uffoon! Soames passed him with his sideway smile. Lying back, rubbing
his skin uneasily for the first signs of perspiration, he thought: 'Let
them laugh! I won't feel anything! I can't stand violence! It's not
good for me!'

CHAPTER VII

A SUMMER NIGHT

Soames left dead silence in the little study. "Thank you for that good
lie," said Jolyon suddenly. "Come out--the air in here is not what it
was!"

In front of a long high southerly wall on which were trained peach-trees
the two walked up and down in silence. Old Jolyon had planted some
cupressus-trees, at intervals, between this grassy terrace and the
dipping meadow full of buttercups and ox-eyed daisies; for twelve years
they had flourished, till their dark spiral shapes had quite a look of
Italy. Birds fluttered softly in the wet shrubbery; the swallows swooped
past, with a steel-blue sheen on their swift little bodies; the grass
felt springy beneath the feet, its green refreshed; butterflies chased
each other. After that painful scene the quiet of Nature was wonderfully
poignant. Under the sun-soaked wall ran a narrow strip of garden-bed
full of mignonette and pansies, and from the bees came a low hum in which
all other sounds were set--the mooing of a cow deprived of her calf, the
calling of a cuckoo from an elm-tree at the bottom of the meadow. Who
would have thought that behind them, within ten miles, London began--that
London of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise;
its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and
stucco? That London which had seen Irene's early tragedy, and Jolyon's
own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse of the possessive
instinct!

And while they walked Jolyon pondered those words: 'I hope you'll treat
him as you treated me.' That would depend on himself. Could he trust
himself? Did Nature permit a Forsyte not to make a slave of what he
adored? Could beauty be confided to him? Or should she not be just a
visitor, coming when she would, possessed for moments which passed, to
return only at her own choosing? 'We are a breed of spoilers!' thought
Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let
her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not.
Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never-never her cage!'

She was the chink of beauty in his dream. Was he to pass through the
curtains now and reach her? Was the