheerful way of blurting
+out his opinions.
+
+"Come in," he said; "have you had tea?"
+
+Mont came in.
+
+"I thought Fleur would have been back, sir; but I'm glad she isn't.
+The fact is, I--I'm fearfully gone on her; so fearfully gone that I
+thought you'd better know.  It's old-fashioned, of course, coming to
+fathers first, but I thought you'd forgive that.  I went to my own
+Dad, and he says if I settle down he'll see me through.  He rather
+cottons to the idea, in fact.  I told him about your Goya."
+
+"Oh!" said Soames, inexpressibly dry.  "He rather cottons?"
+
+"Yes, sir; do you?"
+
+Soames smiled faintly.
+
+"You see," resumed Mont, twiddling his straw hat, while his hair,
+ears, eyebrows, all seemed to stand up from excitement, "when you've
+been through the War you can't help being in a hurry."
+
+"To get married; and unmarried afterward," said Soames slowly.
+
+"Not from Fleur, sir.  Imagine, if you were me!"
+
+Soames cleared his throat.  That way of putting it was forcible
+enough.
+
+"Fleur's too young," he said.
+
+"Oh! no, sir.  We're awfully old nowadays.  My Dad seems to me a
+perfect babe; his thinking apparatus hasn't turned a hair.  But he's
+a Baronight, of course; that keeps him back."
+
+"Baronight," repeated Soames; "what may that be?"
+
+"Bart, sir.  I shall be a Bart some day.  But I shall live it down,
+you know."
+
+"Go away and live this down," said Soames.
+
+Young Mont said imploringly: "Oh! no, sir.  I simply must hang
+around, or I shouldn't have a dog's chance.  You'll let Fleur do what
+she likes, I suppose, anyway.  Madame passes me."
+
+"Indeed!" said Soames frigidly.
+
+"You don't really bar me, do you?" and the young man looked so
+doleful that Soames smiled.
+
+"You may think you're very old," he said; "but you strike me as
+extremely young.  To rattle ahead of everything is not a proof of
+maturity."
+
+"All right, sir; I give you our age.  But to show you I mean
+business--I've got a job."
+
+"Glad to hear it."
+
+"Joined a publisher; my governor is putting up the stakes."
+
+Soames put his hand over his mouth--he had so very nearly said: "God
+help the publisher!"  His grey eyes scrutinised the agitated young
+man.
+
+"I don't dislike you, Mr. Mont, but Fleur is everything to me:
+Everything--do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I know; but so she is to me."
+
+"That's as may be.  I'm glad you've told me, however.  And now I
+think there's nothing more to be said."
+
+"I know it rests with her, sir."
+
+"It will rest with her a long time, I hope."
+
+"You aren't cheering," said Mont suddenly.
+
+"No," said Soames, "my experience of life has not made me anxious to
+couple people in a hurry.  Good-night, Mr. Mont.  I shan't tell Fleur
+what you've said."
+
+"Oh!" murmured Mont blankly; "I really could knock my brains out for
+want of her.  She knows that perfectly well."
+
+"I dare say."  And Soames held out his hand.  A distracted squeeze, a
+heavy sigh, and soon after sounds from the young man's motor-cycle
+called up visions of flying dust and broken bones.
+
+'The younger generation!' he thought heavily, and went out on to the
+lawn.  The gardeners had been mowing, and there was still the smell
+of fresh-cut grass--the thundery air kept all scents close to earth.
+The sky was of a purplish hue--the poplars black.  Two or three boats
+passed on the river, scuttling, as it were, for shelter before the
+storm.  'Three days' fine weather,' thought Soames, 'and then a
+storm!'  Where was Annette?  With that chap, for all he knew--she was
+a young woman!  Impressed with the queer charity of that thought, he
+entered the summerhouse and sat down.  The fact was--and he admitted
+it--Fleur was so much to him that his wife was very little--very
+little; French--had never been much more than a mistress, and he was
+getting indifferent to that side of things!  It was odd how, with all
+this ingrained care for moderation and secure investment, Soames ever
+put his emotional eggs into one basket.  First Irene--now Fleur.  He
+was dimly conscious of it, sitting there, conscious of its odd
+dangerousness.  It had brought him to wreck and scandal once, but
+now--now it should save him!  He cared so much for Fleur that he
+would have no further scandal.  If only he could get at that
+anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not to meddle and stir up
+mud at the bottom of water which he wished should remain stagnant!...
+A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain spattered on
+the thatch above him.  He remained indifferent, tracing a pattern
+with his finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table.
+Fleur's future! 'I want fair sailing for her,' he thought.  'Nothing
+else matters at my time of life.'  A lonely business--life!  What you
+had you never could keep to yourself!  As you warned one off, you let
+another in.  One could make sure of nothing!  He reached up and
+pulled a red rambler rose from a cluster which blocked the window.
+Flowers grew and dropped--Nature was a queer thing!  The thunder
+rumbled and crashed, travelling east along a river, the paling
+flashes flicked his eyes; the poplar tops showed sharp and dense
+against the sky, a heavy shower rustled and rattled and veiled in the
+little house wherein he sat, indifferent, thinking.
+
+When the storm was over, he left his retreat and went down the wet
+path to the river bank.
+
+Two swans had come, sheltering in among the reeds.  He knew the birds
+well, and stood watching the dignity in the curve of those white
+necks and formidable snake-like heads.  'Not dignified--what I have
+to do!' he thought.  And yet it must be tackled, lest worse befell.
+Annette must be back by now from wherever she had gone, for it was
+nearly dinner-time, and as the moment for seeing her approached, the
+difficulty of knowing what to say and how to say it had increased.  A
+new and scaring thought occurred to him.  Suppose she wanted her
+liberty to marry this fellow!  Well, if she did, she couldn't have
+it.  He had not married her for that.  The image of Prosper Profond
+dawdled before him reassuringly.  Not a marrying man!  No, no!  Anger
+replaced that momentary scare.  'He had better not come my way,' he
+thought.  The mongrel represented---!  But what did Prosper Profond
+represent?  Nothing that mattered surely.  And yet something real
+enough in the world--unmorality let off its chain, disillusionment on
+the prowl!  That expression Annette had caught from him: "Je m'en
+fiche!  "A fatalistic chap!  A continental--a cosmopolitan--a product
+of the age!  If there were condemnation more complete, Soames felt
+that he did not know it.
+
+The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into some
+distance of their own.  One of them uttered a little hiss, wagged its
+tail, turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam away.  The other
+followed.  Their white bodies, their stately necks, passed out of his
+sight, and he went toward the house.
+
+Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he thought
+as he went up-stairs 'Handsome is as handsome does.'  Handsome!
+Except for remarks about the curtains in the drawing-room, and the
+storm, there was practically no conversation during a meal
+distinguished by exactitude of quantity and perfection of quality.
+Soames drank nothing.  He followed her into the drawing-room
+afterward, and found her smoking a cigarette on the sofa between the
+two French windows.  She was leaning back, almost upright, in a low
+black frock, with her knees crossed and her blue eyes half-closed;
+grey-blue smoke issued from her red, rather full lips, a fillet bound
+her chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk stockings, and shoes
+with very high heels showing off her instep.  A fine piece in any
+room!  Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep into
+the side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
+
+"I'm going to shut the window; the damp's lifting in."
+
+He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the cream-
+panelled wall close by.
+
+What was she thinking of?  He had never understood a woman in his
+life--except Fleur--and Fleur not always!  His heart beat fast.  But
+if he meant to do it, now was the moment.  Turning from the David
+Cox, he took out the torn letter.
+
+"I've had this."
+
+Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
+
+Soames handed her the letter.
+
+"It's torn, but you can read it."  And he turned back to the David
+Cox--a sea-piece, of good tone--but without movement enough.  'I
+wonder what that chap's doing at this moment?' he thought.  'I'll
+astonish him yet.'  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Annette
+holding the letter rigidly; her eyes moved from side to side under
+her darkened lashes and frowning darkened eyes.  She dropped the
+letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and said:
+
+"Dirrty!"
+
+"I quite agree," said Soames; "degrading.  Is it true?"
+
+A tooth fastened on her red lower lip.  "And what if it were?"
+
+She was brazen!
+
+"Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"No."
+
+
+"Well, speak out!"
+
+"What is the good of talking?"
+
+Soames said icily: "So you admit it?"
+
+"I admit nothing.  You are a fool to ask.  A man like you should not
+ask.  It is dangerous."
+
+Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, halting in front of her, "what you were
+when I married you?  Working at accounts in a restaurant."
+
+"Do you remember that I was not half your age?"
+
+Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to
+the David Cox.
+
+"I am not going to bandy words.  I require you to give up this--
+friendship.  I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur."
+
+"Ah!--Fleur!"
+
+"Yes," said Soames stubbornly; "Fleur.  She is your child as well as
+mine."
+
+"It is kind to admit that!"
+
+"Are you going to do what I say?"
+
+"I refuse to tell you."
+
+"Then I must make you."
+
+Annette smiled.
+
+"No, Soames," she said.  "You are helpless.  Do not say things that
+you will regret."
+
+Anger swelled the veins on his forehead.  He opened his mouth to vent
+that emotion, and could not.  Annette went on:
+
+"There shall be no more such letters, I promise you.  That is
+enough."
+
+Soames writhed.  He had a sense of being treated like a child by this
+woman who had deserved he did not know what.
+
+"When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had
+better be quiet about each other.  There are things one does not drag
+up into the light for people to laugh at.  You will be quiet, then;
+not for my sake for your own.  You are getting old; I am not, yet.
+You have made me ver-ry practical"
+
+Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked,
+repeated dully:
+
+"I require you to give up this friendship."
+
+"And if I do not?"
+
+"Then--then I will cut you out of my Will."
+
+Somehow it did not seem to meet the case.  Annette laughed.
+
+"You will live a long time, Soames."
+
+"You--you are a bad woman," said Soames suddenly.
+
+Annette shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I do not think so.  Living with you has killed things in me, it is
+true; but I am not a bad woman.  I am sensible--that is all.  And so
+will you be when you have thought it over."
+
+"I shall see this man," said Soames sullenly, "and warn him off."
+
+"Mon cher, you are funny.  You do not want me, you have as much of me
+as you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead.  I admit
+nothing, but I am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had
+better be quiet, I tell you.  I myself will make no scandal; none.
+Now, I am not saying any more, whatever you do."
+
+She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened
+it.  Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings.  The
+thought of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a
+revelation of their relationship, startling to one little given to
+introspective philosophy.  Without saying another word he went out
+and up to the picture-gallery.  This came of marrying a Frenchwoman!
+And yet, without her there would have been no Fleur! She had served
+her purpose.
+
+'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing.  I don't even know that
+there's anything in it.'  The instinct of self-preservation warned
+him to batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air.
+Unless one believed there was something in a thing, there wasn't.
+
+That night he went into her room.  She received him in the most
+matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them.  And
+he returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace.  If one
+didn't choose to see, one needn't.  And he did not choose--in future
+he did not choose.  There was nothing to be gained by it--nothing!
+Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the
+framed photograph of Fleur.  When he had looked at it a little he
+slipped it down, and there was that other one--that old one of Irene.
+An owl hooted while he stood in his window gazing at it.  The owl
+hooted, the red climbing roses seemed to deepen in colour, there came
+a scent of lime-blossom.  God!  That had been a different thing!
+Passion--Memory!  Dust!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+JUNE TAKES A HAND
+
+
+One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York,
+an egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June
+Forsyte's studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick.  On the
+evening of July 6, Boris Strumolowski--several of whose works were on
+show there because they were as yet too advanced to be on show
+anywhere else--had begun well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like
+silence which admirably suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned
+countenance framed in bright hair banged like a girl's.  June had
+known him three weeks, and he still seemed to her the principal
+embodiment of genius, and hope of the future; a sort of Star of the
+East which had strayed into an unappreciative West.  Until that
+evening he had conversationally confined himself to recording his
+impressions of the United States, whose dust he had just shaken from
+off his feet--a country, in his opinion, so barbarous in every way
+that he had sold practically nothing there, and become an object of
+suspicion to the police; a country, as he said, without a race of its
+own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity, without principles,
+traditions, taste, without--in a word--a soul.  He had left it for
+his own good, and come to the only other country where he could live
+well.  June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments,
+standing before his creations--frightening, but powerful and symbolic
+once they had been explained!  That he, haloed by bright hair like an
+early Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion
+of all else--the only sign of course by which real genius could be
+told--should still be a "lame duck" agitated her warm heart almost to
+the exclusion of Paul Post.  And she had begun to take steps to clear
+her Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces.  She
+had at once encountered trouble.  Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch
+had stung.  With all the emphasis of a genius which she did not as
+yet deny them, they had demanded another six weeks at least of her
+Gallery.  The American stream, still flowing in, would soon be
+flowing out.  The American stream was their right, their only hope,
+their salvation--since nobody in this "beastly" country cared for
+Art.  June had yielded to the demonstration.  After all Boris would
+not mind their having the full benefit of an American stream, which
+he himself so violently despised.
+
+This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present,
+except Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy
+Portugal, editor of the Neo-Artist.  She had put it to him with that
+sudden confidence which continual contact with the neo-artistic world
+had never been able to dry up in her warm and generous nature.  He
+had not broken his Christ-like silence, however, for more than two
+minutes before she began to move her blue eyes from side to side, as
+a cat moves its tail.  This--he said--was characteristic of England,
+the most selfish country in the world; the country which sucked the
+blood of other countries; destroyed the brains and hearts of
+Irishmen, Hindus, Egyptians, Boers, and Burmese, all the best races
+in the world; bullying, hypocritical England!  This was what he had
+expected, coming to, such a country, where the climate was all fog,
+and the people all tradesmen perfectly blind to Art, and sunk in
+profiteering and the grossest materialism.  Conscious that Hannah
+Hobdey was murmuring, "Hear, hear!" and Jimmy Portugal sniggering,
+June grew crimson, and suddenly rapped out:
+
+"Then why did you ever come?  We didn't ask you."
+
+The remark was so singularly at variance with all she had led him to
+expect from her, that Strumolowski stretched out his hand and took a
+cigarette.
+
+"England never wants an idealist," he said.
+
+But in June something primitively English was thoroughly upset; old
+Jolyon's sense of justice had risen, as it were, from bed.  "You come
+and sponge on us," she said, "and then abuse us.  If you think that's
+playing the game, I don't."
+
+She now discovered that which others had discovered before her--the
+thickness of hide beneath which the sensibility of genius is
+sometimes veiled.  Strumolowski's young and ingenuous face became the
+incarnation of a sneer.
+
+"Sponge, one does not sponge, one takes what is owing--a tenth part
+of what is owing.  You will repent to say that, Miss Forsyte."
+
+"Oh, no," said June, "I shan't."
+
+"Ah!  We know very well, we artists--you take us to get what you can
+out of us.  I want nothing from you"--and he blew out a cloud of
+June's smoke.
+
+Decision rose in an icy puff from the turmoil of insulted shame
+within her.  "Very well, then, you can take your things away."
+
+And, almost in the same moment, she thought: 'Poor boy!  He's only
+got a garret, and probably not a taxi fare.  In front of these
+people, too; it's positively disgusting!'
+
+Young Strumolowski shook his head violently; his hair, thick, smooth,
+close as a golden plate, did not fall off.
+
+"I can live on nothing," he said shrilly; "I have often had to for
+the sake of my Art.  It is you bourgeois who force us to spend
+money."
+
+The words hit June like a pebble, in the ribs.  After all she had
+done for Art, all her identification with its troubles and lame
+ducks.  She was struggling for adequate words when the door was
+opened, and her Austrian murmured:
+
+"A young lady, gnadiges Fraulein."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the little meal-room."
+
+With a glance at Boris Strumolowski, at Hannah Hobdey, at Jimmy
+Portugal, June said nothing, and went out, devoid of equanimity.
+Entering the "little meal-room," she perceived the young lady to be
+Fleur--looking very pretty, if pale.  At this disenchanted moment a
+little lame duck of her own breed was welcome to June, so
+homoeopathic by instinct.
+
+The girl must have come, of course, because of Jon; or, if not, at
+least to get something out of her.  And June felt just then that to
+assist somebody was the only bearable thing.
+
+"So you've remembered to come," she said.
+
+"Yes.  What a jolly little duck of a house!  But please don't let me
+bother you, if you've got people."
+
+"Not at all," said June.  "I want to let them stew in their own juice
+for a bit.  Have you come about Jon?"
+
+"You said you thought we ought to be told.  Well, I've found out."
+
+"Oh!" said June blankly.  "Not nice, is it?"
+
+They were standing one on each side of the little bare table at which
+June took her meals.  A vase on it was full of Iceland poppies; the
+girl raised her hand and touched them with a gloved finger.  To her
+new-fangled dress, frilly about the hips and tight below the knees,
+June took a sudden liking--a charming colour, flax-blue.
+
+'She makes a picture,' thought June.  Her little room, with its
+whitewashed walls, its floor and hearth of old pink brick, its black
+paint, and latticed window athwart which the last of the sunlight was
+shining, had never looked so charming, set off by this young figure,
+with the creamy, slightly frowning face.  She remembered with sudden
+vividness how nice she herself had looked in those old days when her
+heart was set on Philip Bosinney, that dead lover, who had broken
+from her to destroy for ever Irene's allegiance to this girl's
+father.  Did Fleur know of that, too?
+
+"Well," she said, "what are you going to do?"
+
+It was some seconds before Fleur answered.
+
+"I don't want Jon to suffer.  I must see him once more to put an end
+to it."
+
+"You're going to put an end to it!"
+
+"What else is there to do?"
+
+The girl seemed to June, suddenly, intolerably spiritless.
+
+"I suppose you're right," she muttered.  "I know my father thinks so;
+but--I should never have done it myself.  I can't take things lying
+down."
+
+How poised and watchful that girl looked; how unemotional her voice
+sounded!
+
+"People will assume that I'm in love."
+
+"Well, aren't you?"
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders.  'I might have known it,' thought June;
+'she's Soames' daughter--fish!  And yet--he!'
+
+"What do you want me to do then?" she said with a sort of disgust.
+
+"Could I see Jon here to-morrow on his way down to Holly's?  He'd
+come if you sent him a line to-night.  And perhaps afterward you'd
+let them know quietly at Robin Hill that it's all over, and that they
+needn't tell Jon about his mother."
+
+"All right!" said June abruptly.  "I'll write now, and you can post
+it.  Half-past two tomorrow.  I shan't be in, myself."
+
+She sat down at the tiny bureau which filled one corner.  When she
+looked round with the finished note Fleur was still touching the
+poppies with her gloved finger.
+
+June licked a stamp.  "Well, here it is.  If you're not in love, of
+course, there's no more to be said.  Jon's lucky."
+
+Fleur took the note.  "Thanks awfully!"
+
+'Cold-blooded little baggage!'  thought June.  Jon, son of her
+father, to love, and not to be loved by the daughter of--Soames!  It
+was humiliating!
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+Fleur nodded; her frills shook and trembled as she swayed toward the
+door.
+
+"Good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye!...  Little piece of fashion!" muttered June, closing the
+door.  "That family!"  And she marched back toward her studio.  Boris
+Strumolowski had regained his Christ-like silence and Jimmy Portugal
+was damning everybody, except the group in whose behalf he ran the
+Neo-Artist.  Among the condemned were Eric Cobbley, and several other
+"lame-duck" genii who at one time or another had held first place in
+the repertoire of June's aid and adoration.  She experienced a sense
+of futility and disgust, and went to the window to let the river-wind
+blow those squeaky words away.
+
+But when at length Jimmy Portugal had finished, and gone with Hannah
+Hobdey, she sat down and mothered young Strumolowski for half an
+hour, promising him a month, at least, of the American stream; so
+that he went away with his halo in perfect order.  'In spite of all,'
+June thought, 'Boris is wonderful'
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
+
+
+To know that your hand is against every one's is--for some natures--
+to experience a sense of moral release.  Fleur felt no remorse when
+she left June's house.  Reading condemnatory resentment in her little
+kinswoman's blue eyes-she was glad that she had fooled her, despising
+June because that elderly idealist had not seen what she was after.
+
+End it, forsooth!  She would soon show them all that she was only
+just beginning.  And she smiled to herself on the top of the bus
+which carried her back to Mayfair.  But the smile died, squeezed out
+by spasms of anticipation and anxiety.  Would she be able to manage
+Jon?  She had taken the bit between her teeth, but could she make him
+take it too?  She knew the truth and the real danger of delay--he
+knew neither; therein lay all the difference in the world.
+
+'Suppose I tell him,' she thought; 'wouldn't it really be safer?'
+This hideous luck had no right to spoil their love; he must see that!
+They could not let it!  People always accepted an accomplished fact
+in time!  From that piece of philosophy--profound enough at her age--
+she passed to another consideration less philosophic.  If she
+persuaded Jon to a quick and secret marriage, and he found out
+afterward that she had known the truth.  What then?  Jon hated
+subterfuge.  Again, then, would it not be better to tell him?  But
+the memory of his mother's face kept intruding on that impulse.
+Fleur was afraid.  His mother had power over him; more power perhaps
+than she herself.  Who could tell?  It was too great a risk.  Deep-
+sunk in these instinctive calculations she was carried on past Green
+Street as far as the Ritz Hotel.  She got down there, and walked back
+on the Green Park side.  The storm had washed every tree; they still
+dripped.  Heavy drops fell on to her frills, and to avoid them she
+crossed over under the eyes of the Iseeum Club.  Chancing to look up
+she saw Monsieur Profond with a tall stout man in the bay window.
+Turning into Green Street she heard her name called, and saw "that
+prowler" coming up.  He took off his hat--a glossy "bowler" such as
+she particularly detested.
+
+"Good evenin'!  Miss Forsyde.  Isn't there a small thing I can do for
+you?"
+
+"Yes, pass by on the other side."
+
+"I say!  Why do you dislike me?"
+
+"Do I?"
+
+"It looks like it."
+
+"Well, then, because you make me feel life isn't worth living."
+
+Monsieur Profond smiled.
+
+"Look here, Miss Forsyde, don't worry.  It'll be all right.  Nothing
+lasts."
+
+"Things do last," cried Fleur; "with me anyhow--especially likes and
+dislikes."
+
+"Well, that makes me a bit un'appy."
+
+"I should have thought nothing could ever make you happy or unhappy."
+
+"I don't like to annoy other people.  I'm goin' on my yacht."
+
+Fleur looked at him, startled.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Small voyage to the South Seas or somewhere," said Monsieur Profond.
+
+Fleur suffered relief and a sense of insult.  Clearly he meant to
+convey that he was breaking with her mother.  How dared he have
+anything to break, and yet how dared he break it?
+
+"Good-night, Miss Forsyde!  Remember me to Mrs. Dartie.  I'm not so
+bad really.  Good-night!"  Fleur left him standing there with his hat
+raised.  Stealing a look round, she saw him stroll--immaculate and
+heavy--back toward his Club.
+
+'He can't even love with conviction,' she thought.  'What will Mother
+do?'
+
+Her dreams that night were endless and uneasy; she rose heavy and
+unrested, and went at once to the study of Whitaker's Almanac.  A
+Forsyte is instinctively aware that facts are the real crux of any
+situation.  She might conquer Jon's prejudice, but without exact
+machinery to complete their desperate resolve, nothing would happen.
+>From the invaluable tome she learned that they must each be twenty-
+one; or some one's consent would be necessary, which of course was
+unobtainable; then she became lost in directions concerning licenses,
+certificates, notices, districts, coming finally to the word
+"perjury."   But that was nonsense!  Who would really mind their
+giving wrong ages in order to be married for love!  She ate hardly
+any breakfast, and went back to Whitaker.  The more she studied the
+less sure she became; till, idly turning the pages, she came to
+Scotland.  People could be married there without any of this
+nonsense.  She had only to go and stay there twenty-one days, then
+Jon could come, and in front of two people they could declare
+themselves married.  And what was more--they would be!  It was far
+the best way; and at once she ran over her schoolfellows.  There was
+Mary Lambe who lived in Edinburgh and was "quite a sport!"
+
+She had a brother too.  She could stay with Mary Lambe, who with her
+brother would serve for witnesses.  She well knew that some girls
+would think all this unnecessary, and that all she and Jon need do
+was to go away together for a weekend and then say to their people:
+"We are married by Nature, we must now be married by Law."  But Fleur
+was Forsyte enough to feel such a proceeding dubious, and to dread
+her father's face when he heard of it.  Besides, she did not believe
+that Jon would do it; he had an opinion of her such as she could not
+bear to diminish.  No!  Mary Lambe was preferable, and it was just
+the time of year to go to Scotland.  More at ease now she packed,
+avoided her aunt, and took a bus to Chiswick.  She was too early, and
+went on to Kew Gardens.  She found no peace among its flower-beds,
+labelled trees, and broad green spaces, and having lunched off
+anchovy-paste sandwiches and coffee, returned to Chiswick and rang
+June's bell.  The Austrian admitted her to the "little meal-room."
+Now that she knew what she and Jon were up against, her longing for
+him had increased tenfold, as if he were a toy with sharp edges or
+dangerous paint such as they had tried to take from her as a child.
+If she could not have her way, and get Jon for good and all, she felt
+like dying of privation.  By hook or crook she must and would get
+him!  A round dim mirror of very old glass hung over the pink brick
+hearth.  She stood looking at herself reflected in it, pale, and
+rather dark under the eyes; little shudders kept passing through her
+nerves.  Then she heard the bell ring, and, stealing to the window,
+saw him standing on the doorstep smoothing his hair and lips, as if
+he too were trying to subdue the fluttering of his nerves.
+
+She was sitting on one of the two rush-seated chairs, with her back
+to the door, when he came in, and she said at once
+
+"Sit down, Jon, I want to talk seriously."
+
+Jon sat on the table by her side, and without looking at him she went
+on:
+
+"If you don't want to lose me, we must get married."
+
+Jon gasped.
+
+"Why?  Is there anything new?"
+
+"No, but I felt it at Robin Hill, and among my people."
+
+"But--" stammered Jon, "at Robin Hill--it was all smooth--and they've
+said nothing to me."
+
+"But they mean to stop us.  Your mother's face was enough.  And my
+father's."
+
+"Have you seen him since?"
+
+Fleur nodded.  What mattered a few supplementary lies?
+
+"But," said Jon eagerly, "I can't see how they can feel like that
+after all these years."
+
+Fleur looked up at him.
+
+"Perhaps you don't love me enough."
+"Not love you enough!  Why--!"
+
+"Then make sure of me."
+
+"Without telling them?"
+
+"Not till after."
+
+Jon was silent.  How much older he looked than on that day, barely
+two months ago, when she first saw him--quite two years older!
+
+"It would hurt Mother awfully," he said.
+
+Fleur drew her hand away.
+
+"You've got to choose."
+
+Jon slid off the table on to his knees.
+
+"But why not tell them?  They can't really stop us, Fleur!"
+
+"They can!  I tell you, they can."
+
+"How?"
+
+"We're utterly dependent--by putting money pressure, and all sorts of
+other pressure.  I'm not patient, Jon."
+
+"But it's deceiving them."
+
+Fleur got up.
+
+"You can't really love me, or you wouldn't hesitate.  'He either
+fears his fate too much!'"
+
+Lifting his hands to her waist, Jon forced her to sit down again.
+She hurried on:
+
+"I've planned it all out.  We've only to go to Scotland.  When we're
+married they'll soon come round.  People always come round to facts.
+Don't you see, Jon?"
+
+"But to hurt them so awfully!"
+
+So he would rather hurt her than those people of his!  "All right,
+then; let me go!"
+
+Jon got up and put his back against the door.
+
+"I expect you're right," he said slowly; "but I want to think it
+over."
+
+She could see that he was seething with feelings he wanted to
+express; but she did not mean to help him.  She hated herself at this
+moment and almost hated him.  Why had she to do all the work to
+secure their love?  It wasn't fair.  And then she saw his eyes,
+adoring and distressed.
+
+"Don't look like that!  I only don't want to lose you, Jon."
+
+"You can't lose me so long as you want me."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can."
+
+Jon put his hands on her shoulders.
+
+"Fleur, do you know anything you haven't told me?"
+
+It was the point-blank question she had dreaded.  She looked straight
+at him, and answered: "No."  She had burnt her boats; but what did it
+matter, if she got him?  He would forgive her.  And throwing her arms
+round his neck, she kissed him on the lips.  She was winning!  She
+felt it in the beating of his heart against her, in the closing of
+his eyes.  "I want to make sure!  I want to make sure!" she
+whispered.  "Promise!"
+
+Jon did not answer.  His face had the stillness of extreme trouble.
+At last he said:
+
+"It's like hitting them.  I must think a little, Fleur.  I really
+must."
+
+Fleur slipped out of his arms.
+
+"Oh! Very well!" And suddenly she burst into tears of disappointment,
+shame, and overstrain.  Followed five minutes of acute misery.  Jon's
+remorse and tenderness knew no bounds; but he did not promise.
+Despite her will to cry, "Very well, then, if you don't love me
+enough-goodbye!" she dared not.  From birth accustomed to her own
+way, this check from one so young, so tender, so devoted, baffled and
+surprised her.  She wanted to push him away from her, to try what
+anger and coldness would do, and again she dared not.  The knowledge
+that she was scheming to rush him blindfold into the irrevocable
+weakened everything--weakened the sincerity of pique, and the
+sincerity of passion; even her kisses had not the lure she wished for
+them.  That stormy little meeting ended inconclusively.
+
+"Will you some tea, gnadiges Fraulein?"
+
+Pushing Jon from her, she cried out:
+
+"No-no, thank you!  I'm just going."
+
+And before he could prevent her she was gone.
+
+She went stealthily, mopping her gushed, stained cheeks, frightened,
+angry, very miserable.  She had stirred Jon up so fearfully, yet
+nothing definite was promised or arranged!  But the more uncertain
+and hazardous the future, the more "the will to have" worked its
+tentacles into the flesh of her heart--like some burrowing tick!
+
+No one was at Green Street.  Winifred had gone with Imogen to see a
+play which some said was allegorical, and others "very exciting,
+don't you know."  It was because of what others said that Winifred
+and Imogen had gone.  Fleur went on to Paddington.  Through the
+carriage the air from the brick-kilns of West Drayton and the late
+hayfields fanned her still gushed cheeks.  Flowers had seemed to be
+had for the picking; now they were all thorned and prickled.  But the
+golden flower within the crown of spikes seemed to her tenacious
+spirit all the fairer and more desirable.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE FAT IN THE FIRE
+
+
+On reaching home Fleur found an atmosphere so peculiar that it
+penetrated even the perplexed aura of her own private life.  Her
+mother was inaccessibly entrenched in a brown study; her father
+contemplating fate in the vinery.  Neither of them had a word to
+throw to a dog.  'Is it because of me?' thought Fleur.  'Or because
+of Profond?'  To her mother she said:
+
+"What's the matter with Father?"
+
+Her mother answered with a shrug of her shoulders.
+
+To her father:
+
+"What's the matter with Mother?"
+
+Her father answered:
+
+"Matter?  What should be the matter?" and gave her a sharp look.
+
+"By the way," murmured Fleur, "Monsieur Profond is going a 'small'
+voyage on his yacht, to the South Seas."
+
+Soames examined a branch on which no grapes were growing.
+
+"This vine's a failure," he said.  "I've had young Mont here.  He
+asked me something about you."
+
+"Oh! How do you like him, Father?"
+
+"He--he's a product--like all these young people."
+
+"What were you at his age, dear?"
+
+Soames smiled grimly.
+
+"We went to work, and didn't play about--flying and motoring, and
+making love."
+
+"Didn't you ever make love?"
+
+She avoided looking at him while she said that, but she saw him well
+enough.  His pale face had reddened, his eyebrows, where darkness was
+still mingled with the grey, had come close together.
+
+"I had no time or inclination to philander."
+
+"Perhaps you had a grand passion."
+
+Soames looked at her intently.
+
+"Yes--if you want to know--and much good it did me."  He moved away,
+along by the hot-water pipes.  Fleur tiptoed silently after him.
+
+"Tell me about it, Father!"
+
+Soames became very still.
+
+"What should you want to know about such things, at your age?"
+
+"Is she alive?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And married?" Yes."
+
+"It's Jon Forsyte's mother, isn't it?  And she was your wife first."
+
+It was said in a flash of intuition.  Surely his opposition came from
+his anxiety that she should not know of that old wound to his pride.
+But she was startled.  To see some one so old and calm wince as if
+struck, to hear so sharp a note of pain in his voice!
+
+"Who told you that?  If your aunt!  I can't bear the affair talked
+of."
+
+"But, darling," said Fleur, softly, "it's so long ago."
+
+"Long ago or not, I...."
+
+Fleur stood stroking his arm.
+
+"I've tried to forget," he said suddenly; "I don't wish to be
+reminded."  And then, as if venting some long and secret irritation,
+he added: "In these days people don't understand.  Grand passion,
+indeed!  No one knows what it is."
+
+"I do," said Fleur, almost in a whisper.
+
+Soames, who had turned his back on her, spun round.
+
+"What are you talking of--a child like you!"
+
+"Perhaps I've inherited it, Father."
+
+"What?"
+
+"For her son, you see."
+
+He was pale as a sheet, and she knew that she was as bad.  They stood
+staring at each other in the steamy heat, redolent of the mushy scent
+of earth, of potted geranium, and of vines coming along fast.
+
+"This is crazy," said Soames at last, between dry lips.
+
+Scarcely moving her own, she murmured:
+
+"Don't be angry, Father.  I can't help it."
+
+But she could see he wasn't angry; only scared, deeply scared.
+
+"I thought that foolishness," he stammered, "was all forgotten."
+
+"Oh, no!  It's ten times what it was."
+
+Soames kicked at the hot-water pipe.  The hapless movement touched
+her, who had no fear of her father--none.
+
+"Dearest!" she said.  "What must be, must, you know."
+
+"Must!" repeated Soames.  "You don't know what you're talking of.
+Has that boy been told?"
+
+The blood rushed into her cheeks.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+He had turned from her again, and, with one shoulder a little raised,
+stood staring fixedly at a joint in the pipes.
+
+"It's most distasteful to me," he said suddenly; "nothing could be
+more so.  Son of that fellow!  It's--it's--perverse!"
+
+She had noted, almost unconsciously, that he did not say "son of that
+woman," and again her intuition began working.
+
+Did the ghost of that grand passion linger in some corner of his
+heart?
+
+She slipped her hand under his arm.
+
+"Jon's father is quite ill and old; I saw him."
+
+"You--?"
+
+"Yes, I went there with Jon; I saw them both."
+
+"Well, and what did they say to you?"
+
+"Nothing.  They were very polite."
+
+"They would be."  He resumed his contemplation of the pipe-joint, and
+then said suddenly:
+
+"I must think this over--I'll speak to you again to-night."
+
+She knew this was final for the moment, and stole away, leaving him
+still looking at the pipe-joint.  She wandered into the fruit-garden,
+among the raspberry and currant bushes, without impetus to pick and
+eat.  Two months ago--she was light-hearted!  Even two days ago--
+light-hearted, before Prosper Profond told her.  Now she felt tangled
+in a web-of passions, vested rights, oppressions and revolts, the
+ties of love and hate.  At this dark moment of discouragement there
+seemed, even to her hold-fast nature, no way out.  How deal with it--
+how sway and bend things to her will, and get her heart's desire?
+And, suddenly, round the corner of the high box hedge, she came plump
+on her mother, walking swiftly, with an open letter in her hand.  Her
+bosom was heaving, her eyes dilated, her cheeks flushed.  Instantly
+Fleur thought: 'The yacht!  Poor Mother!'
+
+Annette gave her a wide startled look, and said:
+
+"J'ai la migraine."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, Mother."
+
+"Oh, yes!  you and your father--sorry!"
+
+"But, Mother--I am.  I know what it feels like."
+
+Annette's startled eyes grew wide, till the whites showed above them.
+
+"Poor innocent!" she said.
+
+Her mother--so self-possessed, and commonsensical--to look and speak
+like this!  It was all frightening!  Her father, her mother, herself!
+And only two months back they had seemed to have everything they
+wanted in this world.
+
+Annette crumpled the letter in her hand.  Fleur knew that she must
+ignore the sight.
+
+"Can't I do anything for your head, Mother?"
+
+Annette shook that head and walked on, swaying her hips.
+
+'It's cruel,' thought Fleur, 'and I was glad!  That man!  What do men
+come prowling for, disturbing everything!  I suppose he's tired of
+her.  What business has he to be tired of my mother?  What business!'
+And at that thought, so natural and so peculiar, she uttered a little
+choked laugh.
+
+She ought, of course, to be delighted, but what was there to be
+delighted at?  Her father didn't really care!  Her mother did,
+perhaps?  She entered the orchard, and sat down under a cherry-tree.
+A breeze sighed in the higher boughs; the sky seen through their
+green was very blue and very white in cloud--those heavy white clouds
+almost always present in river landscape.  Bees, sheltering out of
+the wind, hummed softly, and over the lush grass fell the thick shade
+from those fruit-trees planted by her father five-and-twenty, years
+ago.  Birds were almost silent, the cuckoos had ceased to sing, but
+wood-pigeons were cooing.  The breath and drone and cooing of high
+summer were not for long a sedative to her excited nerves.  Crouched
+over her knees she began to scheme.  Her father must be made to back
+her up.  Why should he mind so long as she was happy?  She had not
+lived for nearly nineteen years without knowing that her future was
+all he really cared about.  She had, then, only to convince him that
+her future could not be happy without Jon.  He thought it a mad
+fancy.  How foolish the old were, thinking they could tell what the
+young felt!  Had not he confessed that he--when young--had loved with
+a grand passion?  He ought to understand!  'He piles up his money for
+me,' she thought; 'but what's the use, if I'm not going to be happy?'
+Money, and all it bought, did not bring happiness.  Love only brought
+that.  The ox-eyed daisies in this orchard, which gave it such a
+moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour.  'They
+oughtn't to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if they didn't mean me
+to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.'  Nothing real stood in
+the way, like poverty, or disease--sentiment only, a ghost from the
+unhappy past!  Jon was right.  They wouldn't let you live, these old
+people!  They made mistakes, committed crimes, and wanted their
+children to go on paying!  The breeze died away; midges began to
+bite.  She got up, plucked a piece of honeysuckle, and went in.
+
+It was hot that night.  Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale
+low frocks.  The dinner flowers were pale.  Fleur was struck with the
+pale look of everything; her father's face, her mother's shoulders;
+the pale panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-
+shade, even the soup was pale.  There was not one spot of colour in
+the room, not even wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it.
+What was not pale was black--her father's clothes, the butler's
+clothes, her retriever stretched out exhausted in the window, the
+curtains black with a cream pattern.  A moth came in, and that was
+pale.  And silent was that half-mourning dinner in the heat.
+
+Her father called her back as she was following her mother out.
+
+She sat down beside him at the table, and, unpinning the pale
+honeysuckle, put it to her nose.
+
+"I've been thinking," he said.
+
+"Yes, dear?"
+
+"It's extremely painful for me to talk, but there's no help for it.
+I don't know if you understand how much you are to me I've never
+spoken of it, I didn't think it necessary; but--but you're
+everything.  Your mother--" he paused, staring at his finger-bowl of
+Venetian glass.
+
+"Yes?"'
+
+"I've only you to look to.  I've never had--never wanted anything
+else, since you were born."
+
+"I know," Fleur murmured.
+
+Soames moistened his lips.
+
+"You may think this a matter I can smooth over and arrange for you.
+You're mistaken.  I'm helpless."
+
+Fleur did not speak.
+
+"Quite apart from my own feelings," went on Soames with more
+resolution, "those two are not amenable to anything I can say.  They-
+-they hate me, as people always hate those whom they have injured."
+"But he--Jon--"
+
+"He's their flesh and blood, her only child.  Probably he means to
+her what you mean to me.  It's a deadlock."
+
+"No," cried Fleur, "no, Father!"
+
+Soames leaned back, the image of pale patience, as if resolved on the
+betrayal of no emotion.
+
+"Listen!" he said.  "You're putting the feelings of two months--two
+months--against the feelings of thirty-five years!  What chance do
+you think you have?  Two months--your very first love affair, a
+matter of half a dozen meetings, a few walks and talks, a few kisses-
+-against, against what you can't imagine, what no one could who
+hasn't been through it.  Come, be reasonable, Fleur! It's midsummer
+madness!"
+
+Fleur tore the honeysuckle into little, slow bits.
+
+"The madness is in letting the past spoil it all.
+
+"What do we care about the past?  It's our lives, not yours."
+
+Soames raised his hand to his forehead, where suddenly she saw
+moisture shining.
+
+"Whose child are you?" he said.  "Whose child is he?  The present is
+linked with the past, the future with both.  There's no getting away
+from that."
+
+She had never heard philosophy pass those lips before.  Impressed
+even in her agitation, she leaned her elbows on the table, her chin
+on her hands.
+
+"But, Father, consider it practically.  We want each other.  There's
+ever so much money, and nothing whatever in the way but sentiment.
+Let's bury the past, Father."
+
+His answer was a sigh.
+
+"Besides," said Fleur gently, "you can't prevent us."
+
+"I don't suppose," said Soames, "that if left to myself I should try
+to prevent you; I must put up with things, I know, to keep your
+affection.  But it's not I who control this matter.  That's what I
+want you to realise before it's too late.  If you go on thinking you
+can get your way and encourage this feeling, the blow will be much
+heavier when you find you can't."
+
+"Oh!" cried Fleur, "help me, Father; you can help me, you know."
+
+Soames made a startled movement of negation.  "I?" he said bitterly.
+"Help?  I am the impediment--the just cause and impediment--isn't
+that the jargon?  You have my blood in your veins."
+
+He rose.
+
+"Well, the fat's in the fire.  If you persist in your wilfulness
+you'll have yourself to blame.  Come!  Don't be foolish, my child--my
+only child!"
+
+Fleur laid her forehead against his shoulder.
+
+All was in such turmoil within her.  But no good to show it!  No good
+at all!  She broke away from him, and went out into the twilight,
+distraught, but unconvinced.  All was indeterminate and vague within
+her, like the shapes and shadows in the garden, except--her will to
+have.  A poplar pierced up into the dark-blue sky and touched a white
+star there.  The dew wetted her shoes, and chilled her bare
+shoulders.  She went down to the river bank, and stood gazing at a
+moonstreak on the darkening water.  Suddenly she smelled tobacco
+smoke, and a white figure emerged as if created by the moon.  It was
+young Mont in flannels, standing in his boat.  She heard the tiny
+hiss of his cigarette extinguished in the water.
+
+"Fleur," came his voice, "don't be hard on a poor devil!  I've been
+waiting hours."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"Come in my boat!"
+
+"Not I."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I'm not a water-nymph."
+
+"Haven't you any romance in you?  Don't be modern, Fleur!"
+
+He appeared on the path within a yard of her.
+
+"Go away!"
+
+"Fleur, I love you.  Fleur!"
+
+Fleur uttered a short laugh.
+
+"Come again," she said, "when I haven't got my wish."
+
+"What is your wish?"
+
+"Ask another."
+
+"Fleur," said Mont, and his voice sounded strange, "don't mock me!
+Even vivisected dogs are worth decent treatment before they're cut up
+for good."
+
+Fleur shook her head; but her lips were trembling.
+
+"Well, you shouldn't make me jump.  Give me a cigarette."
+
+Mont gave her one, lighted it, and another for himself.
+
+"I don't want to talk rot," he said, "but please imagine all the rot
+that all the lovers that ever were have talked, and all my special
+rot thrown in."
+
+"Thank you, I have imagined it.  Good-night!"  They stood for a
+moment facing each other in the shadow of an acacia-tree with very
+moonlit blossoms, and the smoke from their cigarettes mingled in the
+air between them.
+
+"Also ran: 'Michael Mont'?" he said.  Fleur turned abruptly toward
+the house.  On the lawn she stopped to look back.  Michael Mont was
+whirling his arms above him; she could see them dashing at his head;
+then waving at the moonlit blossoms of the acacia.  His voice just
+reached her.  "Jolly-jolly!"  Fleur shook herself.  She couldn't help
+him, she had too much trouble of her own!  On the verandah she
+stopped very suddenly again.  Her mother was sitting in the drawing-
+room at her writing bureau, quite alone.  There was nothing
+remarkable in the expression of her face except its utter immobility.
+But she looked desolate!  Fleur went upstairs.  At the door of her
+room she paused.  She could hear her father walking up and down, up
+and down the picture-gallery.
+
+'Yes,' she thought, jolly!  Oh, Jon!'
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+DECISION
+
+
+When Fleur left him Jon stared at the Austrian.  She was a thin woman
+with a dark face and the concerned expression of one who has watched
+every little good that life once had slip from her, one by one.
+"No tea?" she said.
+
+Susceptible to the disappointment in her voice, Jon murmured:
+
+"No, really; thanks."
+
+"A lil cup--it ready.  A lil cup and cigarette."
+
+Fleur was gone!  Hours of remorse and indecision lay before him!  And
+with a heavy sense of disproportion he smiled, and said:
+
+"Well--thank you!"
+
+She brought in a little pot of tea with two little cups, and a silver
+box of cigarettes on a little tray.
+
+"Sugar?  Miss Forsyte has much sugar--she buy my sugar, my friend's
+sugar also.  Miss Forsyte is a veree kind lady.  I am happy to serve
+her.  You her brother?"
+
+"Yes," said Jon, beginning to puff the second cigarette of his life.
+
+"Very young brother," said the Austrian, with a little anxious smile,
+which reminded him of the wag of a dog's tail.
+
+"May I give you some?" he said.  "And won't you sit down, please?"
+
+The Austrian shook her head.
+
+"Your father a very nice old man--the most nice old man I ever see.
+Miss Forsyte tell me all about him.  Is he better?"
+
+Her words fell on Jon like a reproach.  "Oh Yes, I think he's all
+right."
+
+"I like to see him again," said the Austrian, putting a hand on her
+heart; "he have veree kind heart."
+
+"Yes," said Jon.  And again her words seemed to him a reproach.
+
+"He never give no trouble to no one, and smile so gentle."
+
+"Yes, doesn't he?"
+
+"He look at Miss Forsyte so funny sometimes.  I tell him all my
+story; he so sympatisch.  Your mother--she nice and well?"
+
+"Yes, very."
+
+"He have her photograph on his dressing-table.  Veree beautiful"
+
+Jon gulped down his tea.  This woman, with her concerned face and her
+reminding words, was like the first and second murderers.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "I must go now.  May--may I leave this with
+you?"
+
+He put a ten-shilling note on the tray with a doubting hand and
+gained the door.  He heard the Austrian gasp, and hurried out.  He
+had just time to catch his train, and all the way to Victoria looked
+at every face that passed, as lovers will, hoping against hope.  On
+reaching Worthing he put his luggage into the local train, and set
+out across the Downs for Wansdon, trying to walk off his aching
+irresolution.  So long as he went full bat, he could enjoy the beauty
+of those green slopes, stopping now and again to sprawl on the grass,
+admire the perfection of a wild rose or listen to a lark's song.  But
+the war of motives within him was but postponed--the longing for
+Fleur, and the hatred of deception.  He came to the old chalk-pit
+above Wansdon with his mind no more made up than when he started.  To
+see both sides of a question vigorously was at once Jon's strength
+and weakness.  He tramped in, just as the first dinner-bell rang.
+His things had already been brought up.  He had a hurried bath and
+came down to find Holly alone--Val had gone to Town and would not be
+back till the last train.
+
+Since Val's advice to him to ask his sister what was the matter
+between the two families, so much had happened--Fleur's disclosure in
+the Green Park, her visit to Robin Hill, to-day's meeting--that there
+seemed nothing to ask.  He talked of Spain, his sunstroke, Val's
+horses, their father's health.  Holly startled him by saying that she
+thought their father not at all well.  She had been twice to Robin
+Hill for the week-end.  He had seemed fearfully languid, sometimes
+even in pain, but had always refused to talk about himself.
+
+"He's awfully dear and unselfish--don't you think, Jon?"
+
+Feeling far from dear and unselfish himself, Jon answered: "Rather!"
+
+"I think, he's been a simply perfect father, so long as I can
+remember."
+
+"Yes," answered Jon, very subdued.
+
+"He's never interfered, and he's always seemed to understand.  I
+shall never forget his letting me go to South Africa in the Boer War
+when I was in love with Val."
+
+"That was before he married Mother, wasn't it?" said Jon suddenly.
+
+"Yes.  Why?"
+
+"Oh! nothing.  Only, wasn't she engaged to Fleur's father first?"
+
+Holly put down the spoon she was using, and raised her eyes.  Her
+stare was circumspect.  What did the boy know?  Enough to make it
+better to tell him?  She could not decide.  He looked strained and
+worried, altogether older, but that might be the sunstroke.
+
+"There was something," she said.  "Of course we were out there, and
+got no news of anything."  She could not take the risk.
+
+It was not her secret.  Besides, she was in the dark about his
+feelings now.  Before Spain she had made sure he was in love; but
+boys were boys; that was seven weeks ago, and all Spain between.
+
+She saw that he knew she was putting him off, and added:
+
+"Have you heard anything of Fleur?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+His face told her, then, more than the most elaborate explanations.
+So he had not forgotten!
+
+She said very quietly: "Fleur is awfully attractive, Jon, but you
+know--Val and I don't really like her very much."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"We think she's got rather a 'having' nature."
+
+"'Having'?  I don't know what you mean.  She--she--" he pushed his
+dessert plate away, got up, and went to the window.
+
+Holly, too, got up, and put her arm round his waist.
+
+"Don't be angry, Jon dear.  We can't all see people in the same
+light, can we?  You know, I believe each of us only has about one or
+two people who can see the best that's in us, and bring it out.  For
+you I think it's your mother.  I once saw her looking at a letter of
+yours; it was wonderful to see her face.  I think she's the most
+beautiful woman I ever saw--Age doesn't seem to touch her."
+
+Jon's face softened; then again became tense.  Everybody--everybody
+was against him and Fleur!  It all strengthened the appeal of her
+words: "Make sure of me--marry me, Jon!"
+
+Here, where he had passed that wonderful week with her--the tug of
+her enchantment, the ache in his heart increased with every minute
+that she was not there to make the room, the garden, the very air
+magical.  Would he ever be able to live down here, not seeing her?
+And he closed up utterly, going early to bed.  It would not make him
+healthy, wealthy, and wise, but it closeted him with memory of Fleur
+in her fancy frock.  He heard Val's arrival--the Ford discharging
+cargo, then the stillness of the summer night stole back--with only
+the bleating of very distant sheep, and a night-Jar's harsh purring.
+He leaned far out.  Cold moon--warm air--the Downs like silver!
+Small wings, a stream bubbling, the rambler roses!  God--how empty
+all of it without her!  In the Bible it was written: Thou shalt leave
+father and mother and cleave to--Fleur!
+
+Let him have pluck, and go and tell them!  They couldn't stop him
+marrying her--they wouldn't want to stop him when they knew how he
+felt.  Yes!  He would go! Bold and open--Fleur was wrong!
+
+The night-jar ceased, the sheep were silent; the only sound in the
+darkness was the bubbling of the stream.  And Jon in his bed slept,
+freed from the worst of life's evils--indecision.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
+
+
+On the day of the cancelled meeting at the National Gallery began the
+second anniversary of the resurrection of England's pride and glory--
+or, more shortly, the top hat.  "Lord's"--that festival which the
+War had driven from the field--raised its light and dark blue flags
+for the second time, displaying almost every feature of a glorious
+past.  Here, in the luncheon interval, were all species of female and
+one species of male hat, protecting the multiple types of face
+associated with "the classes."  The observing Forsyte might discern
+in the free or unconsidered seats a certain number of the squash-
+hatted, but they hardly ventured on the grass; the old school--or
+schools--could still rejoice that the proletariat was not yet paying
+the necessary half-crown.  Here was still a close borough, the only
+one left on a large scale--for the papers were about to estimate the
+attendance at ten thousand.  And the ten thousand, all animated by
+one hope, were asking each other one question: "Where are you
+lunching?"  Something wonderfully uplifting and reassuring in that
+query and the sight of so many people like themselves voicing it!
+What reserve power in the British realm--enough pigeons, lobsters,
+lamb, salmon mayonnaise, strawberries, and bottles of champagne to
+feed the lot!  No miracle in prospect--no case of seven loaves and a
+few fishes--faith rested on surer foundations.  Six thousand top
+hats, four thousand parasols would be doffed and furled, ten thousand
+mouths all speaking the same English would be filled.  There was life
+in the old dog yet!  Tradition!  And again Tradition!  How strong and
+how elastic!  Wars might rage, taxation prey, Trades Unions take
+toll, and Europe perish of starvation; but the ten thousand would be
+fed; and, within their ring fence, stroll upon green turf, wear their
+top hats, and meet--themselves.  The heart was sound, the pulse still
+regular.  E-ton!  E-ton!  Har-r-o-o-o-w!
+
+Among the many Forsytes, present on a hunting-ground theirs, by
+personal prescriptive right, or proxy, was Soames with his wife and
+daughter.  He had not been at either school, he took no interest in
+cricket, but he wanted Fleur to show her frock, and he wanted to wear
+his top hat parade it again in peace and plenty among his peers.  He
+walked sedately with Fleur between him and Annette.  No women
+equalled them, so far as he could see.  They could walk, and hold
+themselves up; there was substance in their good looks; the modern
+woman had no build, no chest, no anything!  He remembered suddenly
+with what intoxication of pride he had walked round with Irene in the
+first years of his first marriage.  And how they used to lunch on the
+drag which his mother would make his father have, because it was so
+"chic"--all drags and carriages in those days, not these lumbering
+great Stands!  And how consistently Montague Dartie had drunk too
+much.  He supposed that people drank too much still, but there was
+not the scope for it there used to be.  He remembered George Forsyte-
+-whose brothers Roger and Eustace had been at Harrow and Eton--
+towering up on the top of the drag waving a light-blue flag with one
+hand and a dark-blue flag with the other, and shouting "Etroow-
+Harrton!"  Just when everybody was silent, like the buffoon he had
+always been; and Eustace got up to the nines below, too dandified to
+wear any colour or take any notice.  H'm!  Old days, and Irene in
+grey silk shot with palest green.  He looked, sideways, at Fleur's
+face.  Rather colourless-no light, no eagerness!  That love affair
+was preying on her--a bad business!  He looked beyond, at his wife's
+face, rather more touched up than usual, a little disdainful--not
+that she had any business to disdain, so far as he could see.  She
+was taking Profond's defection with curious quietude; or was his
+"small" voyage just a blind?  If so, he should refuse to see it!
+Having promenaded round the pitch and in front of the pavilion, they
+sought Winifred's table in the Bedouin Club tent.  This Club--a new
+"cock and hen"--had been founded in the interests of travel, and of a
+gentleman with an old Scottish name, whose father had somewhat
+strangely been called Levi.  Winifred had joined, not because she had
+travelled, but because instinct told her that a Club with such a name
+and such a founder was bound to go far; if one didn't join at once
+one might never have the chance.  Its tent, with a text from the
+Koran on an orange ground, and a small green camel embroidered over
+the entrance, was the most striking on the ground.  Outside it they
+found Jack Cardigan in a dark blue tie (he had once played for
+Harrow), batting with a Malacca cane to show how that fellow ought to
+have hit that ball.  He piloted them in.  Assembled in Winifred's
+corner were Imogen, Benedict with his young wife, Val Dartie without
+Holly, Maud and her husband, and, after Soames and his two were
+seated, one empty place.
+
+"I'm expecting Prosper," said Winifred, "but he's so busy with his
+yacht."
+
+Soames stole a glance.  No movement in his wife's face!  Whether that
+fellow were coming or not, she evidently knew all about it.  It did
+not escape him that Fleur, too, looked at her mother.  If Annette
+didn't respect his feelings, she might think of Fleur's!  The
+conversation, very desultory, was syncopated by Jack Cardigan talking
+about "mid-off."  He cited all the "great mid-offs" from the
+beginning of time, as if they had been a definite racial entity in
+the composition of the British people.  Soames had finished his
+lobster, and was beginning on pigeon-pie, when he heard the words,
+"I'm a small bit late, Mrs. Dartie," and saw that there was no longer
+any empty place.  That fellow was sitting between Annette and Imogen.
+Soames ate steadily on, with an occasional word to Maud and Winifred.
+Conversation buzzed around him.  He heard the voice of Profond say:
+
+"I think you're mistaken, Mrs. Forsyde; I'll--I'll bet Miss Forsyde
+agrees with me."
+
+"In what?" came Fleur's clear voice across the table.
+
+"I was sayin', young gurls are much the same as they always were--
+there's very small difference."
+
+"Do you know so much about them?"
+
+
+That sharp reply caught the ears of all, and Soames moved uneasily on
+his thin green chair.
+
+"Well, I don't know, I think they want their own small way, and I
+think they always did."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"Oh, but--Prosper," Winifred interjected comfortably, "the girls in
+the streets--the girls  who've been in munitions, the little flappers
+in  the shops; their manners now really quite hit you in the eye."
+
+At the word "hit" Jack Cardigan stopped his disquisition; and in the
+silence Monsieur Profond  said:
+
+"It was inside before, now it's outside; that's  all."
+
+"But their morals!" cried Imogen.
+
+"Just as moral as they ever were, Mrs. Cardigan, but they've got more
+opportunity."
+
+The saying, so cryptically cynical, received a  little laugh from
+Imogen, a slight opening of Jack Cardigan's mouth, and a creak from
+Soames' chair.
+
+Winifred said: "That's too bad, Prosper."
+
+"What do you say, Mrs. Forsyde; don't you think human nature's always
+the same?"
+
+Soames subdued a sudden longing to get up and kick the fellow.  He
+heard his wife reply:
+
+"Human nature is not the same in England as anywhere else."  That was
+her confounded mockery!
+
+"Well, I don't know much about this small country"--'No, thank God!'
+thought Soames--"but I should say the pot was boilin' under the lid
+everywhere.  We all want pleasure, and we always did."
+
+Damn the fellow!  His cynicism was--was outrageous!
+
+When lunch was over they broke up into couples for the digestive
+promenade.  Too proud to notice, Soames knew perfectly that Annette
+and that fellow had gone prowling round together.  Fleur was with
+Val; she had chosen him, no doubt, because he knew that boy.  He
+himself had Winifred for partner.  They walked in the bright,
+circling stream, a little flushed and sated, for some minutes, till
+Winifred sighed:
+
+"I wish we were back forty years, old boy!"
+
+Before the eyes of her spirit an interminable procession of her own
+"Lord's" frocks was passing, paid for with the money of her father,
+to save a recurrent crisis.  "It's been very amusing, after all.
+Sometimes I even wish Monty was back.  What do you think of people
+nowadays, Soames?"
+
+"Precious little style.  The thing began to go to pieces with
+bicycles and motor-cars; the War has finished it."
+
+"I wonder what's coming?" said Winifred in a voice dreamy from
+pigeon-pie.  "I'm not at all sure we shan't go back to crinolines and
+pegtops.  Look at that dress!"
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+"There's money, but no faith in things.  We don't lay by for the
+future.  These youngsters--it's all a short life and a merry one with
+them."
+
+"There's a hat!" said Winifred.  "I don't know--when you come to
+think of the people killed and all that in the War, it's rather
+wonderful, I think.  There's no other country--Prosper says the rest
+are all bankrupt, except America; and of course her men always took
+their style in dress from us."
+
+"Is that chap," said Soames, "really going to the South Seas?"
+
+"Oh! one never knows where Prosper's going!"
+
+"He's a sign of the times," muttered Soames, "if you like."
+
+Winifred's hand gripped his arm.
+
+"Don't turn your head," she said in a low voice, "but look to your
+right in the front row of the Stand."
+
+Soames looked as best he could under that limitation.  A man in a
+grey top hat, grey-bearded, with thin brown, folded cheeks, and a
+certain elegance of posture, sat there with a woman in a lawn-
+coloured frock, whose dark eyes were fixed on himself.  Soames looked
+quickly at his feet.  How funnily feet moved, one after the other
+like that!  Winifred's voice said in his ear:
+
+"Jolyon looks very ill; but he always had style.  She doesn't change-
+-except her hair."
+
+"Why did you tell Fleur about that business?"
+
+"I didn't; she picked it up.  I always knew she would."
+
+"Well, it's a mess.  She's set her heart upon their boy."
+
+"The little wretch," murmured Winifred.  "She tried to take me in
+about that.  What shall you do, Soames?"
+
+"Be guided by events."
+
+They moved on, silent, in the almost solid crowd.
+
+"Really," said Winifred suddenly; "it almost seems like Fate.  Only
+that's so old-fashioned.  Look! there are George and Eustace!"
+
+George Forsyte's lofty bulk had halted before them.
+
+"Hallo, Soames!" he said.  "Just met Profond and your wife.  You'll
+catch 'em if you put on pace.  Did you ever go to see old Timothy?"
+
+Soames nodded, and the streams forced them apart.
+
+"I always liked old George," said Winifred.  "He's so droll."
+
+"I never did," said Soames.  "Where's your seat?  I shall go to mine.
+Fleur may be back there."
+
+Having seen Winifred to her seat, he regained his own, conscious of
+small, white, distant figures running, the click of the bat, the
+cheers and counter-cheers.  No Fleur, and no Annette!  You could
+expect nothing of women nowadays!  They had the vote.  They were
+"emancipated," and much good it was doing them!  So Winifred would go
+back, would she, and put up with Dartie all over again?  To have the
+past once more--to be sitting here as he had sat in '83 and '84,
+before he was certain that his marriage with Irene had gone all
+wrong, before her antagonism had become so glaring that with the best
+will in the world he could not overlook it.  The sight of her with
+that fellow had brought all memory back.  Even now he could not
+understand why she had been so impracticable.  She could love other
+men; she had it in her!  To himself, the one person she ought to have
+loved, she had chosen to refuse her heart.  It seemed to him,
+fantastically, as he looked back, that all this modern relaxation of
+marriage--though its forms and laws were the same as when he married
+her--that all this modern looseness had come out of her revolt; it
+seemed to him, fantastically, that she had started it, till all
+decent ownership of anything had gone, or was on the point of going.
+All came from her!  And now--a pretty state of things!  Homes!  How
+could you have them without mutual ownership?  Not that he had ever
+had a real home!  But had that been his fault?  He had done his best.
+And his rewards were--those two sitting in that Stand, and this
+affair of Fleur's!
+
+And overcome by loneliness he thought: 'Shan't wait any longer!  They
+must find their own way back to the hotel--if they mean to come!'
+Hailing a cab outside the ground, he said:
+
+"Drive me to the Bayswater Road."  His old aunts had never failed
+him.  To them he had meant an ever-welcome visitor.  Though they were
+gone, there, still, was Timothy!
+
+Smither was standing in the open doorway.
+
+"Mr. Soames!  I was just taking the air.  Cook will be so pleased."
+
+"How is Mr. Timothy?"
+
+"Not himself at all these last few days, sir; he's been talking a
+great deal.  Only this morning he was saying: 'My brother James, he's
+getting old.'  His mind wanders, Mr. Soames, and then he will talk of
+them.  He troubles about their investments.  The other day he said:
+'There's my brother Jolyon won't look at Consols'--he seemed quite
+down about it.  Come in, Mr. Soames, come in!  It's such a pleasant
+change!"
+
+"Well," said Soames, "just for a few minutes."
+
+"No," murmured Smither in the hall, where the air had the singular
+freshness of the outside day, "we haven't been very satisfied with
+him, not all this week.  He's always been one to leave a titbit to
+the end; but ever since Monday he's been eating it first.  If you
+notice a dog, Mr. Soames, at its dinner, it eats the meat first.
+We've always thought it such a good sign of Mr. Timothy at his age to
+leave it to the last, but now he seems to have lost all his self-
+control; and, of course, it makes him leave the rest.  The doctor
+doesn't make anything of it, but"--Smither shook her head--"he seems
+to think he's got to eat it first, in case he shouldn't get to it.
+That and his talking makes us anxious."
+
+"Has he said anything important?"
+
+"I shouldn't like to say that, Mr. Soames; but he's turned against
+his Will.  He gets quite pettish--and after having had it out every
+morning for years, it does seem funny.  He said the other day: 'They
+want my money.'  It gave me such a turn, because, as I said to him,
+nobody wants his money, I'm sure.  And it does seem a pity he should
+be thinking about money at his time of life.  I took my courage in my
+'ands.  'You know, Mr. Timothy,' I said, 'my dear mistress'--that's
+Miss Forsyte, Mr. Soames, Miss Ann that trained me--'she never
+thought about money,' I said, 'it was all character with her.'  He
+looked at me, I can't tell you how funny, and he said quite dry:
+'Nobody wants my character.'  Think of his saying a thing like that!
+But sometimes he'll say something as sharp and sensible as anything."
+
+Soames, who had been staring at an old print by the hat-rack,
+thinking, 'That's got value!'  murmured: "I'll go up and see him,
+Smither."
+
+"Cook's with him," answered Smither above her corsets; "she will be
+pleased to see you."
+
+He mounted slowly, with the thought: 'Shan't care to live to be that
+age.'
+
+On the second floor, he paused, and tapped.  The door was opened, and
+he saw the round homely face of a woman about sixty.
+
+"Mr. Soames!" she said: "Why!  Mr. Soames!"
+
+Soames nodded.  "All right, Cook!" and entered.
+
+Timothy was propped up in bed, with his hands joined before his
+chest, and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, where a fly was standing
+upside down.  Soames stood at the foot of the bed, facing him.
+
+"Uncle Timothy," he said, raising his voice.  "Uncle Timothy!"
+
+Timothy's eyes left the fly, and levelled themselves on his visitor.
+Soames could see his pale tongue passing over his darkish lips.
+
+"Uncle Timothy," he said again, "is there anything I can do for you?
+Is there anything you'd like to say?"
+
+"Ha!" said Timothy.
+
+"I've come to look you up and see that everything's all right."
+
+Timothy nodded.  He seemed trying to get used to the apparition
+before him.
+
+"Have you got everything you want?"
+
+"No," said Timothy.
+
+"Can I get you anything?"
+
+"No," said Timothy.
+
+"I'm Soames, you know; your nephew, Soames Forsyte.  Your brother
+James' son."
+
+Timothy nodded.
+
+"I shall be delighted to do anything I can for you."
+
+Timothy beckoned.  Soames went close to him:
+
+"You--" said Timothy in a voice which seemed to have outlived tone,
+"you tell them all from me--you tell them all--" and his finger
+tapped on Soames' arm, "to hold on--hold on--Consols are goin' up,"
+and he nodded thrice.
+
+"All right!" said Soames; "I will."
+
+"Yes," said Timothy, and, fixing his eyes again on the ceiling, he
+added: "That fly!"
+
+Strangely moved, Soames looked at the Cook's pleasant fattish face,
+all little puckers from staring at fires.
+
+"That'll do him a world of good, sir," she said.
+
+A mutter came from Timothy, but he was clearly speaking to himself,
+and Soames went out with the cook.
+
+"I wish I could make you a pink cream, Mr. Soames, like in old days;
+you did so relish them.  Good-bye, sir; it has been a pleasure."
+
+"Take care of him, Cook, he is old."
+
+And, shaking her crumpled hand, he went down-stairs.  Smither was
+still taking the air in the doorway.
+
+"What do you think of him, Mr. Soames?"
+
+"H'm!" Soames murmured: "He's lost touch."
+
+"Yes," said Smither, "I was afraid you'd think that coming fresh out
+of the world to see him like."
+
+"Smither," said Soames, "we're all indebted to you."
+
+"Oh, no, Mr. Soames, don't say that!  It's a pleasure--he's such a
+wonderful man."
+
+"Well, good-bye!" said Soames, and got into his taxi.
+
+'Going up!' he thought; 'going up!'
+
+Reaching the hotel at Knightsbridge he went to their sitting-room,
+and rang for tea.  Neither of them were in.  And again that sense of
+loneliness came over him.  These hotels.  What monstrous great places
+they were now!  He could remember when there was nothing bigger than
+Long's or Brown's, Morley's or the Tavistock, and the heads that were
+shaken over the Langham and the Grand.  Hotels and Clubs--Clubs and
+Hotels; no end to them now!  And Soames, who had just been watching
+at Lord's a miracle of tradition and continuity, fell into reverie
+over the changes in that London where he had been born five-and-sixty
+years before.  Whether Consols were going up or not, London had
+become a terrific property.  No such property in the world, unless it
+were New York!  There was a lot of hysteria in the papers nowadays;
+but any one who, like himself, could remember London sixty years ago,
+and see it now, realised the fecundity and elasticity of wealth.
+They had only to keep their heads, and go at it steadily.  Why! he
+remembered cobblestones, and stinking straw on the floor of your cab.
+And old Timothy--what could be not have told them, if he had kept his
+memory!  Things were unsettled, people in a funk or in a hurry, but
+here were London and the Thames, and out there the British Empire,
+and the ends of the earth.  "Consols are goin' up!"  He should n't be
+a bit surprised.  It was the breed that counted.  And all that was
+bull-dogged in Soames stared for a moment out of his grey eyes, till
+diverted by the print of a Victorian picture on the walls.  The hotel
+had bought three dozen of that little lot!  The old hunting or
+"Rake's Progress" prints in the old inns were worth looking at--but
+this sentimental stuff--well, Victorianism had gone!  "Tell them to
+hold on!" old Timothy had said.  But to what were they to hold on in
+this modern welter of the "democratic principle"?  Why, even privacy
+was threatened!  And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames
+pushed back his teacup and went to the window.  Fancy owning no more
+of Nature than the crowd out there owned of the flowers and trees and
+waters of Hyde Park!  No, no! Private possession underlay everything
+worth having.  The world had slipped its sanity a bit, as dogs now
+and again at full moon slipped theirs and went off for a night's
+rabbiting; but the world, like the dog, knew where its bread was
+buttered and its bed warm, and would come back sure enough to the
+only home worth having--to private ownership.  The world was in its
+second childhood for the moment, like old Timothy--eating its titbit
+first!
+
+He heard a sound behind him, and saw that his wife and daughter had
+come in.
+
+"So you're back!" he said.
+
+Fleur did not answer; she stood for a moment looking at him and her
+mother, then passed into her bedroom.  Annette poured herself out a
+cup of tea.
+
+"I am going to Paris, to my mother, Soames."  "Oh! To your mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For how long?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"And when are you going?"
+
+"On Monday."
+
+Was she really going to her mother?  Odd, how indifferent he felt!
+Odd, how clearly she had perceived the indifference he would feel so
+long as there was no scandal.  And suddenly between her and himself
+he saw distinctly the face he had seen that afternoon--Irene's.
+
+"Will you want money?"
+
+"Thank you; I have enough."
+
+"Very well.  Let us know when you are coming back."
+
+Annette put down the cake she was fingering, and, looking up through
+darkened lashes, said:
+
+"Shall I give Maman any message?"
+
+"My regards."
+
+Annette stretched herself, her hands on her waist, and said in
+French:
+
+"What luck that you have never loved me, Soames!"  Then rising, she
+too left the room.  Soames was glad she had spoken it in French--it
+seemed to require no dealing with.  Again that other face--pale,
+dark-eyed, beautiful still!  And there stirred far down within him
+the ghost of warmth, as from sparks lingering beneath a mound of
+flaky ash.  And Fleur infatuated with her boy!  Queer chance!  Yet,
+was there such a thing as chance?  A man went down a street, a brick
+fell on his head.  Ah! that was chance, no doubt.  But this!
+"Inherited," his girl had said.  She--she was "holding on"!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+I
+
+OLD JOLYON WALKS
+
+
+Twofold impulse had made Jolyon say to his wife at breakfast
+"Let's go up to Lord's!"
+
+"Wanted"--something to abate the anxiety in which those two had lived
+during the sixty hours since Jon had brought Fleur down.  "Wanted"--
+too, that which might assuage the pangs of memory in one who knew he
+might lose them any day!
+
+Fifty-eight years ago Jolyon had become an Eton boy, for old Jolyon's
+whim had been that he should be canonised at the greatest possible
+expense.  Year after year he had gone to Lord's from Stanhope Gate
+with a father whose youth in the eighteen-twenties had been passed
+without polish in the game of cricket.  Old Jolyon would speak quite
+openly of swipes, full tosses, half and three-quarter balls; and
+young Jolyon with the guileless snobbery of youth had trembled lest
+his sire should be overheard.  Only in this supreme matter of cricket
+he had been nervous, for his father--in Crimean whiskers then--had
+ever impressed him as the beau ideal.  Though never canonised
+himself, Old Jolyon's natural fastidiousness and balance had saved
+him from the errors of the vulgar.  How delicious, after howling in a
+top hat and a sweltering heat, to go home with his father in a hansom
+cab, bathe, dress, and forth to the "Disunion" Club, to dine off
+white bait, cutlets, and a tart, and go--two "swells," old and young,
+in lavender kid gloves--to the opera or play.  And on Sunday, when
+the match was over, and his top hat duly broken, down with his father
+in a special hansom to the "Crown and Sceptre," and the terrace above
+the river--the golden sixties when the world was simple, dandies
+glamorous, Democracy not born, and the books of Whyte Melville coming
+thick and fast.
+
+A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-buttonholed with
+corn-flowers--by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at
+a trifle less expense--again Jolyon had experienced the heat and
+counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the
+strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy
+making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and
+grown-up.  Those two days each year he and his son had been alone
+together in the world, one on each side--and Democracy just born!
+
+And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of
+light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and
+train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground.  There, beside her in a
+lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game,
+and felt the old thrill stir within him.
+
+When Soames passed, the day was spoiled.  Irene's face was distorted
+by compression of the lips.  No good to go on sitting here with
+Soames or perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like
+decimals.  And he said:
+
+"Well, dear, if you've had enough--let's go!"
+
+That evening Jolyon felt exhausted.  Not wanting her to see him thus,
+he waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little
+study.  He opened the long window for air, and the door, that he
+might still hear her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's
+old armchair, closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown
+leather.  Like that passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata--so had been
+his life with her, a divine third movement.  And now this business of
+Jon's--this bad business!  Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he
+hardly knew if it were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar,
+and seemed to see his father in the blackness before his closed eyes.
+That shape formed, went, and formed again; as if in the very chair
+where he himself was sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with.
+knees crossed, glasses balanced between thumb and finger; saw the big
+white moustaches, and the deep eyes looking up below a dome of
+forehead and seeming to search his own, seeming to speak.  "Are you
+facing it, Jo?  It's for you to decide.  She's only a woman!"  Ah!
+how well he knew his father in that phrase; how all the Victorian Age
+came up with it!  And his answer "No, I've funked it--funked hurting
+her and Jon and myself.  I've got a heart; I've funked it."  But the
+old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept at it;
+"It's your wife, your son; your past.  Tackle it, my boy!"  Was it a
+message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living
+on within him?  And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old
+saturated leather.  Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put
+the whole thing down in black and white!  And suddenly he breathed
+with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were
+swollen.  He got up and went out into the air.  The stars were very
+bright.  He passed along the terrace round the corner of the house,
+till, through the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the
+piano, with lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into
+herself she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her
+hands idle.  Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her
+breast.  'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of
+her--it's natural!'
+
+And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
+
+Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task.  He wrote with
+difficulty and many erasures.
+
+
+"MY DEAREST BOY,
+
+"You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders
+to give themselves away to their young.  Especially when--like your
+mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but
+young--their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must
+confess.  I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly--
+people in real life very seldom are, I believe--but most persons
+would say we had, and at all events our conduct, righteous or not,
+has found us out.  The truth is, my dear, we both have pasts, which
+it is now my task to make known to you, because they so grievously
+and deeply affect your future.  Many, very many years ago, as far
+back indeed as 1883, when she was only twenty, your mother had the
+great and lasting misfortune to make an unhappy marriage--no, not
+with me, Jon.  Without money of her own, and with only a stepmother--
+closely related to Jezebel--she was very unhappy in her home life.
+It was Fleur's father that she married, my cousin Soames Forsyte.  He
+had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him justice was deeply in
+love with her.  Within a week she knew the fearful mistake she had
+made.  It was not his fault; it was her error of judgment--her
+misfortune."
+
+So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject
+carried him away.
+
+"Jon, I want to explain to you if I can--and it's very hard--how it
+is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about.
+You will of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how could she
+ever have married him?'  You would be right if it were not for one or
+two rather terrible considerations.  From this initial mistake of
+hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and
+so I must make it clear to you if I can.  You see, Jon, in those days
+and even to this day--indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of
+enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise--most girls are married
+ignorant of the sexual side of life.  Even if they know what it means
+they have not experienced it.  That's the crux.  It is this actual
+lack of experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes
+all the difference and all the trouble.  In a vast number of
+marriages-and your mother's was one--girls are not and cannot be
+certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they do not know
+until after that act of union which makes the reality of marriage.
+Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements and
+strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's
+was one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such
+attraction as there was.  There is nothing more tragic in a woman's
+life than such a revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer.
+Coarse-grained and unthinking people are apt to laugh at such a
+mistake, and say, 'What a fuss about nothing!'  Narrow and self-
+righteous people, only capable of judging the lives of others by
+their own, are apt to condemn those who make this tragic error, to
+condemn them for life to the dungeons they have made for themselves.
+You know the expression: 'She has made her bed, she must lie on it!'
+It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or lady in
+the best sense of those words; and I can use no stronger
+condemnation.  I have not been what is called a moral man, but I wish
+to use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly of
+ties or contracts into which you enter.  Heaven forbid!  But with the
+experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the
+victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands
+to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
+understanding to know what they are doing.  But they haven't!  Let
+them go!  They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them.
+I have had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a
+position to judge your mother, and you are very young, without
+experience of what life is.  To go on with the story.  After three
+years of effort to subdue her shrinking--I was going to say her
+loathing and it's not too strong a word, for shrinking soon becomes
+loathing under such circumstances--three years of what to a
+sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother's, Jon, was torment,
+she met a young man who fell in love with her.  He was the architect
+of this very house that we live in now, he was building it for her
+and Fleur's father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in place of
+the one she inhabited with him in London.  Perhaps that fact played
+some part in what came of it.  But in any case she, too, fell in love
+with him.  I know it's not necessary to explain to you that one does
+not precisely choose with whom one will fall in love.  It comes.
+Very well!  It came.  I can imagine--though she never said much to me
+about it--the struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she
+was brought up strictly and was not light in her ideas--not at all.
+However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass that
+they loved in deed as well as in thought.  Then came a fearful
+tragedy.  I must tell you of it because if I don't you will never
+understand the real situation that you have now to face.  The man
+whom she had married--Soames Forsyte, the father of Fleur one night,
+at the height of her passion for this young man, forcibly reasserted
+his rights over her.  The next day she met her lover and told him of
+it.  Whether he committed suicide or whether he was accidentally run
+over in his distraction, we never knew; but so it was.  Think of your
+mother as she was that evening when she heard of his death.  I
+happened to see her.  Your grandfather sent me to help her if I
+could.  I only just saw her, before the door was shut against me by
+her husband.  But I have never forgotten her face, I can see it now.
+I was not in love with her then, not for twelve years after, but I
+have never for gotten.  My dear boy--it is not easy to write like
+this.  But you see, I must.  Your mother is wrapped up in you,
+utterly, devotedly.  I don't wish to write harshly of Soames Forsyte.
+I don't think harshly of him.  I have long been sorry for him;
+perhaps I was sorry even then.  As the world judges she was in error,
+he within his rights.  He loved her--in his way.  She was his
+property.  That is the view he holds of life--of human feelings and
+hearts--property.  It's not his fault--so was he born.  To me it is a
+view that has always been abhorrent--so was I born!  Knowing you as I
+do, I feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you.  Let me go
+on with the story.  Your mother fled from his house that night; for
+twelve years she lived quietly alone without companionship of any
+sort, until in 1899 her husband--you see, he was still her husband,
+for he did not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right
+to divorce him--became conscious, it seems, of the want of children,
+and commenced a long attempt to induce her to go back to him and give
+him a child.  I was her trustee then, under your Grandfather's Will,
+and I watched this going on.  While watching, I became attached to
+her, devotedly attached.  His pressure increased, till one day she
+came to me here and practically put herself under my protection.  Her
+husband, who was kept informed of all her movements, attempted to
+force us apart by bringing a divorce suit, or possibly he really
+meant it, I don't know; but anyway our names were publicly joined.
+That decided us, and we became united in fact.  She was divorced,
+married me, and you were born.  We have lived in perfect happiness,
+at least I have, and I believe your mother also.  Soames, soon after
+the divorce, married Fleur's mother, and she was born.  That is the
+story, Jon.  I have told it you, because by the affection which we
+see you have formed for this man's daughter you are blindly moving
+toward what must utterly destroy your mother's happiness, if not your
+own.  I don't wish to speak of myself, because at my age there's no
+use supposing I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I
+should suffer would be mainly on her account, and on yours.  But what
+I want you to realise is that feelings of horror and aversion such as
+those can never be buried or forgotten. They are alive in her to-day.
+Only yesterday at Lord's we happened to see Soames Forsyte.  Her
+face, if you had seen it, would have convinced you.  The idea that
+you should marry his daughter is a nightmare to her, Jon.  I have
+nothing to say against Fleur save that she is his daughter.  But your
+children, if you married her, would be the grandchildren of Soames,
+as much as of your mother, of a man who once owned your mother as a
+man might own a slave.  Think what that would mean.  By such a
+marriage you enter the camp which held your mother prisoner and
+wherein she ate her heart out.  You are just on the threshold of
+life, you have only known this girl two months, and however deeply
+you think you love her, I appeal to you to break it off at once.
+Don't give your mother this rankling pain and humiliation during the
+rest of her life.  Young though she will always seem to me, she is
+fifty-seven.  Except for us two she has no one in the world.  She
+will soon have only you.  Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away.
+Don't put this cloud and barrier between you.  Don't break her heart!
+Bless you, my dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this
+letter must bring you--we tried to spare it you, but Spain--it seems-
+--was no good.
+
+"Ever your devoted father
+
+"JOLYON FORSYTE."
+
+
+Having finished his confession, Jolyon sat with a thin cheek on his
+hand, re-reading.  There were things in it which hurt him so much,
+when he thought of Jon reading them, that he nearly tore the letter
+up.  To speak of such things at all to a boy--his own boy--to speak
+of them in relation to his own wife and the boy's own mother, seemed
+dreadful to the reticence of his Forsyte soul.  And yet without
+speaking of them how make Jon understand the reality, the deep
+cleavage, the ineffaceable scar?  Without them, how justify this
+stiffing of the boy's love?  He might just as well not write at all!
+
+He folded the confession, and put it in his pocket.  It was--thank
+Heaven!--Saturday; he had till Sunday evening to think it over; for
+even if posted now it could not reach Jon till Monday.  He felt a
+curious relief at this delay, and at the fact that, whether sent or
+not, it was written.
+
+In the rose garden, which had taken the place of the old fernery, he
+could see Irene snipping and pruning, with a little basket on her
+arm.  She was never idle, it seemed to him, and he envied her now
+that he himself was idle nearly all his time.  He went down to her.
+She held up a stained glove and smiled.  A piece of lace tied under
+her chin concealed her hair, and her oval face with its still dark
+brows looked very young.
+
+"The green-fly are awful this year, and yet it's cold.  You look
+tired, Jolyon."
+
+Jolyon took the confession from his pocket.  "I've been writing this.
+I think you ought to see it?"
+
+"To Jon?"  Her whole face had changed, in that instant, becoming
+almost haggard.
+
+"Yes; the murder's out."
+
+He gave it to her, and walked away among the roses.  Presently,
+seeing that she had finished reading and was standing quite still
+with the sheets of the letter against her skirt, he came back to her.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"It's wonderfully put.  I don't see how it could be put better.
+Thank you, dear."
+
+"Is there anything you would like left out?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No; he must know all, if he's to understand."
+
+"That's what I thought, but--I hate it!"
+
+He had the feeling that he hated it more than she--to him sex was so
+much easier to mention between man and woman than between man and
+man; and she had always been more natural and frank, not deeply
+secretive like his Forsyte self.
+
+"I wonder if he will understand, even now, Jolyon?  He's so young;
+and he shrinks from the physical."
+
+"He gets that shrinking from my father, he was as fastidious as a
+girl in all such matters.  Would it be better to rewrite the whole
+thing, and just say you hated Soames?"
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+"Hate's only a word.  It conveys nothing.  No, better as it is."
+
+"Very well.  It shall go to-morrow."
+
+She raised her face to his, and in sight of the big house's many
+creepered windows, he kissed her.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CONFESSION
+
+
+Late that same afternoon, Jolyon had a nap in the old armchair.
+Face down on his knee was La Rotisserie de la Refine Pedauque, and
+just before he fell asleep he had been thinking: 'As a people shall
+we ever really like the French?  Will they ever really like us!'  He
+himself had always liked the French, feeling at home with their wit,
+their taste, their cooking.  Irene and he had paid many visits to
+France before the War, when Jon had been at his private school.  His
+romance with her had begun in Paris--his last and most enduring
+romance.  But the French--no Englishman could like them who could not
+see them in some sort with the detached aesthetic eye!  And with that
+melancholy conclusion he had nodded off.
+
+When he woke he saw Jon standing between him and the window.  The boy
+had evidently come in from the garden and was waiting for him to
+wake.  Jolyon smiled, still half asleep.  How nice the chap looked--
+sensitive, affectionate, straight!  Then his heart gave a nasty jump;
+and a quaking sensation overcame him.  Jon!  That confession!  He
+controlled himself with an effort.  "Why, Jon, where did you spring
+from?"
+
+Jon bent over and kissed his forehead.
+
+Only then he noticed the look on the boy's face.
+
+"I came home to tell you something, Dad."
+
+With all his might Jolyon tried to get the better of the jumping,
+gurgling sensations within his chest.
+
+"Well, sit down, old man.  Have you seen your mother?"
+
+"No."  The boy's flushed look gave place to pallor; he sat down on
+the arm of the old chair, as, in old days, Jolyon himself used to sit
+beside his own father, installed in its recesses.  Right up to the
+time of the rupture in their relations he had been wont to perch
+there--had he now reached such a moment with his own son?  All his
+life he had hated scenes like poison, avoided rows, gone on his own
+way quietly and let others go on theirs.  But now--it seemed--at the
+very end of things, he had a scene before him more painful than any
+he had avoided.  He drew a visor down over his emotion, and waited
+for his son to speak.
+
+"Father," said Jon slowly, "Fleur and I are engaged."
+
+'Exactly!' thought Jolyon, breathing with difficulty.
+
+"I know that you and Mother don't like the idea.  Fleur says that
+Mother was engaged to her father before you married her.  Of course I
+don't know what happened, but it must be ages ago.  I'm devoted to
+her, Dad, and she says she is to me."
+
+Jolyon uttered a queer sound, half laugh, half groan.
+
+"You are nineteen, Jon, and I am seventy-two.  How are we to
+understand each other in a matter like this, eh?"
+
+"You love Mother, Dad; you must know what we feel.  It isn't fair to
+us to let old things spoil our happiness, is it?"
+
+Brought face to face with his confession, Jolyon resolved to do
+without it if by any means he could.  He laid his hand on the boy's
+arm.
+
+"Look, Jon! I might put you off with talk about your both being too
+young and not knowing your own minds, and all that, but you wouldn't
+listen, besides, it doesn't meet the case--Youth, unfortunately,
+cures itself.  You talk lightly about 'old things like that,' knowing
+nothing--as you say truly--of what happened.  Now, have I ever given
+you reason to doubt my love for you, or my word?"
+
+At a less anxious moment he might have been amused by the conflict
+his words aroused--the boy's eager clasp, to reassure him on these
+points, the dread on his face of what that reassurance would bring
+forth; but he could only feel grateful for the squeeze.
+
+"Very well, you can believe what I tell you.  If you don't give up
+this love affair, you will make Mother wretched to the end of her
+days.  Believe me, my dear, the past, whatever it was, can't be
+buried--it can't indeed."
+
+Jon got off the arm of the chair.
+
+'The girl'--thought Jolyon--'there she goes--starting up before him--
+life itself--eager, pretty, loving!'
+
+"I can't, Father; how can I--just because you say that?  Of course, I
+can't!"
+
+"Jon, if you knew the story you would give this up without
+hesitation; you would have to!  Can't you believe me?"
+
+"How can you tell what I should think?  Father, I love her better
+than anything in the world."
+
+Jolyon's face twitched, and he said with painful slowness:
+
+"Better than your mother, Jon?"
+
+>From the boy's face, and his clenched fists Jolyon realised the
+stress and struggle he was going through.
+
+"I don't know," he burst out, "I don't know!  But to give Fleur up
+for nothing--for something I don't understand, for something that I
+don't believe can really matter half so much, will make me--make me"
+
+"Make you feel us unjust, put a barrier--yes.  But that's better than
+going on with this."
+
+"I can't.  Fleur loves me, and I love her.  You want me to trust you;
+why don't you trust me, Father?  We wouldn't want to know anything--
+we wouldn't let it make any difference.  It'll only make us both love
+you and Mother all the more."
+
+Jolyon put his hand into his breast pocket, but brought it out again
+empty, and sat, clucking his tongue against his teeth.
+
+"Think what your mother's been to you, Jon!  She has nothing but you;
+I shan't last much longer."
+
+"Why not?  It isn't fair to--Why not?"
+
+"Well," said Jolyon, rather coldly, "because the doctors tell me I
+shan't; that's all."
+
+"Oh, Dad!" cried Jon, and burst into tears.
+
+This downbreak of his son, whom he had not seen cry since he was ten,
+moved Jolyon terribly.  He recognised to the full how fearfully soft
+the boy's heart was, how much he would suffer in this business, and
+in life generally.  And he reached out his hand helplessly--not
+wishing, indeed not daring to get up.
+
+"Dear man," he said, "don't--or you'll make me!"
+
+Jon smothered down his paroxysm, and stood with face averted, very
+still.
+
+'What now?' thought Jolyon.  'What can I say to move him?'
+
+"By the way, don't speak of that to Mother," he said; "she has enough
+to frighten her with this affair of yours.  I know how you feel.
+But, Jon, you know her and me well enough to be sure we wouldn't wish
+to spoil your happiness lightly.  Why, my dear boy, we don't care for
+anything but your happiness--at least, with me it's just yours and
+Mother's and with her just yours.  It's all the future for you both
+that's at stake."
+
+Jon turned.  His face was deadly pale; his eyes, deep in his head,
+seemed to burn.
+
+"What is it?  What is it?  Don't keep me like this!"
+
+Jolyon, who knew that he was beaten, thrust his hand again into his
+breast pocket, and sat for a full minute, breathing with difficulty,
+his eyes closed.  The thought passed through his mind: 'I've had a
+good long innings--some pretty bitter moments--this is the worst!'
+Then he brought his hand out with the letter, and said with a sort of
+fatigue: "Well, Jon, if you hadn't come to-day, I was going to send
+you this.  I wanted to spare you--I wanted to spare your mother and
+myself, but I see it's no good.  Read it, and I think I'll go into
+the garden."  He reached forward to get up.
+
+Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, "No, I'll go"; and was
+gone.
+
+Jolyon sank back in his chair.  A blue-bottle chose that moment to
+come buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely,
+better than nothing....  Where had the boy gone to read his letter?
+The wretched letter--the wretched story!  A cruel business--cruel to
+her--to Soames--to those two children--to himself!...  His heart
+thumped and pained him.  Life--its loves--its work--its beauty--its
+aching, and--its end!  A good time; a fine time in spite of all;
+until--you regretted that you had ever been born.  Life--it wore you
+down, yet did not make you want to die--that was the cunning evil!
+Mistake to have a heart!  Again the blue-bottle came buzzing--
+bringing in all the heat and hum and scent of summer--yes, even the
+scent--as of ripe fruits, dried grasses, sappy shrubs, and the
+vanilla breath of cows.  And out there somewhere in the fragrance Jon
+would be reading that letter, turning and twisting its pages in his
+trouble, his bewilderment and trouble--breaking his heart about it!
+The thought made Jolyon acutely miserable.  Jon was such a tender-
+hearted chap, affectionate to his bones, and conscientious, too--it
+was so unfair, so damned unfair!  He remembered Irene saying to him
+once: "Never was any one born more loving and lovable than Jon."
+Poor little Jon!  His world gone up the spout, all of a summer
+afternoon!  Youth took things so hard!  And stirred, tormented by
+that vision of Youth taking things hard, Jolyon got out of his chair,
+and went to the window.  The boy was nowhere visible.  And he passed
+out.  If one could take any help to him now--one must!
+
+He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden--no Jon!
+Nor where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to swell and
+colour.  He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral, into the
+meadow.  Where had the boy got to?  Had he rushed down to the
+coppice--his old hunting-ground?  Jolyon crossed the rows of hay.
+They would cock it on Monday and be carrying the day after, if rain
+held off.  Often they had crossed this field together--hand in hand,
+when Jon was a little chap.  Dash it!  The golden age was over by the
+time one was ten!  He came to the pond, where flies and gnats were
+dancing over a bright reedy surface; and on into the coppice.  It was
+cool there, fragrant of larches.  Still no Jon!  He called.  No
+answer!  On the log seat he sat down, nervous, anxious, forgetting
+his own physical sensations.  He had been wrong to let the
+boy get away with that letter; he ought to have kept him under his
+eye from the start!  Greatly troubled, he got up to retrace his
+steps.  At the farm-buildings he called again, and looked into the
+dark cow-house.  There in the cool, and the scent of vanilla and
+ammonia, away from flies, the three Alderneys were chewing the quiet
+cud; just milked, waiting for evening, to be turned out again into
+the lower field.  One turned a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon
+could see the slobber on its grey lower lip.  He saw everything with
+passionate clearness, in the agitation of his nerves--all that in his
+time he had adored and tried to paint--wonder of light and shade and
+colour.  No wonder the legend put Christ into a manger--what more
+devotional than the eyes and moon-white horns of a chewing cow in the
+warm dusk!  He called again.  No answer!  And he hurried away out of
+the coppice, past the pond, up the hill.  Oddly ironical--now he came
+to think of it--if Jon had taken the gruel of his discovery down in
+the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those old days had made
+the plunge of acknowledging their love.  Where he himself, on the log
+seat the Sunday morning he came back from Paris, had realised to the
+full that Irene had become the world to him.  That would have been
+the place for Irony to tear the veil from before the eyes of Irene's
+boy!  But he was not here!  Where had he got to?  One must find the
+poor chap!
+
+A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all the
+beauty of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening shadows,
+of the blue, and the white clouds, the scent of the hay, and the
+cooing of the pigeons; and the flower shapes standing tall.  He came
+to the rosery, and the beauty of the roses in that sudden sunlight
+seemed to him unearthly.  "Rose, you Spaniard!"  Wonderful three
+words!  There she had stood by that bush of dark red roses; had stood
+to read and decide that Jon must know it all!  He knew all now!  Had
+she chosen wrong?  He bent and sniffed a rose, its petals brushed his
+nose and trembling lips; nothing so soft as a rose-leaf's velvet,
+except her neck--Irene!  On across the lawn he went, up the slope, to
+the oak-tree.  Its top alone was glistening, for the sudden sun was
+away over the house; the lower shade was thick, blessedly cool--he
+was greatly overheated.  He paused a minute with his hand on the rope
+of the swing--Jolly, Holly--Jon!  The old swing!  And suddenly, he
+felt horribly--deadly ill.  'I've over done it!' he thought: 'by
+Jove! I've overdone it--after all!'  He staggered up toward the
+terrace, dragged himself up the steps, and fell against the wall of
+the house.  He leaned there gasping, his face buried in the honey-
+suckle that he and she had taken such trouble with that it might
+sweeten the air which drifted in.  Its fragrance mingled with awful
+pain.  'My love!' he thought; 'the boy!'  And with a great effort he
+tottered in through the long window, and sank into old Jolyon's
+chair.  The book was there, a pencil in it; he caught it up,
+scribbled a word on the open page....  His hand dropped....  So it
+was like this--was it?...
+
+There was a great wrench; and darkness....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IRENE
+
+
+When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along the
+terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and confusion.
+Leaning against the creepered wall he tore open the letter.  It was
+long--very long!  This added to his fear, and he began reading.  When
+he came to the words: "It was Fleur's father that she married,"
+everything seemed to spin before him.  He was close to a window, and
+entering by it, he passed, through music-room and hall, up to his
+bedroom.  Dipping his face in cold water, he sat on his bed, and went
+on reading, dropping each finished page on the bed beside him.  His
+father's writing was easy to read--he knew it so well, though he had
+never had a letter from him one quarter so long.  He read with a dull
+feeling--imagination only half at work.  He best grasped, on that
+first reading, the pain his father must have had in writing such a
+letter.  He let the last sheet fall, and in a sort of mental, moral
+helplessness began to read the first again.  It all seemed to him
+disgusting--dead and disgusting.  Then, suddenly, a hot wave of
+horrified emotion tingled through him.  He buried his face in his
+hands.  His mother!  Fleur's father!  He took up the letter again,
+and read on mechanically.  And again came the feeling that it was all
+dead and disgusting; his own love so different!  This letter said his
+mother--and her father!  An awful letter!
+
+Property!  Could there be men who looked on women as their property?
+Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him--
+red, stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent
+faces; hundreds, thousands of them!  How could he know what men who
+had such faces thought and did?  He held his head in his hands and
+groaned.  His mother!  He caught up the letter and read on again:
+"horror and aversion-alive in her to-day....  your children....
+grandchildren....  of a man who once owned your mother as a man might
+own a slave...."  He got up from his bed.  This cruel shadowy past,
+lurking there to murder his love and Fleur's, was true, or his father
+could never have written it.  'Why didn't they tell me the first
+thing,' he thought, 'the day I first saw Fleur?  They knew "I'd seen
+her.  They were afraid, and--now--I've--got it!'  Overcome by misery
+too acute for thought or reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the
+room and sat down on the floor.  He sat there, like some unhappy
+little animal.  There was comfort in dusk, and the floor--as if he
+were back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all over
+it.  He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped round
+his knees, for how long he did not know.  He was wrenched from his
+blank wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from his mother's
+room.  The blinds were down over the windows of his room, shut up in
+his absence, and from where he sat he could only hear a rustle, her
+footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her standing before
+his dressing-table.  She had something in her hand. He hardly
+breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go away.  He saw her
+touch things on the table as if they had some virtue in them, then
+face the window-grey from head to foot like a ghost.  The least turn
+of her head, and she must see him!  Her lips moved: "Oh! Jon!"  She
+was speaking to herself; the tone of her voice troubled Jon's heart.
+He saw in her hand a little photograph.  She held it toward the
+light, looking at it--very small.  He knew it--one of himself as a
+tiny boy, which she always kept in her bag.  His heart beat fast.
+And, suddenly as if she had heard it, she turned her eyes and saw
+him.  At the gasp she gave, and the movement of her hands pressing
+the photograph against her breast, he said:
+
+"Yes, it's me."
+
+She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him,
+her hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the sheets of the
+letter which had slipped to the floor.  She saw them, and her hands
+grasped the edge of the bed.  She sat very upright, her dark eyes
+fixed on him.  At last she spoke.
+
+"Well, Jon, you know, I see."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You've seen Father?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a long silence, till she said:
+
+"Oh! my darling!"
+
+"It's all right."  The emotions in him were so, violent and so mixed
+that he dared not move--resentment, despair, and yet a strange
+yearning for the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+There was another long silence, then she got up.  She stood a moment,
+very still, made a little movement with her hand, and said: "My
+darling boy, my most darling boy, don't think of me--think of
+yourself," and, passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her
+room.
+
+Jon turned--curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog--into the
+corner made by the two walls.
+
+He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him.  It
+came from the terrace below.  He got up, scared.  Again came the cry:
+"Jon!"  His mother was calling!  He ran out and down the stairs,
+through the empty dining-room into the study.  She was kneeling
+before the old armchair, and his father was lying back quite white,
+his head on his breast, one of his hands resting on an open book,
+with a pencil clutched in it--more strangely still than anything he
+had ever seen.  She looked round wildly, and said:
+
+"Oh! Jon--he's dead--he's dead!"
+
+Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where
+he had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead.  Icy cold!
+How could--how could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago--!  His
+mother's arms were round the knees; pressing her breast against them.
+"Why--why wasn't I with him?" he heard her whisper.  Then he saw the
+tottering word "Irene" pencilled on the open page, and broke down
+himself.  It was his first sight of human death, and its unutterable
+stillness blotted from him all other emotion; all else, then, was but
+preliminary to this!  All love and life, and joy, anxiety, and
+sorrow, all movement, light and beauty, but a beginning to this
+terrible white stillness.  It made a dreadful mark on him; all seemed
+suddenly little, futile, short.  He mastered himself at last, got up,
+and raised her.
+
+"Mother! don't cry--Mother!"
+
+Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother
+was lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a
+white sheet.  He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had
+never looked angry--always whimsical, and kind.  "To be kind and keep
+your end up--there's nothing else in it," he had once heard his
+father say.  How wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy!  He
+understood now that his father had known for a long time past that
+this would come suddenly--known, and not said a word.  He gazed with
+an awed and passionate reverence.  The loneliness of it--just to
+spare his mother and himself!  His own trouble seemed small while he
+was looking at that face.  The word scribbled on the page!  The
+farewell word!  Now his mother had no one but himself!  He went up
+close to the dead face--not changed at all, and yet completely
+changed.  He had heard his father say once that he did not believe in
+consciousness surviving death, or that if it did it might be just
+survival till the natural age limit of the body had been reached--the
+natural term of its inherent vitality; so that if the body were
+broken by accident, excess, violent disease, consciousness might
+still persist till, in the course of Nature uninterfered with, it
+would naturally have faded out.  It had struck him because he had
+never heard any one else suggest it.  When the heart failed like
+this--surely it was not quite natural!  Perhaps his father's
+consciousness was in the room with him.  Above the bed hung a picture
+of his father's father.  Perhaps his consciousness, too, was still
+alive; and his brother's--his half-brother, who had died in the
+Transvaal.  Were they all gathered round this bed?  Jon kissed the
+forehead, and stole back to his own room.  The door between it and
+his mother's was ajar; she had evidently been in--everything was
+ready for him, even some biscuits and hot milk, and the letter no
+longer on the floor.  He ate and drank, watching the last light fade.
+He did not try to see into the future--just stared at the dark
+branches of the oak-tree, level with his window, and felt as if life
+had stopped.  Once in the night, turning in his heavy sleep, he was
+conscious of something white and still, beside his bed, and started
+up.
+
+His mother's voice said:
+
+"It's only I, Jon dear!"  Her hand pressed his forehead gently back;
+her white figure disappeared.
+
+Alone!  He fell heavily asleep again, and dreamed he saw his mother's
+name crawling on his bed.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SOAMES COGITATES
+
+
+The announcement in The Times of his cousin Jolyon's death affected
+Soames quite simply.  So that chap was gone!  There had never been a
+time in their two lives when love had not been lost between them.
+That quick-blooded sentiment hatred had run its course long since in
+Soames' heart, and he had refused to allow any recrudescence, but he
+considered this early decease a piece of poetic justice.  For twenty
+years the fellow had enjoyed the reversion of his wife and house,
+and--he was dead!  The obituary notice, which appeared a little
+later, paid Jolyon--he thought--too much attention.  It spoke of that
+"diligent and agreeable painter whose work we have come to look on as
+typical of the best late-Victorian water-colour art."  Soames, who
+had almost mechanically preferred Mole, Morpin, and Caswell Baye, and
+had always sniffed quite audibly when he came to one of his cousin's
+on the line, turned The Times with a crackle.
+
+He had to go up to Town that morning on Forsyte affairs, and was
+fully conscious of Gradman's glance sidelong over his spectacles.
+The old clerk had about him an aura of regretful congratulation.  He
+smelled, as it were, of old days.  One could almost hear him
+thinking: "Mr. Jolyon, ye-es--just my age, and gone--dear, dear!  I
+dare say she feels it.  She was a mice-lookin' woman.  Flesh is
+flesh!  They've given 'im a notice in the papers.  Fancy!"  His
+atmosphere in fact caused Soames to handle certain leases and
+conversions with exceptional swiftness.
+
+"About that settlement on Miss Fleur, Mr. Soames?"
+
+"I've thought better of that," answered Soames shortly.
+
+"Ah!  I'm glad of that.  I thought you were a little hasty.  The
+times do change."
+
+How this death would affect Fleur had begun to trouble Soames.  He
+was not certain that she knew of it--she seldom looked at the paper,
+never at the births, marriages, and deaths.
+
+He pressed matters on, and made his way to Green Street for lunch.
+Winifred was almost doleful.  Jack Cardigan had broken a splashboard,
+so far as one could make out, and would not be "fit" for some time.
+She could not get used to the idea.
+
+"Did Profond ever get off?" he said suddenly.
+
+"He got off," replied Winifred, "but where--I don't know."
+
+Yes, there it was--impossible to tell anything!  Not that he wanted
+to know.  Letters from Annette were coming from Dieppe, where she and
+her mother were staying.
+
+"You saw that fellow's death, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes," said Winifred.  "I'm sorry for--for his children.  He was very
+amiable."  Soames uttered a rather queer sound.  A suspicion of the
+old deep truth--that men were judged in this world rather by what
+they were than by what they did--crept and knocked resentfully at the
+back doors of his mind.
+
+"I know there was a superstition to that effect," he muttered.
+
+"One must do him justice now he's dead."
+
+"I should like to have done him justice before," said Soames; "but I
+never had the chance.  Have you got a 'Baronetage' here?"
+
+"Yes; in that bottom row."
+
+Soames took out a fat red book, and ran over the leaves.
+
+"Mont-Sir Lawrence, 9th Bt., cr. 1620, e. s. of Geoffrey, 8th Bt.,
+and Lavinia, daur. of Sir Charles Muskham, Bt., of Muskham Hall,
+Shrops: marr. 1890 Emily, daur. of Conway Charwell, Esq., of
+Condaford Grange, co. Oxon; 1 son, heir Michael Conway, b. 1895, 2
+daurs. Residence: Lippinghall Manor, Folwell, Bucks.  Clubs: Snooks':
+Coffee House: Aeroplane.  See BidIicott."
+
+"H'm!" he said.  "Did you ever know a publisher?"
+
+"Uncle Timothy."
+
+"Alive, I mean."
+
+"Monty knew one at his Club.  He brought him here to dinner once.
+Monty was always thinking of writing a book, you know, about how to
+make money on the turf.  He tried to interest that man."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"He put him on to a horse--for the Two Thousand.  We didn't see him
+again.  He was rather smart, if I remember."
+
+"Did it win?"
+
+"No; it ran last, I think.  You know Monty really was quite clever in
+his way."
+
+"Was he?" said Soames.  "Can you see any connection between a sucking
+baronet and publishing?"
+
+"People do all sorts of things nowadays," replied Winifred.  "The
+great stunt seems not to be idle--so different from our time.  To do
+nothing was the thing then.  But I suppose it'll come again."
+
+"This young Mont that I'm speaking of is very sweet on Fleur.  If it
+would put an end to that other affair I might encourage it."
+
+"Has he got style?" asked Winifred.
+
+"He's no beauty; pleasant enough, with some scattered brains.
+There's a good deal of land, I believe.  He seems genuinely attached.
+But I don't know."
+
+"No," murmured Winifred; "it's--very difficult.  I always found it
+best to do nothing.  It is such a bore about Jack; now we shan't get
+away till after Bank Holiday.  Well, the people are always amusing, I
+shall go into the Park and watch them."
+
+"If I were you," said Soames, "I should have a country cottage, and
+be out of the way of holidays and strikes when you want."
+
+"The country bores me," answered Winifred, "and I found the railway
+strike quite exciting."
+
+Winifred had always been noted for sang-froid.
+
+Soames took his leave.  All the way down to Reading he debated
+whether he should tell Fleur of that boy's father's death.  It did
+not alter the situation except that he would be independent now, and
+only have his mother's opposition to encounter.  He would come into a
+lot of money, no doubt, and perhaps the house--the house built for
+Irene and himself--the house whose architect had wrought his domestic
+ruin.  His daughter--mistress of that house!  That would be poetic
+justice!  Soames uttered a little mirthless laugh.  He had designed
+that house to re-establish his failing union, meant it for the seat
+of his descendants, if he could have induced Irene to give him one!
+Her son and Fleur!  Their children would be, in some sort, offspring
+of the union between himself and her!
+
+The theatricality in that thought was repulsive to his sober sense.
+And yet--it would be the easiest and wealthiest way out of the
+impasse, now that Jolyon was gone.  The juncture of two Forsyte
+fortunes had a kind of conservative charm.  And she--Irene-would be
+linked to him once more.  Nonsense!  Absurd!  He put the notion from
+his head.
+
+On arriving home he heard the click of billiard-balls, and through
+the window saw young Mont sprawling over the table.  Fleur, with her
+cue akimbo, was watching with a smile.  How pretty she looked!  No
+wonder that young fellow was out of his mind about her.  A title--
+land!  There was little enough in land, these days; perhaps less in a
+title.  The old Forsytes had always had a kind of contempt for
+titles, rather remote and artificial things--not worth the money they
+cost, and having to do with the Court.  They had all had that feeling
+in differing measure--Soames remembered.  Swithin, indeed, in his
+most expansive days had once attended a Levee.  He had come away
+saying he shouldn't go again--"all that small fry."  It was suspected
+that he had looked too big in knee-breeches.  Soames remembered how
+his own mother had wished to be presented because of the fashionable
+nature of the performance, and how his father had put his foot down
+with unwonted decision.  What did she want with that peacocking--
+wasting time and money; there was nothing in it!
+
+The instinct which had made and kept the English Commons the chief
+power in the State, a feeling that their own world was good enough
+and a little better than any other because it was their world, had
+kept the old Forsytes singularly free of "flummery," as Nicholas had
+been wont to call it when he had the gout.  Soames' generation, more
+self-conscious and ironical, had been saved by a sense of Swithin in
+knee-breeches.  While the third and the fourth generation, as it
+seemed to him, laughed at everything.
+
+However, there was no harm in the young fellow's being heir to a
+title and estate--a thing one couldn't help.  He entered quietly, as
+Mont missed his shot.  He noted the young man's eyes, fixed on Fleur
+bending over in her turn; and the adoration in them almost touched
+him.
+
+She paused with the cue poised on the bridge of her slim hand, and
+shook her crop of short dark chestnut hair.
+
+"I shall never do it."
+
+"'Nothing venture.'"
+
+"All right."  The cue struck, the ball rolled.  "There!"
+
+"Bad luck!  Never mind!"
+
+Then they saw him, and Soames said:
+
+"I'll mark for you."
+
+He sat down on the raised seat beneath the marker, trim and tired,
+furtively studying those two young faces.  When the game was over
+Mont came up to him.
+
+"I've started in, sir.  Rum game, business, isn't it?  I suppose you
+saw a lot of human nature as a solicitor."
+
+"I did."
+
+"Shall I tell you what I've noticed: People are quite on the wrong
+tack in offering less than they can afford to give; they ought to
+offer more, and work backward."
+
+Soames raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Suppose the more is accepted?"
+
+"That doesn't matter a little bit," said Mont; "it's much more paying
+to abate a price than to increase it.  For instance, say we offer an
+author good terms--he naturally takes them.  Then we go into it, find
+we can't publish at a decent profit and tell him so.  He's got
+confidence in us because we've been generous to him, and he comes
+down like a lamb, and bears us no malice.  But if we offer him poor
+terms at the start, he doesn't take them, so we have to advance them
+to get him, and he thinks us damned screws into the bargain.
+
+"Try buying pictures on that system," said Soames; "an offer accepted
+is a contract--haven't you learned that?"
+
+Young Mont turned his head to where Fleur was standing in the window.
+
+"No," he said, "I wish I had.  Then there's another thing.  Always
+let a man off a bargain if he wants to be let off."
+
+"As advertisement?" said Soames dryly.
+
+"Of course it is; but I meant on principle."
+
+"Does your firm work on those lines?"
+
+"Not yet," said Mont, "but it'll come."
+
+"And they will go."
+
+"No, really, sir.  I'm making any number of observations, and they
+all confirm my theory.  Human nature is consistently underrated in
+business, people do themselves out of an awful lot of pleasure and
+profit by that.  Of course, you must be perfectly genuine and open,
+but that's easy if you feel it.  The more human and generous you are
+the better chance you've got in business."
+
+Soames rose.
+
+"Are you a partner?"
+
+"Not for six months, yet."
+
+"The rest of the firm had better make haste and retire."
+
+Mont laughed.
+
+"You'll see," he said.  "There's going to be a big change.  The
+possessive principle has got its shutters up."
+
+"What?" said Soames.
+
+"The house is to let!  Good-bye, sir; I'm off now."
+
+Soames watched his daughter give her hand, saw her wince at the
+squeeze it received, and distinctly heard the young man's sigh as he
+passed out.  Then she came from the window, trailing her finger along
+the mahogany edge of the billiard-table.  Watching her, Soames knew
+that she was going to ask him something.  Her finger felt round the
+last pocket, and she looked up.
+
+"Have you done anything to stop Jon writing to me, Father?"
+
+Soames shook his head.
+
+"You haven't seen, then?" he said.  "His father died just a week ago
+to-day."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+In her startled, frowning face he saw the instant struggle to
+apprehend what this would mean.
+
+"Poor Jon!  Why didn't you tell me, Father?"
+
+"I never know!" said Soames slowly; "you don't confide in me."
+
+"I would, if you'd help me, dear."
+
+"Perhaps I shall."
+
+Fleur clasped her hands.  "Oh! darling--when one wants a thing
+fearfully, one doesn't think of other people.  Don't be angry with
+me."
+
+Soames put out his hand, as if pushing away an aspersion.
+
+"I'm cogitating," he said.  What on earth had made him use a word
+like that!  "Has young Mont been bothering you again?"
+
+Fleur smiled.  "Oh! Michael!  He's always bothering; but he's such a
+good sort--I don't mind him."
+
+"Well," said Soames, "I'm tired; I shall go and have a nap before
+dinner."
+
+He went up to his picture-gallery, lay down on the couch there, and
+closed his eyes.  A terrible responsibility this girl of his--whose
+mother was--ah! what was she?  A terrible responsibility!  Help her--
+how could he help her?  He could not alter the fact that he was her
+father.  Or that Irene--!  What was it young Mont had said--some
+nonsense about the possessive instinct--shutters up--To let?  Silly!
+
+The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and
+roses, closed on his senses, drowsing them.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE FIXED IDEA
+
+
+"The fixed idea," which has outrun more constables than any other form
+of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when it
+takes the avid guise of love.  To hedges and ditches, and doors, to
+humans without ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the
+contents sucking their fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from
+this fast malady--the fixed idea of love pays no attention.  It runs
+with eyes turned inward to its own light, oblivious of all other
+stars.  Those with the fixed ideas that human happiness depends on
+their art, on vivisecting dogs, on hating foreigners, on paying
+supertax, on remaining Ministers, on making wheels go round, on
+preventing their neighbours from being divorced, on conscientious
+objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox and superiority to
+everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania--all are unstable
+compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession of some
+her or him.  And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the
+scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and
+whose business is pleasure, she was--as Winifred would have said in
+the latest fashion of speech--"honest to God" indifferent to it all.
+She wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies above
+the river or the Green Park when she went to Town.  She even kept
+Jon's letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which in
+days when corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and chests so
+out of fashion, there could, perhaps, have been no greater proof of
+the fixity of her idea.
+
+After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received
+his answer three days later on her return from a river picnic.  It
+was his first letter since their meeting at June's.  She opened it
+with misgiving, and read it with dismay.
+
+"Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past.  I won't tell
+it you--I think you knew when we met at June's.  She says you did.
+If you did, Fleur, you ought to have told me.  I expect you only
+heard your father's side of it.  I have heard my mother's.  It's
+dreadful.  Now that she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt her
+more.  Of course, I long for you all day, but I don't believe now
+that we shall ever come together--there's something too strong
+pulling us apart."
+
+So!  Her deception had found her out.  But Jon--she felt--had
+forgiven that.  It was what he said of his mother which caused the
+guttering in her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.
+
+Her first impulse was to reply--her second, not to reply.  These
+impulses were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while
+desperation grew within her.  She was not her father's child for
+nothing.  The tenacity which had at once made and undone Soames was
+her backbone, too, frilled and embroidered by French grace and
+quickness.  Instinctively she conjugated the verb "to have" always
+with the pronoun "I."  She concealed, however, all signs of her
+growing desperation, and pursued such river pleasures as the winds
+and rain of a disagreeable July permitted, as if she had no care in
+the world; nor did any "sucking baronet" ever neglect the business of
+a publisher more consistently than her attendant spirit, Michael
+Mont.
+
+To Soames she was a puzzle.  He was almost deceived by this careless
+gaiety.  Almost--because he did not fail to mark her eyes often fixed
+on nothing, and the film of light shining from her bedroom window
+late at night.  What was she thinking and brooding over into small
+hours when she ought to have been asleep?  But he dared not ask what
+was in her mind; and, since that one little talk in the billiard-
+room, she said nothing to him.
+
+In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred
+invited them to lunch and to go afterward to "a most amusing little
+play, 'The Beggar's Opera'" and would they bring a man to make four?
+Soames, whose attitude toward theatres was to go to nothing,
+accepted, because Fleur's attitude was to go to everything.  They
+motored up, taking Michael Mont, who, being in his seventh heaven,
+was found by Winifred "very amusing."  "The Beggar's Opera" puzzled
+Soames.  The people were very unpleasant, the whole thing very
+cynical.  Winifred was "intrigued"--by the dresses.  The music, too,
+did not displease her.  At the Opera, the night before, she had
+arrived too early for the Russian Ballet, and found the stage
+occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or apoplectic from terror
+lest by some dreadful inadvertence they might drop into a tune.
+Michael Mont was enraptured with the whole thing.  And all three
+wondered what Fleur was thinking of it.  But Fleur was not thinking
+of it.  Her fixed idea stood on the stage and sang with Polly
+Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced with Jenny Diver, postured with
+Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and cuddled with Macheath.  Her lips
+might smile, her hands applaud, but the comic old masterpiece made no
+more impression on her than if it had been pathetic, like a modern
+"Revue."  When they embarked in the car to return, she ached because
+Jon was not sitting next her instead of Michael Mont.  When, at some
+jolt, the young man's arm touched hers as if by accident, she only
+thought: 'If that were Jon's arm!'  When his cheerful voice, tempered
+by her proximity, murmured above the sound of the car's progress, she
+smiled and answered, thinking: 'If that were Jon's voice!' and when
+once he said, "Fleur, you look a perfect angel in that dress!" she
+answered, "Oh, do you like it? thinking, 'If only Jon could see it!'
+
+During this drive she took a resolution.  She would go to Robin Hill
+and see him--alone; she would take the car, without word beforehand
+to him or to her father.  It was nine days since his letter, and she
+could wait no longer.  On Monday she would go!  The decision made her
+well disposed toward young Mont.  With something to look forward to
+she could afford to tolerate and respond.  He might stay to dinner;
+propose to her as usual; dance with her, press her hand, sigh--do
+what he liked.  He was only a nuisance when he interfered with her
+fixed idea.  She was even sorry for him so far as it was possible to
+be sorry for anybody but herself just now.  At dinner he seemed to
+talk more wildly than usual about what he called "the death of the
+close borough"--she paid little attention, but her father seemed
+paying a good deal, with the smile on his face which meant
+opposition, if not anger.
+
+"The younger generation doesn't think as you do, sir; does it,
+Fleur?"
+
+Fleur shrugged her shoulders--the younger generation was just Jon,
+and she did not know what he was thinking.
+
+"Young people will think as I do when they're my age, Mr. Mont.
+Human nature doesn't change."
+
+"I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the times.
+The pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that's going out."
+
+"Indeed!  To mind one's own business is not a form of thought, Mr.
+Mont, it's an instinct."
+
+Yes, when Jon was the business!
+
+"But what is one's business, sir?  That's the point.  Everybody's
+business is going to be one's business.  Isn't it, Fleur?"
+
+Fleur only smiled.
+
+"If not," added young Mont, "there'll be blood."
+
+"People have talked like that from time immemorial"
+
+"But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?"
+
+"I should say increasing among those who have none."
+
+"Well, look at me!  I'm heir to an entailed estate.  I don't want the
+thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow."
+
+"You're not married, and you don't know what you're talking about."
+
+Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.
+
+"Do you really mean that marriage--?" he began.
+
+"Society is built on marriage," came from between her father's close
+lips; "marriage and its consequences.  Do you want to do away with
+it?"
+
+Young Mont made a distracted gesture.  Silence brooded over the
+dinner table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest--a
+pheasant proper--under the electric light in an alabaster globe.  And
+outside, the river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and
+sweet scents.
+
+'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+DESPERATE
+
+
+The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty
+to the only Jolyon Forsyte left.  The necessary forms and ceremonies-
+-the reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of
+the legacies--were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet
+of age.  Jolyon was cremated.  By his special wish no one attended
+that ceremony, or wore black for him.  The succession of his
+property, controlled to some extent by old Jolyon's Will, left his
+widow in possession of Robin Hill, with two thousand five hundred
+pounds a year for life.  Apart from this the two Wills worked
+together in some complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon's
+three children should have an equal share in their grandfather's and
+father's property in the future as in the present, save only that
+Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his capital when he
+was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the spirit of
+theirs, in order that their children might have the body after them.
+If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he outlived
+them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was
+considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of income
+tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he
+died.  All this was nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother.
+It was June who did everything needful for one who had left his
+affairs in perfect order.  When she had gone, and those two were
+alone again in the great house, alone with death drawing them
+together, and love driving them apart, Jon passed very painful days
+secretly disgusted and disappointed with himself.  His mother would
+look at him with such a patient sadness which yet had in it an
+instinctive pride, as if she were reserving her defence.  If she
+smiled he was angry that his answering smile should be so grudging
+and unnatural.  He did not judge or condemn her; that was all too
+remote--indeed, the idea of doing so had never come to him.  No! he
+was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have what he wanted be
+cause of her.  There was one alleviation--much to do in connection
+with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted to
+June, though she had offered to undertake it.  Both Jon and his
+mother had felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings
+and unfinished matter, away with her, the work would encounter such
+icy blasts from Paul Post and other frequenters of her studio, that
+it would soon be frozen out even of her warm heart.  On its old-
+fashioned plane and of its kind the work was good, and they could not
+bear the thought of its subjection to ridicule.  A one-man exhibition
+of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had
+loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together.
+Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father.  The
+quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into
+something really individual was disclosed by these researches.  There
+was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth
+and reach of vision.  Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached
+very high--but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious,
+and complete.  And, remembering his father's utter absence of "side"
+or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always
+spoken of his own efforts, ever calling himself "an amateur," Jon
+could not help feeling that he had never really known his father.  To
+ take himself seriously, yet never bore others by letting them know
+that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle.  There was
+something in this which appealed to the boy, and made him heartily
+endorse his mother's comment: "He had true refinement; he couldn't
+help thinking of others, whatever he did.  And when he took a
+resolution which went counter, he did it with the minimum of
+defiance--not like the Age, is it?  Twice in his life he had to go
+against everything; and yet it never made him bitter."  Jon saw tears
+running down her face, which she at once turned away from him.  She
+was so quiet about her loss that sometimes he had thought she didn't
+feel it much.  Now, as he looked at her, he felt how far he fell
+short of the reserve power and dignity in both his father and his
+mother.  And, stealing up to her, he put his arm round her waist.
+She kissed him swiftly, but with a sort of passion, and went out of
+the room.
+
+The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once been
+Holly's schoolroom, devoted to her silkworms, dried lavender, music,
+and other forms of instruction.  Now, at the end of July, despite its
+northern and eastern aspects, a warm and slumberous air came in
+between the long-faded lilac linen curtains.  To redeem a little the
+departed glory, as of a field that is golden and gone, clinging to a
+room which its master has left, Irene had placed on the paint-stained
+table a bowl of red roses.  This, and Jolyon's favourite cat, who
+still clung to the deserted habitat, were the pleasant spots in that
+dishevelled, sad workroom.  Jon, at the north window, sniffing air
+mysteriously scented with warm strawberries, heard a car drive up.
+The lawyers again about some nonsense!  Why did that scent so make
+one ache?  And where did it come from--there were no strawberry beds
+on this side of the house.  Instinctively he took a crumpled sheet of
+paper from his pocket, and wrote down some broken words.  A warmth
+began spreading in his chest; he rubbed the palms of his hands
+together.  Presently he had jotted this:
+
+"If I could make a little song
+A little song to soothe my heart!
+I'd make it all of little things
+The plash of water, rub of wings,
+The puffing-off of dandies crown,
+The hiss of raindrop spilling down,
+The purr of cat, the trill of bird,
+And ev'ry whispering I've heard
+>From willy wind in leaves and grass,
+And all the distant drones that pass.
+A song as tender and as light
+As flower, or butterfly in flight;
+And when I saw it opening,
+I'd let it fly and sing!"
+
+He was still muttering it over to himself at the window, when he
+heard his name called, and, turning round, saw Fleur.  At that
+amazing apparition, he made at first no movement and no sound, while
+her clear vivid glance ravished his heart.  Then he went forward to
+the table, saying, "How nice of you to come!" and saw her flinch as
+if he had thrown something at her.
+
+"I asked for you," she said, "and they showed me up here.  But I can
+go away again."
+
+Jon clutched the paint-stained table.  Her face and figure in its
+frilly frock photographed itself with such startling vividness upon
+his eyes, that if she had sunk through the floor he must still have
+seen her.
+
+"I know I told you a lie, Jon.  But I told it out of love."
+
+"Yes, oh! yes! That's nothing!"
+
+"I didn't answer your letter.  What was the use--there wasn't
+anything to answer.  I wanted to see you instead."  She held out both
+her hands, and Jon grasped them across the table.  He tried to say
+something, but all his attention was given to trying not to hurt her
+hands.  His own felt so hard and hers so soft.  She said almost
+defiantly:
+
+"That old story--was it so very dreadful?"
+
+"Yes."  In his voice, too, there was a note of defiance.
+
+She dragged her hands away.  "I didn't think in these days boys were
+tied to their mothers' apron-strings."
+
+Jon's chin went up as if he had been struck.
+
+"Oh! I didn't mean it, Jon.  What a horrible thing to say!"  Swiftly
+she came close to him.  "Jon, dear; I didn't mean it."
+
+"All right."
+
+She had put her two hands on his shoulder, and her forehead down on
+them; the brim of her hat touched his neck, and he felt it quivering.
+But, in a sort of paralysis, he made no response.  She let go of his
+shoulder and drew away.
+
+"Well, I'll go, if you don't want me.  But I never thought you'd have
+given me up."
+
+"I haven't," cried Jon, coming suddenly to life.  "I can't.  I'll try
+again."
+
+Her eyes gleamed, she swayed toward him.  "Jon--I love you!  Don't
+give me up!  If you do, I don't know what--I feel so desperate.  What
+does it matter--all that past-compared with this?"
+
+She clung to him.  He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips.  But
+while he kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down on
+the floor of his bedroom--his father's white dead face--his mother
+kneeling before it.  Fleur's whispered, "Make her!  Promise! Oh! Jon,
+try!" seemed childish in his ear.  He felt curiously old.
+
+"I promise!" he muttered.  "Only, you don't understand."
+
+"She wants to spoil our lives, just because--"
+
+"Yes, of what?"
+
+Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer.  Her arms
+tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even while he
+yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the letter.  Fleur
+did not know, she did not understand--she misjudged his mother; she
+came from the enemy's camp!  So lovely, and he loved her so--yet,
+even in her embrace, he could not help the memory of Holly's words:
+"I think she has a 'having' nature," and his mother's "My darling
+boy, don't think of me--think of yourself!"
+
+When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on his
+eyes, her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon leaned
+in the window, listening to the car bearing her away.  Still the
+scent as of warm strawberries, still the little summer sounds that
+should make his song; still all the promise of youth and happiness in
+sighing, floating, fluttering July--and his heart torn; yearning
+strong in him; hope high in him yet with its eyes cast down, as if
+ashamed.  The miserable task before him!  If Fleur was desperate, so
+was he--watching the poplars swaying, the white clouds passing, the
+sunlight on the grass.
+
+He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner, till
+his mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling that she
+knew what he was waiting to say.  She kissed him and went up-stairs,
+and still he lingered, watching the moonlight and the moths, and that
+unreality of colouring which steals along and stains a summer night.
+And he would have given anything to be back again in the past--barely
+three months back; or away forward, years, in the future.  The
+present with this dark cruelty of a decision, one way or the other,
+seemed impossible.  He realised now so much more keenly what his
+mother felt than he had at first; as if the story in that letter had
+been a poisonous germ producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so
+that he really felt there were two camps, his mother's and his--
+Fleur's and her father's.  It might be a dead thing, that old tragic
+ownership and enmity, but dead things were poisonous till time had
+cleaned them away.  Even his love felt tainted, less illusioned, more
+of the earth, and with a treacherous lurking doubt lest Fleur, like
+her father, might want to own; not articulate, just a stealing haunt,
+horribly unworthy, which crept in and about the ardour of his
+memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the vividness and grace
+of that charmed face and figure--a doubt, not real enough to convince
+him of its presence, just real enough to deflower a perfect faith.
+And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was essential.  He still
+had Youth's eagerness to give with both hands, to take with neither--
+to give lovingly to one who had his own impulsive generosity.  Surely
+she had!  He got up from the window-seat and roamed in the big grey
+ghostly room, whose walls were hung with silvered canvas.  This house
+his father said in that death-bed letter--had been built for his
+mother to live in--with Fleur's father!  He put out his hand in the
+half-dark, as if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead.  He clenched,
+trying to feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze
+them, and reassure him that he-he was on his father's side.  Tears,
+prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot.  He went back to
+the window.  It was warmer, not so eerie, more comforting outside,
+where the moon hung golden, three days off full; the freedom of the
+night was comforting.  If only Fleur and he had met on some desert
+island without a past--and Nature for their house!  Jon had still his
+high regard for desert islands, where breadfruit grew, and the water
+was blue above the coral.  The night was deep, was free--there was
+enticement in it; a lure, a promise, a refuge from entanglement, and
+love!  Milksop tied to his mother's...! His cheeks burned.  He shut
+the window, drew curtains over it, switched off the lighted sconce,
+and went up-stairs.
+
+The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother, still
+in her evening gown, was standing at the window.  She turned and
+said:
+
+"Sit down, Jon; let's talk."  She sat down on the window-seat, Jon on
+his bed.  She had her profile turned to him, and the beauty and grace
+of her figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose, the neck, the
+strange and as it were remote refinement of her, moved him.  His
+mother never belonged to her surroundings.  She came into them from
+somewhere--as it were!  What was she going to say to him, who had in
+his heart such things to say to her?
+
+"I know Fleur came to-day.  I'm not surprised."  It was as though she
+had added: "She is her father's daughter!"  And Jon's heart hardened.
+Irene went on quietly:
+
+"I have Father's letter.  I picked it up that night and kept it.
+Would you like it back, dear?"
+
+Jon shook his head.
+
+"I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you.  It didn't quite
+do justice to my criminality."
+
+'Mother!" burst from Jon's lips.
+
+"He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's father
+without love I did a dreadful thing.  An unhappy marriage, Jon, can
+play such havoc with other lives besides one's own.  You are
+fearfully young, my darling, and fearfully loving.  Do you think you
+can possibly be happy with this girl?"
+
+Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
+
+"Yes; oh!  yes--if you could be."
+
+Irene smiled.
+
+"Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love.  If
+yours were another case like mine, Jon--where the deepest things are
+stifled; the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!"
+
+"Why should it, Mother?  You think she must be like her father, but
+she's not.  I've seen him."
+
+Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something wavered;
+there was such irony and experience in that smile.
+
+"You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker."
+
+That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again!  He said with
+vehemence:
+
+"She isn't--she isn't.  It's only because I can't bear to make you
+unhappy, Mother, now that Father--"  He thrust his fists against his
+forehead.
+
+Irene got up.
+
+"I told you that night, dear, not to mind me.  I meant it.  Think of
+yourself and your own happiness!  I can stand what's left--I've
+brought it on myself."
+
+Again the word "Mother!" burst from Jon's lips.
+
+She came over to him and put her hands over his.
+
+"Do you feel your head, darling?"
+
+Jon shook it.  What he felt was in his chest--a sort of tearing
+asunder of the tissue there, by the two loves.
+
+"I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do.  You won't
+lose anything."  She smoothed his hair gently, and walked away.
+
+He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay, stifling
+his breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+EMBASSY
+
+
+Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been out
+in the car since two.  Three hours!  Where had she gone?  Up to
+London without a word to him?  He had never become quite reconciled
+with cars.  He had embraced them in principle--like the born
+empiricist, or Forsyte, that he was--adopting each symptom of
+progress as it came along with: "Well, we couldn't do without them
+now."  But in fact he found them tearing, great, smelly things.
+Obliged by Annette to have one--a Rollhard with pearl-grey cushions,
+electric light, little mirrors, trays for the ashes of cigarettes,
+flower vases--all smelling of petrol and stephanotis--he regarded it
+much as he used to regard his brother-in-law, Montague Dartie.  The
+thing typified all that was fast, insecure, and subcutaneously oily
+in modern life.  As modern life became faster, looser, younger,
+Soames was becoming older, slower, tighter, more and more in thought
+and language like his father James before him.  He was almost aware
+of it himself.  Pace and progress pleased him less and less; there
+was an ostentation, too, about a car which he considered provocative
+in the prevailing mood of Labour.  On one occasion that fellow Sims
+had driven over the only vested interest of a working man.  Soames
+had not forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many people
+would have stopped to put up with it.  He had been sorry for the dog,
+and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that ruffian
+hadn't been so outrageous.  With four hours fast becoming five, and
+still no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had experienced in
+person and by proxy balled within him, and sinking sensations
+troubled the pit of his stomach.  At seven he telephoned to Winifred
+by trunk call.  No!  Fleur had not been to Green Street.  Then where
+was she?  Visions of his beloved daughter rolled up in her pretty
+frills, all blood and dust-stained, in some hideous catastrophe,
+began to haunt him.  He went to her room and spied among her things.
+She had taken nothing--no dressing-case, no Jewellery.  And this, a
+relief in one sense, increased his fears of an accident.  Terrible to
+be helpless when his loved one was missing, especially when he
+couldn't bear fuss or publicity of any kind!  What should he do if
+she were not back by nightfall?
+
+At a quarter to eight he heard the car.  A great weight lifted from
+off his heart; he hurried down.  She was getting out--pale and tired-
+looking, but nothing wrong.  He met her in the hall.
+
+"You've frightened me.  Where have you been?"
+
+"To Robin Hill.  I'm sorry, dear.  I had to go; I'll tell you
+afterward."  And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
+
+Soames waited in the drawing-room.  To Robin Hill!  What did that
+portend?
+
+It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner--consecrated to the
+susceptibilities of the butler.  The agony of nerves Soames had been
+through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his power to
+condemn what she had done, or resist what she was going to do; he
+waited in a relaxed stupor for her revelation.  Life was a queer
+business.  There he was at sixty-five and no more in command of
+things than if he had not spent forty years in building up security-
+always something one couldn't get on terms with!  In the pocket of
+his dinner-jacket was a letter from Annette.  She was coming back in
+a fortnight.  He knew nothing of what she had been doing out there.
+And he was glad that he did not.  Her absence had been a relief.  Out
+of sight was out of mind!  And now she was coming back.  Another
+worry!  And the Bolderby Old Crome was gone--Dumetrius had got it--
+all because that anonymous letter had put it out of his thoughts.  He
+furtively remarked the strained look on his daughter's face, as if
+she too were gazing at a picture that she couldn't buy.  He almost
+wished the War back.  Worries didn't seem, then, quite so worrying.
+>From the caress in her voice, the look on her face, he became certain
+that she wanted something from him, uncertain whether it would be
+wise of him to give it her.  He pushed his savoury away uneaten, and
+even joined her in a cigarette.
+
+After dinner she set the electric piano-player going.  And he augured
+the worst when she sat down on a cushion footstool at his knee, and
+put her hand on his.
+
+"Darling, be nice to me.  I had to see Jon--he wrote to me.  He's
+going to try what he can do with his mother.  But I've been thinking.
+It's really in your hands, Father.  If you'd persuade her that it
+doesn't mean renewing the past in any way!  That I shall stay yours,
+and Jon will stay hers; that you need never see him or her, and she
+need never see you or me!  Only you could persuade her, dear, because
+only you could promise.  One can't promise for other people.  Surely
+it wouldn't be too awkward for you to see her just this once now that
+Jon's father is dead?"
+
+"Too awkward?" Soames repeated.  "The whole thing's preposterous."
+
+"You know," said Fleur, without looking up, "you wouldn't mind seeing
+her, really."
+
+Soames was silent.  Her words had expressed a truth too deep for him
+to admit.  She slipped her fingers between his own--hot, slim, eager,
+they clung there.  This child of his would corkscrew her way into a
+brick wall!
+
+"What am I to do if you won't, Father?" she said very softly.
+
+"I'll do anything for your happiness," said Soanies; "but this isn't
+for your happiness."
+
+"Oh! it is; it is!"
+
+"It'll only stir things up," he said grimly.
+
+"But they are stirred up.  The thing is to quiet them.  To make her
+feel that this is just our lives, and has nothing to do with yours or
+hers.  You can do it, Father, I know you can."
+
+"You know a great deal, then," was Soames' glum answer.
+
+"If you will, Jon and I will wait a year--two years if you like."
+
+"It seems to me," murmured Soames, "that you care nothing about what
+I feel."
+
+Fleur pressed his hand against her cheek.
+
+"I do, darling.  But you wouldn't like me to be awfully miserable."
+
+How she wheedled to get her ends!  And trying with all his might to
+think she really cared for him--he was not sure--not sure.  All she
+cared for was this boy!  Why should he help her to get this boy, who
+was killing her affection for himself?  Why should he?  By the laws
+of the Forsytes it was foolish!  There was nothing to be had out of
+it--nothing!  To give her to that boy!  To pass her into the enemy's
+camp, under the influence of the woman who had injured him so deeply!
+Slowly--inevitably--he would lose this flower of his life!  And
+suddenly he was conscious that his hand was wet.  His heart gave a
+little painful jump.  He couldn't bear her to cry.  He put his other
+hand quickly over hers, and a tear dropped on that, too.  He couldn't
+go on like this!  "Well, well," he said, "I'll think it over, and do
+what I can.  Come, come!"  If she must have it for her happiness--she
+must; he couldn't refuse to help her.  And lest she should begin to
+thank him he got out of his chair and went up to the piano-player--
+making that noise!  It ran down, as he reached it, with a faint buzz.
+That musical box of his nursery days: "The Harmonious Blacksmith,"
+"Glorious Port"--the thing had always made him miserable when his
+mother set it going on Sunday afternoons.  Here it was again--the
+same thing, only larger, more expensive, and now it played "The Wild,
+Wild Women," and "The Policeman's Holiday," and he was no longer in
+black velvet with a sky blue collar.  'Profond's right,' he thought,
+'there's nothing in it!  We're all progressing to the grave!'  And
+with that surprising mental comment he walked out.
+
+He did not see Fleur again that night.  But, at breakfast, her eyes
+followed him about with an appeal he could not escape--not that he
+intended to try.  No!  He had made up his mind to the nerve-racking
+business.  He would go to Robin Hill--to that house of memories.
+Pleasant memory--the last!  Of going down to keep that boy's father
+and Irene apart by threatening divorce.  He had often thought, since,
+that it had clinched their union.  And, now, he was going to clinch
+the union of that boy with his girl.  'I don't know what I've done,'
+he thought, 'to have such things thrust on me!'  He went up by train
+and down by train, and from the station walked by the long rising
+lane, still very much as he remembered it over thirty years ago.
+Funny--so near London!  Some one evidently was holding on to the land
+there.  This speculation soothed him, moving between the high hedges
+slowly, so as not to get overheated, though the day was chill enough.
+After all was said and done there was something real about land, it
+didn't shift.  Land, and good pictures!  The values might fluctuate a
+bit, but on the whole they were always going up--worth holding on to,
+in a world where there was such a lot of unreality, cheap building,
+changing fashions, such a "Here to-day and gone to-morrow" spirit.
+The French were right, perhaps, with their peasant proprietorship,
+though he had no opinion of the French.  One's bit of land!
+Something solid in it!  He had heard peasant proprietors described as
+a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont call his father a pigheaded
+Morning Poster--disrespectful young devil.  Well, there were worse
+things than being pig-headed or reading the Morning Post.  There was
+Profond and his tribe, and all these Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed
+politicians and 'wild, wild women'!  A lot of worse things!  And
+suddenly Soames became conscious of feeling weak, and hot, and shaky.
+Sheer nerves at the meeting before him!  As Aunt Juley might have
+said--quoting "Superior Dosset"--his nerves were "in a proper
+fautigue."  He could see the house now among its trees, the house he
+had watched being built, intending it for himself and this woman,
+who, by such strange fate, had lived in it with another after all!
+He began to think of Dumetrius, Local Loans, and other forms of
+investment.  He could not afford to meet her with his nerves all
+shaking; he who represented the Day of Judgment for her on earth as
+it was in heaven; he, legal ownership, personified, meeting lawless
+beauty, incarnate.  His dignity demanded impassivity during this
+embassy designed to link their offspring, who, if she had behaved
+herself, would have been brother and sister.  That wretched tune,
+"The Wild, Wild Women," kept running in his head, perversely, for
+tunes did not run there as a rule.  Passing the poplars in front of
+the house, he thought: 'How they've grown; I had them planted!'
+A maid answered his ring.
+
+"Will you say--Mr. Forsyte, on a very special matter."
+
+If she realised who he was, quite probably she would not see him.
+'By George!' he thought, hardening as the tug came.  'It's a topsy-
+turvy affair!'
+
+The maid came back.  "Would the gentleman state his business,
+please?"
+
+"Say it concerns Mr. Jon," said Soames.
+
+And once more he was alone in that hall with the pool of grey-white
+marble designed by her first lover.  Ah! she had been a bad lot--had
+loved two men, and not himself!  He must remember that when he came
+face to face with her once more.  And suddenly he saw her in the
+opening chink between the long heavy purple curtains, swaying, as if
+in hesitation; the old perfect poise and line, the old startled dark-
+eyed gravity, the old calm defensive voice: "Will you come in,
+please?"
+
+He passed through that opening.  As in the picture-gallery and the
+confectioner's shop, she seemed to him still beautiful.  And this was
+the first time--the very first--since he married her seven-and-thirty
+years ago, that he was speaking to her without the legal right to
+call her his.  She was not wearing black--one of that fellow's
+radical notions, he supposed.
+
+"I apologise for coming," he said glumly; "but this business must be
+settled one way or the other."
+
+"Won't you sit down?"
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+Anger at his false position, impatience of ceremony between them,
+mastered him, and words came tumbling out:
+
+"It's an infernal mischance; I've done my best to discourage it.  I
+consider my daughter crazy, but I've got into the habit of indulging
+her; that's why I'm here.  I suppose you're fond of your son."
+
+"Devotedly."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"It rests with him."
+
+He had a sense of being met and baffled.  Always--always she had
+baffled him, even in those old first married days.
+
+"It's a mad notion," he said.
+
+"It is."
+
+"If you had only--!  Well--they might have been--" he did not finish
+that sentence "brother and sister and all this saved," but he saw her
+shudder as if he had, and stung by the sight he crossed over to the
+window.  Out there the trees had not grown--they couldn't, they were
+old
+
+"So far as I'm concerned," he said, "you may make your mind easy.  I
+desire to see neither you nor your son if this marriage comes about.
+Young people in these days are--are unaccountable.  But I can't bear
+to see my daughter unhappy.  What am I to say to her when I go back?"
+
+"Please say to her as I said to you, that it rests with Jon."
+
+"You don't oppose it?"
+
+"With all my heart; not with my lips."
+
+Soames stood, biting his finger.
+
+"I remember an evening--" he said suddenly; and was silent.  What was
+there--what was there in this woman that would not fit into the four
+corners of his hate or condemnation?  "Where is he--your son?"
+
+"Up in his father's studio, I think."
+
+"Perhaps you'd have him down."
+
+He watched her ring the bell, he watched the maid come in.
+
+"Please tell Mr. Jon that I want him."
+
+"If it rests with him," said Soames hurriedly, when the maid was
+gone, "I suppose I may take it for granted that this unnatural
+marriage will take place; in that case there'll be formalities.  Whom
+do I deal with--Herring's?"
+
+Irene nodded.
+
+"You don't propose to live with them?"
+
+Irene shook her head.
+
+"What happens to this house?"
+
+"It will be as Jon wishes."
+
+"This house," said Soames suddenly: "I had hopes when I began it.  If
+they live in it--their children!  They say there's such a thing as
+Nemesis.  Do you believe in it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! You do!"
+
+He had come back from the window, and was standing close to her, who,
+in the curve of her grand piano, was, as it were, embayed.
+
+"I'm not likely to see you again," he said slowly.  "Will you shake
+hands"--his lip quivered, the words came out jerkily--"and let the
+past die."  He held out his hand.  Her pale face grew paler, her eyes
+so dark, rested immovably on his, her hands remained clasped in front
+of her.  He heard a sound and turned.  That boy was standing in the
+opening of the curtains.  Very queer he looked, hardly recognisable
+as the young fellow he had seen in the Gallery off Cork Street--very
+queer; much older, no youth in the face at all--haggard, rigid, his
+hair ruffled, his eyes deep in his head.  Soames made an effort, and
+said with a lift of his lip, not quite a smile nor quite a sneer:
+
+"Well, young man!  I'm here for my daughter; it rests with you, it
+seems--this matter.  Your mother leaves it in your hands."
+
+The boy continued staring at his mother's face, and made no answer.
+
+"For my daughter's sake I've brought myself to come," said Soames.
+"What am I to say to her when I go back?"
+
+Still looking at his mother, the boy said, quietly:
+
+"Tell Fleur that it's no good, please; I must do as my father wished
+before he died."
+
+"Jon!"
+
+"It's all right, Mother."
+
+In a kind of stupefaction Soames looked from one to the other; then,
+taking up hat and umbrella which he had put down on a chair, he
+walked toward the curtains.  The boy stood aside for him to go by.
+He passed through and heard the grate of the rings as the curtains
+were drawn behind him.  The sound liberated something in his chest.
+
+'So that's that!'  he thought, and passed out of the front door.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE DARK TUNE
+
+
+As Soames walked away from the house at Robin Hill the sun broke
+through the grey of that chill afternoon, in smoky radiance.  So
+absorbed in landscape painting that he seldom looked seriously for
+effects of Nature out of doors--he was struck by that moody
+effulgence--it mourned with a triumph suited to his own feeling.
+Victory in defeat.  His embassy had come to naught.  But he was rid
+of those people, had regained his daughter at the expense of--her
+happiness.  What would Fleur say to him?  Would she believe he had
+done his best?  And under that sunlight faring on the elms, hazels,
+hollies of the lane and those unexploited fields, Soames felt dread.
+She would be terribly upset!  He must appeal to her pride.  That boy
+had given her up, declared part and lot with the woman who so long
+ago had given her father up!  Soames clenched his hands.  Given him
+up, and why?  What had been wrong with him?  And once more he felt
+the malaise of one who contemplates himself as seen by another--like
+a dog who chances on his refection in a mirror and is intrigued and
+anxious at the unseizable thing.
+
+Not in a hurry to get home, he dined in town at the Connoisseurs.
+While eating a pear it suddenly occurred to him that, if he had not
+gone down to Robin Hill, the boy might not have so decided.  He
+remembered the expression on his face while his mother was refusing
+the hand he had held out.  A strange, an awkward thought!  Had Fleur
+cooked her own goose by trying to make too sure?
+
+He reached home at half-past nine.  While the car was passing in at
+one drive gate he heard the grinding sputter of a motor-cycle passing
+out by the other.  Young Mont, no doubt, so Fleur had not been
+lonely.  But he went in with a sinking heart.  In the cream-panelled
+drawing-room she was sitting with her elbows on her knees, and her
+chin on her clasped hands, in front of a white camellia plant which
+filled the fireplace.  That glance at her before she saw him renewed
+his dread.  What was she seeing among those white camellias?
+
+"Well, Father!"
+
+Soames shook his head.  His tongue failed him.  This was murderous
+work!  He saw her eyes dilate, her lips quivering.
+
+"What?  What?  Quick, Father!"
+
+"My dear," said Soames, "I--I did my best, but--" And again he shook
+his head.
+
+Fleur ran to him, and put a hand on each of his shoulders.
+
+"She?"
+
+"No," muttered Soames; "he. I was to tell you that it was no use; he
+must do what his father wished before he died."  He caught her by the
+waist.  "Come, child, don't let them hurt you.  They're not worth
+your little finger."
+
+Fleur tore herself from his grasp.
+
+"You didn't you--couldn't have tried.  You--you betrayed me, Father!"
+
+Bitterly wounded, Soames gazed at her passionate figure writhing
+there in front of him.
+
+"You didn't try--you didn't--I was a fool!  Iwon't believe he could--
+he ever could!  Only yesterday he--!  Oh! why did I ask you?"
+
+"Yes," said Soames, quietly, "why did you?  I swallowed my feelings;
+I did my best for you, against my judgment--and this is my reward.
+Good-night!"
+
+With every nerve in his body twitching he went toward the door.
+
+Fleur darted after him.
+
+"He gives me up?  You mean that?  Father!"
+
+Soames turned and forced himself to answer:
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh!" cried Fleur.  "What did you--what could you have done in those
+old days?"
+
+The breathless sense of really monstrous injustice cut the power of
+speech in Soames' throat.  What had he done!  What had they done to
+him!
+
+And with quite unconscious dignity he put his hand on his breast, and
+looked at her.
+
+"It's a shame!" cried Fleur passionately.
+
+Soames went out.  He mounted, slow and icy, to his picture gallery,
+and paced among his treasures.  Outrageous!  Oh!  Outrageous!  She
+was spoiled!  Ah! and who had spoiled her?  He stood still before the
+Goya copy.  Accustomed to her own way in everything.  Flower of his
+life!  And now that she couldn't have it!  He turned to the window
+for some air.  Daylight was dying, the moon rising, gold behind the
+poplars!  What sound was that?  Why!  That piano thing!  A dark tune,
+with a thrum and a throb!  She had set it going--what comfort could
+she get from that?  His eyes caught movement down there beyond the
+lawn, under the trellis of rambler roses and young acacia-trees,
+where the moonlight fell.  There she was, roaming up and down.  His
+heart gave a little sickening jump.  What would she do under this
+blow?  How could he tell?  What did he know of her--he had only loved
+her all his life--looked on her as the apple of his eye!  He knew
+nothing--had no notion.  There she was--and that dark tune--and the
+river gleaming in the moonlight!
+
+'I must go out,' he thought.
+
+He hastened down to the drawing-room, lighted just as he had left it,
+with the piano thrumming out that waltz, or fox-trot, or whatever
+they called it in these days, and passed through on to the verandah.
+
+Where could he watch, without her seeing him?  And he stole down
+through the fruit garden to the boat-house.  He was between her and
+the river now, and his heart felt lighter.  She was his daughter, and
+Annette's--she wouldn't do anything foolish; but there it was--he
+didn't know!  From the boat house window he could see the last acacia
+and the spin of her skirt when she turned in her restless march.
+That tune had run down at last--thank goodness!  He crossed the floor
+and looked through the farther window at the water slow-flowing past
+the lilies.  It made little bubbles against them, bright where a
+moon-streak fell.  He remembered suddenly that early morning when he
+had slept on the house-boat after his father died, and she had just
+been born--nearly nineteen years ago!  Even now he recalled the
+unaccustomed world when he woke up, the strange feeling it had given
+him.  That day the second passion of his life began--for this girl of
+his, roaming under the acacias.  What a comfort she had been to him!
+And all the soreness and sense of outrage left him.  If he could make
+her happy again, he didn't care!  An owl flew, queeking, queeking; a
+bat flitted by; the moonlight brightened and broadened on the water.
+How long was she going to roam about like this!  He went back to the
+window, and suddenly saw her coming down to the bank.  She stood
+quite close, on the landing-stage.  And Soames watched, clenching his
+hands.  Should he speak to her?  His excitement was intense.  The
+stillness of her figure, its youth, its absorption in despair, in
+longing, in--itself.  He would always remember it, moonlit like that;
+and the faint sweet reek of the river and the shivering of the willow
+leaves.  She had everything in the world that he could give her,
+except the one thing that she could not have because of him!  The
+perversity of things hurt him at that moment, as might a fish-bone in
+his throat.
+
+Then, with an infinite relief, he saw her turn back toward the house.
+What could he give her to make amends?  Pearls, travel, horses, other
+young men--anything she wanted--that he might lose the memory of her
+young figure lonely by the water!  There!  She had set that tune
+going again!  Why--it was a mania!  Dark, thrumming, faint,
+travelling from the house.  It was as though she had said: "If I
+can't have something to keep me going, I shall die of this!"  Soames
+dimly understood.  Well, if it helped her, let her keep it thrumming
+on all night!  And, mousing back through the fruit garden, he
+regained the verandah.  Though he meant to go in and speak to her
+now, he still hesitated, not knowing what to say, trying hard to
+recall how it felt to be thwarted in love.  He ought to know, ought
+to remember--and he could not!  Gone--all real recollection; except
+that it had hurt him horribly.  In this blankness he stood passing
+his handkerchief over hands and lips, which were very dry.  By
+craning his head he could just see Fleur, standing with her back to
+that piano still grinding out its tune, her arms tight crossed on her
+breast, a lighted cigarette between her lips, whose smoke half veiled
+her face.  The expression on it was strange to Soames, the eyes shone
+and stared, and every feature was alive with a sort of wretched scorn
+and anger.  Once or twice he had seen Annette look like that--the
+face was too vivid, too naked, not his daughter's at that moment.
+And he dared not go in, realising the futility of any attempt at
+consolation.  He sat down in the shadow of the ingle-nook.
+
+Monstrous trick, that Fate had played him!  Nemesis!  That old
+unhappy marriage!  And in God's name-why?  How was he to know, when
+he wanted Irene so violently, and she consented to be his, that she
+would never love him?  The tune died and was renewed, and died again,
+and still Soames sat in the shadow, waiting for he knew not what.
+The fag of Fleur's cigarette, flung through the window, fell on the
+grass; he watched it glowing, burning itself out.  The moon had freed
+herself above the poplars, and poured her unreality on the garden.
+Comfortless light, mysterious, withdrawn--like the beauty of that
+woman who had never loved him--dappling the nemesias and the stocks
+with a vesture not of earth.  Flowers!  And his flower so unhappy!
+Ah!  Why could one not put happiness into Local Loans, gild its
+edges, insure it against going down?
+
+Light had ceased to flow out now from the drawing-room window.  All
+was silent and dark in there.  Had she gone up?  He rose, and,
+tiptoeing, peered in.  It seemed so!  He entered.  The verandah kept
+the moonlight out; and at first he could see nothing but the outlines
+of furniture blacker than the darkness.  He groped toward the farther
+window to shut it.  His foot struck a chair, and he heard a gasp.
+There she was, curled and crushed into the corner of the sofa!  His
+hand hovered.  Did she want his consolation?  He stood, gazing at
+that ball of crushed frills and hair and graceful youth, trying to
+burrow its way out of sorrow.  How leave her there?  At last he
+touched her hair, and said:
+
+"Come, darling, better go to bed.  I'll make it up to you, somehow."
+How fatuous!  But what could he have said?
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER THE OAK-TREE
+
+
+When their visitor had disappeared Jon and his mother stood without
+speaking, till he said suddenly:
+
+"I ought to have seen him out."
+
+But Soames was already walking down the drive, and Jon went upstairs
+to his father's studio, not trusting himself to go back.
+
+The expression on his mother's face confronting the man she had once
+been married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever
+since she left him the night before.  It had put the finishing touch
+of reality.  To marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face;
+to betray his dead father!  It was no good!  Jon had the least
+resentful of natures.  He bore his parents no grudge in this hour of
+his distress.  For one so young there was a rather strange power in
+him of seeing things in some sort of proportion.  It was worse for
+Fleur, worse for his mother even, than it was for him.  Harder than
+to give up was to be given up, or to be the cause of some one you
+loved giving up for you.  He must not, would not behave grudgingly!
+While he stood watching the tardy sunlight, he had again that sudden
+vision of the world which had come to him the night before.  Sea on
+sea, country on country, millions on millions of people, all with
+their own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering--all with
+things they had to give up, and separate struggles for existence.
+Even though he might be willing to give up all else for the one thing
+he couldn't have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered
+much in so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad.  He
+pictured the people who had nothing--the millions who had given up
+life in the War, the millions whom the War had left with life and
+little else; the hungry children he had read of, the shattered men;
+people in prison, every kind of unfortunate.  And--they did not help
+him much.  If one had to miss a meal, what comfort in the knowledge
+that many others had to miss it too?  There was more distraction in
+the thought of getting away out into this vast world of which he knew
+nothing yet.  He could not go on staying here, walled in and
+sheltered, with everything so slick and comfortable, and nothing to
+do but brood and think what might have been. He could not go back to
+Wansdon, and the memories of Fleur.  If he saw her again he could not
+trust himself; and if he stayed here or went back there, he would
+surely see her.  While they were within reach of each other that must
+happen.  To go far away and quickly was the only thing to do.  But,
+however much he loved his mother, he did not want to go away with
+her.  Then feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind desperately
+to propose that they should go to Italy.  For two hours in that
+melancholy room he tried to master himself, then dressed solemnly for
+dinner.
+
+His mother had done the same.  They ate little, at some length, and
+talked of his father's catalogue.  The show was arranged for October,
+and beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.
+
+After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a little,
+talked a little, till they were standing silent at last beneath the
+oak-tree.  Ruled by the thought: 'If I show anything, I show all,'
+Jon put his arm through hers and said quite casually:
+
+"Mother, let's go to Italy."
+
+Irene pressed his arm, and said as casually:
+
+"It would be very nice; but I've been thinking you ought to see and
+do more than you would if I were with you."
+
+"But then you'd be alone."
+
+"I was once alone for more than twelve years.  Besides, I should like
+to be here for the opening of Father's show."
+
+Jon's grip tightened round her arm; he was not deceived.
+
+"You couldn't stay here all by yourself; it's too big."
+
+"Not here, perhaps.  In London, and I might go to Paris, after the
+show opens.  You ought to have a year at least, Jon, and see the
+world."
+
+"Yes, I'd like to see the world and rough it.  But I don't want to
+leave you all alone."
+
+"My dear, I owe you that at least.  If it's for your good, it'll be
+for mine.  Why not start tomorrow?  You've got your passport."
+
+"Yes; if I'm going it had better be at once.  Only--Mother--if--if I
+wanted to stay out somewhere--America or anywhere, would you mind
+coming presently?"
+
+"Wherever and whenever you send for me.  But don't send until you
+really want me."
+
+Jon drew a deep breath.
+
+"I feel England's choky."
+
+They stood a few minutes longer under the oak-tree--looking out to
+where the grand stand at Epsom was veiled in evening.  The branches
+kept the moonlight from them, so that it only fell everywhere else--
+over the fields and far away, and on the windows of the creepered
+house behind, which soon would be to let.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+FLEUR'S WEDDING
+
+
+The October paragraphs describing the wedding of Fleur Forsyte to
+Michael Mont hardly conveyed the symbolic significance of this event.
+In the union of the great-granddaughter of "Superior Dosset" with the
+heir of a ninth baronet was the outward and visible sign of that
+merger of class in class which buttresses the political stability of
+a realm.  The time had come when the Forsytes might resign their
+natural resentment against a "flummery" not theirs by birth, and
+accept it as the still more natural due of their possessive
+instincts.  Besides, they had to mount to make room for all those so
+much more newly rich.  In that quiet but tasteful ceremony in Hanover
+Square, and afterward among the furniture in Green Street, it had
+been impossible for those not in the know to distinguish the Forsyte
+troop from the Mont contingent--so far away was "Superior Dosset"
+now.  Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his
+moustache, his accent, or the shine on his top-hat, a pin to choose
+between Soames and the ninth baronet himself?  Was not Fleur as self-
+possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the likeliest
+Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present?  If anything, the Forsytes
+had it in dress and looks and manners.  They had become "upper class"
+and now their name would be formally recorded in the Stud Book, their
+money joined to land.  Whether this was a little late in the day, and
+those rewards of the possessive instinct, lands and money, destined
+for the melting-pot--was still a question so moot that it was not
+mooted.  After all, Timothy had said Consols were goin' up.  Timothy,
+the last, the missing link; Timothy, in extremis on the Bayswater
+Road--so Francie had reported.  It was whispered, too, that this
+young Mont was a sort of socialist--strangely wise of him, and in the
+nature of insurance, considering the days they lived in.  There was
+no uneasiness on that score.  The landed classes produced that sort
+of amiable foolishness at times, turned to safe uses and confined to
+theory.  As George remarked to his sister Francie: "They'll soon be
+having puppies--that'll give him pause."
+
+The church with white flowers and something blue in the middle of the
+East window looked extremely chaste, as though endeavouring to
+counteract the somewhat lurid phraseology of a Service calculated to
+keep the thoughts of all on puppies.  Forsytes, Haymans, Tweetymans,
+sat in the left aisle; Monts, Charwells; Muskhams in the right; while
+a sprinkling of Fleur's fellow-sufferers at school, and of Mont's
+fellow-sufferers in, the War, gaped indiscriminately from either
+side, and three maiden ladies, who had dropped in on their way from
+Skyward's brought up the rear, together with two Mont retainers and
+Fleur's old nurse.  In the unsettled state of the country as full a
+house as could be expected.
+
+Mrs. Val Dartie, who sat with her husband in the third row, squeezed
+his hand more than once during the performance.  To her, who knew the
+plot of this tragi-comedy, its most dramatic moment was well-nigh
+painful.  'I wonder if Jon knows by instinct,' she thought--Jon, out
+in British Columbia.  She had received a letter from him only that
+morning which had made her smile and say:
+
+"Jon's in British Columbia, Val, because he wants to be in
+California.  He thinks it's too nice there."
+
+"Oh!" said Val, "so he's beginning to see a joke again."
+
+"He's bought some land and sent for his mother."
+
+"What on earth will she do out there?"
+
+"All she cares about is Jon.  Do you still think it a happy release?"
+
+Val's shrewd eyes narrowed to grey pin-points between their dark
+lashes.
+
+"Fleur wouldn't have suited him a bit.  She's not bred right."
+
+"Poor little Fleur!" sighed Holly.  Ah! it was strange--this
+marriage.  The young man, Mont, had caught her on the rebound, of
+course, in the reckless mood of one whose ship has just gone down.
+Such a plunge could not but be--as Val put it--an outside chance.
+There was little to be told from the back view of her young cousin's
+veil, and Holly's eyes reviewed the general aspect of this Christian
+wedding.  She, who had made a love-match which had been successful,
+had a horror of unhappy marriages.  This might not be one in the end-
+-but it was clearly a toss-up; and to consecrate a toss-up in this
+fashion with manufactured unction before a crowd of fashionable free-
+thinkers--for who thought otherwise than freely, or not at all, when
+they were "dolled" up--seemed to her as near a sin as one could find
+in an age which had abolished them.  Her eyes wandered from the
+prelate in his robes (a Charwell-the Forsytes had not as yet produced
+a prelate) to Val, beside her, thinking--she was certain--of the
+Mayfly filly at fifteen to one for the Cambridgeshire.  They passed
+on and caught the profile of the ninth baronet, in counterfeitment of
+the kneeling process.  She could just see the neat ruck above his
+knees where he had pulled his trousers up, and thought: 'Val's
+forgotten to pull up his!'  Her eyes passed to the pew in front of
+her, where Winifred's substantial form was gowned with passion, and
+on again to Soames and Annette kneeling side by side.  A little smile
+came on her lips--Prosper Profond, back from the South Seas of the
+Channel, would be kneeling too, about six rows behind.  Yes!  This
+was a funny "small" business, however it turned out; still it was in
+a proper church and would be in the proper papers to-morrow morning.
+
+They had begun a hymn; she could hear the ninth baronet across the
+aisle, singing of the hosts of Midian.  Her little finger touched
+Val's thumb--they were holding the same hymn-book--and a tiny thrill
+passed through her, preserved--from twenty years ago.  He stooped and
+whispered:
+
+"I say, d'you remember the rat?"  The rat at their wedding in Cape
+Colony, which had cleaned its whiskers behind the table at the
+Registrar's!  And between her little and third forgers she squeezed
+his thumb hard.
+
+The hymn was over, the prelate had begun to deliver his discourse.
+He told them of the dangerous times they lived in, and the awful
+conduct of the House of Lords in connection with divorce.  They were
+all soldiers--he said--in the trenches under the poisonous gas of the
+Prince of Darkness, and must be manful.  The purpose of marriage was
+children, not mere sinful happiness.
+
+An imp danced in Holly's eyes--Val's eyelashes were meeting.
+Whatever happened; he must not snore.  Her finger and thumb closed on
+his thigh till he stirred uneasily.
+
+The discourse was over, the danger past.  They were signing in the
+vestry; and general relaxation had set in.
+
+A voice behind her said:
+
+"Will she stay the course?"
+
+"Who's that?" she whispered.
+
+"Old George Forsyte!"
+
+Holly demurely scrutinized one of whom she had often heard.  Fresh
+from South Africa, and ignorant of her kith and kin, she never saw
+one without an almost childish curiosity.  He was very big, and very
+dapper; his eyes gave her a funny feeling of having no particular
+clothes.
+
+"They're off!" she heard him say.
+
+They came, stepping from the chancel.  Holly looked first in young
+Mont's face.  His lips and ears were twitching, his eyes, shifting
+from his feet to the hand within his arm, stared suddenly before them
+as if to face a firing party.  He gave Holly the feeling that he was
+spiritually intoxicated.  But Fleur!  Ah!  That was different.  The
+girl was perfectly composed, prettier than ever, in her white robes
+and veil over her banged dark chestnut hair; her eyelids hovered
+demure over her dark hazel eyes.  Outwardly, she seemed all there.
+But inwardly, where was she?  As those two passed, Fleur raised her
+eyelids--the restless glint of those clear whites remained on Holly's
+vision as might the flutter of caged bird's wings.
+
+In Green Street Winifred stood to receive, just a little less
+composed than usual.  Soames' request for the use of her house had
+come on her at a deeply psychological moment.  Under the influence of
+a remark of Prosper Profond, she had begun to exchange her Empire for
+Expressionistic furniture.  There were the most amusing arrangements,
+with violet, green, and orange blobs and scriggles, to be had at
+Mealard's.  Another month and the change would have been complete.
+Just now, the very "intriguing" recruits she had enlisted, did not
+march too well with the old guard.  It was as if her regiment were
+half in khaki, half in scarlet and bearskins.  But her strong and
+comfortable character made the best of it in a drawing-room which
+typified, perhaps, more perfectly than she imagined, the semi-
+bolshevized imperialism of her country.  After all, this was a day of
+merger, and you couldn't have too much of it!  Her eyes travelled
+indulgently among her guests.  Soames had gripped the back of a buhl
+chair; young Mont was behind that "awfully amusing" screen, which no
+one as yet had been able to explain to her.  The ninth baronet had
+shied violently at a round scarlet table, inlaid under glass with
+blue Australian butteries' wings, and was clinging to her Louis-
+Quinze cabinet; Francie Forsyte had seized the new mantel-board,
+finely carved with little purple grotesques on an ebony ground;
+George, over by the old spinet, was holding a little sky-blue book as
+if about to enter bets; Prosper Profond was twiddling the knob of the
+open door, black with peacock-blue panels; and Annette's hands, close
+by, were grasping her own waist; two Muskhams clung to the balcony
+among the plants, as if feeling ill; Lady Mont, thin and brave-
+looking, had taken up her long-handled glasses and was gazing at the
+central light shade, of ivory and orange dashed with deep magenta, as
+if the heavens had opened.  Everybody, in fact, seemed holding on to
+something.  Only Fleur, still in her bridal dress, was detached from
+all support, flinging her words and glances to left and right.
+
+The room was full of the bubble and the squeak of conversation.
+Nobody could hear anything that anybody said; which seemed of little
+consequence, since no one waited for anything so slow as an answer.
+Modern conversation seemed to Winifred so different from the days of
+her prime, when a drawl was all the vogue.  Still it was "amusing,"
+which, of course, was all that mattered.  Even the Forsytes were
+talking with extreme rapidity--Fleur and Christopher, and Imogen, and
+young Nicholas's youngest, Patrick.  Soames, of course, was silent;
+but George, by the spinet, kept up a running commentary, and Francie,
+by her mantel-shelf.  Winifred drew nearer to the ninth baronet.  He
+seemed to promise a certain repose; his nose was fine and drooped a
+little, his grey moustaches too; and she said, drawling through her
+smile:
+
+"It's rather nice, isn't it?"
+
+His reply shot out of his smile like a snipped bread pellet
+
+"D'you remember, in Frazer, the tribe that buries the bride up to the
+waist?"
+
+He spoke as fast as anybody!  He had dark lively little eyes, too,
+all crinkled round like a Catholic priest's.  Winifred felt suddenly
+he might say things she would regret.
+
+"They're always so amusing--weddings," she murmured, and moved on to
+Soames.  He was curiously still, and Winifred saw at once what was
+dictating his immobility.  To his right was George Forsyte, to his
+left Annette and Prosper Profond.  He could not move without either
+seeing those two together, or the reflection of them in George
+Forsyte's japing eyes.  He was quite right not to be taking notice.
+
+"They say Timothy's sinking;" he said glumly.
+
+"Where will you put him, Soames?"
+
+"Highgate."  He counted on his fingers.  "It'll make twelve of them
+there, including wives.  How do you think Fleur looks?"
+
+"Remarkably well."
+
+Soames nodded.  He had never seen her look prettier, yet he could not
+rid himself of the impression that this business was unnatural--
+remembering still that crushed figure burrowing into the corner of
+the sofa.  From that night to this day he had received from her no
+confidences.  He knew from his chauffeur that she had made one more
+attempt on Robin Hill and drawn blank--an empty house, no one at
+home.  He knew that she had received a letter, but not what was in
+it, except that it had made her hide herself and cry.  He had
+remarked that she looked at him sometimes when she thought he wasn't
+noticing, as if she were wondering still what he had done--forsooth--
+to make those people hate him so.  Well, there it was!  Annette had
+come back, and things had worn on through the summer--very miserable,
+till suddenly Fleur had said she was going to marry young Mont.  She
+had shown him a little more affection when she told him that.  And he
+had yielded--what was the good of opposing it?  God knew that he had
+never wished to thwart her in anything!  And the young man seemed
+quite delirious about her.  No doubt she was in a reckless mood, and
+she was young, absurdly young.  But if he opposed her, he didn't know
+what she would do; for all he could tell she might want to take up a
+profession, become a doctor or solicitor, some nonsense.  She had no
+aptitude for painting, writing, music, in his view the legitimate
+occupations of unmarried women, if they must do something in these
+days.  On the whole, she was safer married, for he could see too well
+how feverish and restless she was at home.  Annette, too, had been in
+favour of it--Annette, from behind the veil of his refusal to know
+what she was about, if she was about anything.  Annette had said:
+"Let her marry this young man. He is a nice boy--not so highty-
+flighty as he seems."  Where she got her expressions, he didn't know-
+-but her opinion soothed his doubts.  His wife, whatever her conduct,
+had clear eyes and an almost depressing amount of common sense.  He
+had settled fifty thousand on Fleur, taking care that there was no
+cross settlement in case it didn't turn out well.  Could it turn out
+well?  She had not got over that other boy--he knew.  They were to go
+to Spain for the honeymoon.  He would be even lonelier when she was
+gone.  But later, perhaps, she would forget, and turn to him again!
+Winifred's voice broke on his reverie.
+
+"Why!  Of all wonders-June!"
+
+There, in a djibbah--what things she wore!--with her hair straying
+from under a fillet, Soames saw his cousin, and Fleur going forward
+to greet her.  The two passed from their view out on to the stairway.
+
+"Really," said Winifred, "she does the most impossible things!  Fancy
+her coming!"
+
+"What made you ask her?" muttered Soames.
+
+"Because I thought she wouldn't accept, of course."
+
+Winifred had forgotten that behind conduct lies the main trend of
+character; or, in other words, omitted to remember that Fleur was now
+a "lame duck."
+
+On receiving her invitation, June had first thought, 'I wouldn't go
+near them for the world!' and then, one morning, had awakened from a
+dream of Fleur waving to her from a boat with a wild unhappy gesture.
+And she had changed her mind.
+
+When Fleur came forward and said to her, "Do come up while I'm
+changing my dress," she had followed up the stairs.  The girl led the
+way into Imogen's old bedroom, set ready for her toilet.
+
+June sat down on the bed, thin and upright, like a little spirit in
+the sear and yellow.  Fleur locked the door.
+
+The girl stood before her divested of her wedding dress.  What a
+pretty thing she was
+
+"I suppose you think me a fool," she said, with quivering lips, "when
+it was to have been Jon.  But what does it matter?  Michael wants me,
+and I don't care.  It'll get me away from home."  Diving her hand
+into the frills on her breast, she brought out a letter.  "Jon wrote
+me this."
+
+June read:  "Lake Okanagen, British Columbia.  I'm not coming back to
+England.  Bless you always.  Jon."
+
+"She's made safe, you see," said Fleur.
+
+June handed back the letter.
+
+"That's not fair to Irene," she said, "she always told Jon he could
+do as he wished."
+
+Fleur smiled bitterly.  "Tell me, didn't she spoil your life too?"
+June looked up.  "Nobody can spoil a life, my dear.  That's nonsense.
+Things happen, but we bob up."
+
+With a sort of terror she saw the girl sink on her knees and bury her
+face in the djibbah.  A strangled sob mounted to June's ears.
+
+"It's all right--all right," she murmured, "Don't!  There, there!"
+
+But the point of the girl's chin was pressed ever closer into her
+thigh, and the sound was dreadful of her sobbing.
+
+Well, well!  It had to come.  She would feel better afterward!  June
+stroked the short hair of that shapely head; and all the scattered
+mother-sense in her focussed itself and passed through the tips of
+her fingers into the girl's brain.
+
+"Don't sit down under it, my dear," she said at last.  "We can't
+control life, but we can fight it.  Make the best of things.  I've
+had to.  I held on, like you; and I cried, as you're crying now.  And
+look at me!"
+
+Fleur raised her head; a sob merged suddenly into a little choked
+laugh.  In truth it was a thin and rather wild and wasted spirit she
+was looking at, but it had brave eyes.
+
+"All right!" she said.  "I'm sorry.  I shall forget him, I suppose,
+if I fly fast and far enough."
+
+And, scrambling to her feet, she went over to the wash-stand.
+
+June watched her removing with cold water the traces of emotion.
+Save for a little becoming pinkness there was nothing left when she
+stood before the mirror.  June got off the bed and took a pin-cushion
+in her hand.  To put two pins into the wrong places was all the vent
+she found for sympathy.
+
+"Give me a kiss," she said when Fleur was ready, and dug her chin
+into the girl's warm cheek.
+
+"I want a whiff," said Fleur; "don't wait."
+
+June left her, sitting on the bed with a cigarette between her lips
+and her eyes half closed, and went down-stairs.  In the doorway of
+the drawing-room stood Soames as if unquiet at his daughter's
+tardiness.  June tossed her head and passed down on to the half-
+landing.  Her cousin Francie was standing there.
+
+"Look!" said June, pointing with her chin at Soames.  "That man's
+fatal!"
+
+"How do you mean," said Francie, "fatal?"
+
+June did not answer her.  "I shan't wait to see them off," she said.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+"Good-bye!" said Francie, and her eyes, of a Celtic grey, goggled.
+That old feud!  Really, it was quite romantic!
+
+Soames, moving to the well of the staircase, saw June go, and drew a
+breath of satisfaction.  Why didn't Fleur come?  They would miss
+their train.  That train would bear her away from him, yet he could
+not help fidgeting at the thought that they would lose it.  And then
+she did come, running down in her tan-coloured frock and black velvet
+cap, and passed him into the drawing-room.  He saw her kiss her
+mother, her aunt, Val's wife, Imogen, and then come forth, quick and
+pretty as ever.  How would she treat him at this last moment of her
+girlhood?  He couldn't hope for much!
+
+Her lips pressed the middle of his cheek.
+
+"Daddy!" she said, and was past and gone!  Daddy!  She hadn't called
+him that for years.  He drew a long breath and followed slowly down.
+There was all the folly with that confetti stuff and the rest of it
+to go through with yet.  But he would like just to catch her smile,
+if she leaned out, though they would hit her in the eye with the
+shoe, if they didn't take care.  Young Mont's voice said fervently in
+his ear:
+
+"Good-bye, sir; and thank you!  I'm so fearfully bucked."
+
+"Good-bye," he said; "don't miss your train."
+
+He stood on the bottom step but three, whence he could see above the
+heads--the silly hats and heads.  They were in the car now; and there
+was that stuff, showering, and there went the shoe.  A flood of
+something welled up in Soames, and--he didn't know--he couldn't see!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
+
+When they came to prepare that terrific symbol Timothy Forsyte--the
+one pure individualist left, the only man who hadn't heard of the
+Great War--they found him wonderful--not even death had undermined
+his soundness.
+
+To Smither and Cook that preparation came like final evidence of what
+they had never believed possible--the end of the old Forsyte family
+on earth.  Poor Mr. Timothy must now take a harp and sing in the
+company of Miss Forsyte, Mrs. Julia, Miss Hester; with Mr. Jolyon,
+Mr. Swithin, Mr. James, Mr. Roger, and Mr. Nicholas of the party.
+Whether Mrs. Hayman would be there was more doubtful, seeing that she
+had been cremated.  Secretly Cook thought that Mr. Timothy would be
+upset--he had always been so set against barrel organs.  How many
+times had she not said: "Drat the thing!  There it is again!
+Smither, you'd better run up and see what you can do."  And in her
+heart she would so have enjoyed the tunes, if she hadn't known that
+Mr. Timothy would ring the bell in a minute and say: "Here, take him
+a halfpenny and tell him to move on."  Often they had been obliged to
+add threepence of their own before the man would go--Timothy had ever
+underrated the value of emotion.  Luckily he had taken the organs for
+blue-bottles in his last years, which had been a comfort, and they
+had been able to enjoy the tunes.  But a harp!  Cook wondered.  It
+was a change!  And Mr. Timothy had never liked change.  But she did
+not speak of this to Smither, who did so take a line of her own in
+regard to heaven that it quite put one about sometimes.
+
+She cried while Timothy was being prepared, and they all had sherry
+afterward out of the yearly Christmas bottle, which would not be
+needed now.  Ah! dear!  She had been there five-and-forty years and
+Smither three-and-forty!  And now they would be going to a tiny house
+in Tooting, to live on their savings and what Miss Hester had so
+kindly left them--for to take fresh service after the glorious past--
+No!  But they would like just to see Mr. Soames again, and Mrs.
+Dartie, and Miss Francie, and Miss Euphemia.  And even if they had to
+take their own cab, they felt they must go to the funeral.  For six
+years Mr. Timothy had been their baby, getting younger and younger
+every day, till at last he had been too young to live.
+
+They spent the regulation hours of waiting in polishing and dusting,
+in catching the one mouse left, and asphyxiating the last beetle so
+as to leave it nice, discussing with each other what they would buy
+at the sale.  Miss Ann's workbox; Miss Juley's (that is Mrs. Julia's)
+seaweed album; the fire-screen Miss Hester had crewelled; and Mr.
+Timothy's hair--little golden curls, glued into a black frame.  Oh!
+they must have those--only the price of things had gone up so!
+
+It fell to Soames to issue invitations for the funeral.  He had them
+drawn up by Gradman in his office--only blood relations, and no
+flowers.  Six carriages were ordered.  The Will would be read
+afterward at the house.
+
+He arrived at eleven o'clock to see that all was ready.  At a quarter
+past old Gradman came in black gloves and crape on his hat.  He and
+Soames stood in the drawing-room waiting.  At half-past eleven the
+carriages drew up in a long row.  But no one else appeared.  Gradman
+said:
+
+"It surprises me, Mr. Soames.  I posted them myself."
+
+"I don't know," said Soames; "he'd lost touch with the family."
+Soames had often noticed in old days how much more neighbourly his
+family were to the dead than to the living.  But, now, the way they
+had flocked to Fleur's wedding and abstained from Timothy's funeral,
+seemed to show some vital change.  There might, of course, be another
+reason; for Soames felt that if he had not known the contents of
+Timothy's Will, he might have stayed away himself through delicacy.
+Timothy had left a lot of money, with nobody in particular to leave
+it to.  They mightn't like to seem to expect something.
+
+At twelve o'clock the procession left the door; Timothy alone in the
+first carriage under glass.  Then Soames alone; then Gradman alone;
+then Cook and Smither together.  They started at a walk, but were
+soon trotting under a bright sky.  At the entrance to Highgate
+Cemetery they were delayed by service in the Chapel.  Soames would
+have liked to stay outside in the sunshine.  He didn't believe a word
+of it; on the other hand, it was a form of insurance which could not
+safely be neglected, in case there might be something in it after
+all.
+
+They walked up two and two--he and Gradman, Cook and Smither--to the
+family vault.  It was not very distinguished for the funeral of the
+last old Forsyte.
+
+He took Gradman into his carriage on the way back to the Bayswater
+Road with a certain glow in his heart.  He had a surprise in pickle
+for the old chap who had served the Forsytes four-and-fifty years-a
+treat that was entirely his doing.  How well he remembered saying to
+Timothy the day--after Aunt Hester's funeral: "Well; Uncle Timothy,
+there's Gradman.  He's taken a lot of trouble for the family.  What
+do you say to leaving him five thousand?" and his surprise, seeing
+the difficulty there had been in getting Timothy to leave anything,
+when Timothy had nodded.  And now the old chap would be as pleased as
+Punch, for Mrs. Gradman, he knew, had a weak heart, and their son had
+lost a leg in the War.  It was extraordinarily gratifying to Soames
+to have left him five thousand pounds of Timothy's money.  They sat
+down together in the little drawing-room, whose walls--like a vision
+of heaven--were sky-blue and gold with every picture-frame
+unnaturally bright, and every speck of dust removed from every piece
+of furniture, to read that little masterpiece--the Will of Timothy.
+With his back to the light in Aunt Hester's chair, Soames faced
+Gradman with his face to the light, on Aunt Ann's sofa; and, crossing
+his legs, began:
+
+"This is the last Will and Testament of me Timothy Forsyte of The
+Bower Bayswater Road, London I appoint my nephew Soames Forsyte of
+The Shelter Mapleduram and Thomas Gradman of 159 Folly Road Highgate
+(hereinafter called my Trustees) to be the trustees and executors of
+this my Will To the said Soames Forsyte I leave the sum of one
+thousand pounds free of legacy duty and to the said Thomas Gradman I
+leave the sum of five thousand pounds free of legacy duty."
+
+Soames paused.  Old Gradman was leaning forward, convulsively
+gripping a stout black knee with each of his thick hands; his mouth
+had fallen open so that the gold fillings of three teeth gleamed; his
+eyes were blinking, two tears rolled slowly out of them.  Soames read
+hastily on.
+
+"All the rest of my property of whatsoever description I bequeath to
+my Trustees upon Trust to convert and hold the same upon the
+following trusts namely To pay thereout all my debts funeral expenses
+and outgoings of any kind in connection with my Will and to hold the
+residue thereof in trust for that male lineal descendant of my father
+Jolyon Forsyte by his marriage with Ann Pierce who after the decease
+of all lineal descendants whether male or female of my said father by
+his said marriage in being at the time of my death shall last attain
+the age of twenty-one years absolutely it being my desire that my
+property shall be nursed to the extreme limit permitted by the laws
+of England for the benefit of such male lineal descendant as
+aforesaid."
+
+Soames read the investment and attestation clauses, and, ceasing,
+looked at Gradman.  The old fellow was wiping his brow with a large
+handkerchief, whose brilliant colour supplied a sudden festive tinge
+to the proceedings.
+
+"My word, Mr. Soames!" he said, and it was clear that the lawyer in
+him had utterly wiped out the man: "My word!  Why, there are two
+babies now, and some quite young children--if one of them lives to be
+eighty--it's not a great age--and add twenty-one--that's a hundred
+years; and Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound net
+if he's worth a penny.  Compound interest at five per cent. doubles
+you in fourteen years.  In fourteen years three hundred thousand-six
+hundred thousand in twenty-eight--twelve hundred thousand in forty-
+two--twenty-four hundred thousand in fifty-six--four million eight
+hundred thousand in seventy--nine million six hundred thousand in
+eighty-four--Why, in a hundred years it'll be twenty million!  And we
+shan't live to use it!  It is a Will!"
+
+Soames said dryly: "Anything may happen.  The State might take the
+lot; they're capable of anything in these days."
+
+"And carry five," said Gradman to himself.  "I forgot--Mr. Timothy's
+in Consols; we shan't get more than two per cent. with this income
+tax.  To be on the safe side, say eight millions.  Still, that's a
+pretty penny."
+
+Soames rose and handed him the Will.  "You're going into the City.
+Take care of that, and do what's necessary.  Advertise; but there are
+no debts.  When's the sale?"
+
+"Tuesday week," said Gradman.  "Life or lives in bein' and twenty-one
+years afterward--it's a long way off.  But I'm glad he's left it in
+the family...."
+
+The sale--not at Jobson's, in view of the Victorian nature of the
+effects--was far more freely attended than the funeral, though not by
+Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give them
+their heart's desires.  Winifred was present, Euphemia, and Francie,
+and Eustace had come in his car.  The miniatures, Barbizons, and J.
+R. drawings had been bought in by Soames; and relics of no marketable
+value were set aside in an off-room for members of the family who
+cared to have mementoes.  These were the only restrictions upon
+bidding characterised by an almost tragic languor.  Not one piece of
+furniture, no picture or porcelain figure appealed to modern taste.
+The humming birds had fallen like autumn leaves when taken from where
+they had not hummed for sixty years.  It was painful to Soames to see
+the chairs his aunts had sat on, the little grand piano they had
+practically never played, the books whose outsides they had gazed at,
+the china they had dusted, the curtains they had drawn, the hearth-
+rug which had warmed their feet; above all, the beds they had lain
+and died in--sold to little dealers, and the housewives of Fulham.
+And yet--what could one do?  Buy them and stick them in a lumber-
+room?  No; they had to go the way of all flesh and furniture, and be
+worn out.  But when they put up Aunt Ann's sofa and were going to
+knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out, suddenly: "Five
+pounds!"  The sensation was considerable, and the sofa his.
+
+When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those
+Victorian ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October
+sunshine feeling as if cosiness had died out of the world, and the
+board "To Let" was up, indeed.  Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in
+Spain; no comfort in Annette; no Timothy's on the Bayswater Road.  In
+the irritable desolation of his soul he went into the Goupenor
+Gallery.  That chap Jolyon's watercolours were on view there.  He
+went in to look down his nose at them--it might give him some faint
+satisfaction.  The news had trickled through from June to Val's wife,
+from her to Val, from Val to his mother, from her to Soames, that the
+house--the fatal house at Robin Hill--was for sale, and Irene going
+to join her boy out in British Columbia, or some such place.  For one
+wild moment the thought had come to Soames: 'Why shouldn't I buy it
+back?  I meant it for my!'  No sooner come than gone.  Too lugubrious
+a triumph; with too many humiliating memories for himself and Fleur.
+She would never live there after what had happened.  No, the place
+must go its way to some peer or profiteer.  It had been a bone of
+contention from the first, the shell of the feud; and with the woman
+gone, it was an empty shell.  "For Sale or To Let."  With his mind's
+eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied wall which he
+had built.
+
+He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery.  There
+was certainly a body of work!  And now that the fellow was dead it
+did not seem so trivial.  The drawings were pleasing enough, with
+quite a sense of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush
+work.  'His father and my father; he and I; his child and mine!'
+thought Soames.  So it had gone on!  And all about that woman!
+Softened by the events of the past week, affected by the melancholy
+beauty of the autumn day, Soames came nearer than he had ever been to
+realisation of that truth--passing the understanding of a Forsyte
+pure--that the body of Beauty has a spiritual essence, uncapturable
+save by a devotion which thinks not of self.  After all, he was near
+that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps that made him
+understand a little how he had missed the prize.  And there, among
+the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that which he had
+found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance
+which surprised him.  But he did not buy a drawing.
+
+Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air
+he met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his
+mind when he went into the Gallery--Irene, herself, coming in.  So
+she had not gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that
+fellow's remains!  He subdued the little involuntary leap of his
+subconsciousness, the mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm
+of this once-owned woman, and passed her with averted eyes.  But when
+he had gone by he could not for the life of him help looking back.
+This, then, was finality--the heat and stress of his life, the
+madness and the longing thereof, the only defeat he had known, would
+be over when she faded from his view this time; even such memories
+had their own queer aching value.
+
+She, too, was looking back.  Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her
+lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak.  It was the turn
+of Soames to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell
+wave; he went out into the fashionable street quivering from head to
+foot.  He knew what she had meant to say: "Now that I am going for
+ever out of the reach of you and yours--forgive me; I wish you well."
+That was the meaning; last sign of that terrible reality--passing
+morality, duty, common sense--her aversion from him who had owned her
+body, but had never touched her spirit or her heart.  It hurt; yes--
+more than if she had kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
+
+Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-
+cab to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the
+Forsyte vault.  Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria,
+tall, ugly, and individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive
+system.  He could remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated
+the addition to its face of the pheasant proper.  The proposal had
+been rejected in favour of a wreath in stone, above the stark words:
+"The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850."  It was in good order.
+All trace of the recent interment had been removed, and its sober
+grey gloomed reposefully in the sunshine.  The whole family lay there
+now, except old Jolyon's wife, who had gone back under a contract to
+her own family vault in Suffolk; old Jolyon himself lying at Robin
+Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that none knew where she might
+be.  Soames gazed at it with satisfaction--massive, needing little
+attention; and this was important, for he was well aware that no one
+would attend to it when he himself was gone, and he would have to be
+looking out for lodgings soon.  He might have twenty years before
+him, but one never knew.  Twenty years without an aunt or uncle, with
+a wife of whom one had better not know anything, with a daughter gone
+from home.  His mood inclined to melancholy and retrospection.
+
+This cemetery was full, they said--of people with extraordinary
+names, buried in extraordinary taste.  Still, they had a fine view up
+here, right over London.  Annette had once given him a story to read
+by that Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern, where all the
+skeletons emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious
+inscriptions on the stones were altered to descriptions of their
+sins.  Not a true story at all.  He didn't know about the French, but
+there was not much real harm in English people except their teeth and
+their taste, which was certainly deplorable.  "The family vault of
+Jolyon Forsyte: 1850."  A lot of people had been buried here since
+then--a lot of English life crumbled to mould and dust!  The boom of
+an airplane passing under the gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift
+his eyes.  The deuce of a lot of expansion had gone on.  But it all
+came back to a cemetery--to a name and a date on a tomb.  And he
+thought with a curious pride that he and his family had done little
+or nothing to help this feverish expansion.  Good solid middlemen,
+they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.  "Superior
+Dosset," indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted in a
+doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them all
+had soiled his hands by creating anything--unless you counted Val
+Dartie and his horse-breeding.  Collectors, solicitors, barristers,
+merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even
+soldiers--there they had been!  The country had expanded, as it were,
+in spite of them.  They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken
+advantage of the process and when you considered how "Superior
+Dosset" had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal
+descendants already owned what old Gradman estimated at between a
+million and a million and a half, it was not so bad!  And yet he
+sometimes felt as if the family bolt was shot, their possessive
+instinct dying out.  They seemed unable to make money--this fourth
+generation; they were going into art, literature, farming, or the
+army; or just living on what was left them--they had no push and no
+tenacity.  They would die out if they didn't take care.
+
+Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze.  The air up
+here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the
+feeling that mortality was in it.  He gazed restlessly at the crosses
+and the urns, the angels, the "immortelles," the flowers, gaudy or
+withering; and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different
+from anything else up there that he was obliged to walk the few
+necessary yards and look at it.  A sober corner, with a massive
+queer-shaped cross of grey rough-hewn granite, guarded by four dark
+yew-trees.  The spot was free from the pressure of the other graves,
+having a little box-hedged garden on the far side, and in front a
+goldening birch-tree.  This oasis in the desert of conventional
+graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and he sat down
+there in the sunshine.  Through those trembling gold birch leaves he
+gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of memory.  He thought
+of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair was rusty-golden and
+her white shoulders his--Irene, the prize of his love-passion,
+resistant to his ownership.  He saw Bosinney's body lying in that
+white mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with
+the eyes of a dying bird.  Again he thought of her by the little
+green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him.  His
+fancy took him on beside his drifting river on the November day when
+Fleur was to be born, took him to the dead leaves floating on the
+green-tinged water and the snake-headed weed for ever swaying and
+nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered.  And on again to the window opened
+to the cold starry night above Hyde Park, with his father lying dead.
+His fancy darted to that picture of "the future town," to that boy's
+and Fleur's first meeting; to the bluish trail of Prosper Profond's
+cigar, and Fleur in the window pointing down to where the fellow
+prowled.  To the sight of Irene and that dead fellow sitting side by
+side in the stand at Lord's.  To her and that boy at Robin Hill.  To
+the sofa, where Fleur lay crushed up in the corner; to her lips
+pressed into his cheek, and her farewell "Daddy."  And suddenly he
+saw again Irene's grey-gloved hand waving its last gesture of
+release.
+
+He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the scut of
+his possessive instinct, warming himself even with its failures.
+
+"To Let"--the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his soul,
+his investments, and his woman, without check or question.  And now
+the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman had herself,
+and God knew who had his soul.  "To Let"--that sane and simple creed!
+
+The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new
+forms only when their destructive flood should have passed its full.
+He sat there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts resolutely
+set on the past--as a man might ride into a wild night with his face
+to the tail of his galloping horse.  Athwart the Victorian dykes the
+waters were rolling on property, manners, and morals, on melody and
+the old forms of art--waters bringing to his mouth a salt taste as of
+blood, lapping to the foot of this Highgate Hill where Victorianism
+lay buried.  And sitting there, high up on its most individual spot,
+Soames--like a figure of Investment--refused their restless sounds.
+Instinctively he would not fight them--there was in him too much
+primeval wisdom, of Man the possessive animal.  They would quiet down
+when they had fulfilled their tidal fever of dispossessing and
+destroying; when the creations and the properties of others were
+sufficiently broken and defected--they would lapse and ebb, and fresh
+forms would rise based on an instinct older than the fever of change-
+-the instinct of Home.
+
+"Je m'en fiche," said Prosper Profond.  Soames did not say "Je m'en
+fiche"--it was French, and the fellow was a thorn in his side--but
+deep down he knew that change was only the interval of death between
+two forms of life, destruction necessary to make room for fresher
+property.  What though the board was up, and cosiness to let?--some
+one would come along and take it again some day.
+
+And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there--the melancholy
+craving in his heart--because the sun was like enchantment on his
+face and on the clouds and on the golden birch leaves, and the wind's
+rustle was so gentle, and the yewtree green so dark, and the sickle
+of a moon pale in the sky.
+
+He might wish and wish and never get it--the beauty and the loving in
+the world!
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of AWAKENING and TO LET
+by John Galsworthy.
+
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