frames, he was noticeably silent. Whether because he had been to a funeral or not, the peculiar Forsyte build of his facewas seen to the best advantage this afternoon — a face concave and long, with a jaw which divested of flesh would haveseemed extravagant: altogether a chinny face though not at all ill-looking. He was feeling more strongly than ever thatTimothy’s was hopelessly ‘rum-ti-too’ and the souls of his aunts dismally mid-Victorian. The subject on which alone hewanted to talk — his own undivorced position — was unspeakable. And yet it occupied his mind to the exclusion of all else.It was only since the Spring that this had been so and a new feeling grown up which was egging him on towards what he knewmight well be folly in a Forsyte of forty-five. More and more of late he had been conscious that he was ‘getting on.’ Thefortune already considerable when he conceived the house at Robin Hill which had finally wrecked his marriage with Irene,had mounted with surprising vigour in the twelve lonely years during which he had devoted himself to little else. He wasworth to-day well over a hundred thousand pounds, and had no one to leave it to — no real object for going on with what washis religion. Even if he were to relax his efforts, money made money, and he felt that he would have a hundred and fiftythousand before he knew where he was. There had always been a strongly domestic, philoprogenitive side to Soames; baulkedand frustrated, it had hidden itself away, but now had crept out again in this his ‘prime of life.’ Concreted and focussedof late by the attraction of a girl’s undoubted beauty, it had become a veritable prepossession.

And this girl was French, not likely to lose her head, or accept any unlegalised position. Moreover, Soames himselfdisliked the thought of that. He had tasted of the sordid side of sex during those long years of forced celibacy,secretively, and always with disgust, for he was fastidious, and his sense of law and order innate. He wanted no hole and