r, a collar unglossed! He
would not have gone without a bath for worlds--it was the fashion to take
baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!

But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside streams,
for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.

In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the wall. As
in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation,
the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on it a
conventional superstructure.

Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of other
houses with the same high aspirations, having become: 'That very charming
little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite individual, my dear--really
elegant.'

For Soames Forsyte--read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel
Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middle class Englishman in
London with any pretensions to taste; and though the decoration be
different, the phrase is just.

On the evening of August 8, a week after the expedition to Robin Hill, in
the dining-room of this house--'quite individual, my dear--really
elegant'--Soames and Irene were seated at dinner. A hot dinner on
Sundays was a little distinguishing elegance common to this house and
many others. Early in married life Soames had laid down the rule: 'The
servants must give us hot dinner on Sundays--they've nothing to do but
play the concertina.'

The custom had produced no revolution. For--to Soames a rather
deplorable sign--servants were devoted to Irene, who, in defiance of all
safe tradition, appeared to recognise their right to a share in the
weaknesses of human nature.

The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly,
at the handsome rosewood table; they dined without a cloth--a
distinguishing elegance--and so far had not spoken a word.

Soames liked to talk during dinner about business, or what he had been
buying, and so long as he talked Irene's silence did not distress him.
This evening he had found it impossible to talk. The decision to build
had been weighing on his mind all the week, and he had made up his mind
to tell her.

His nervousness about this disclosure irritated him profoundly; she had
no business to make him feel like that--a wife and a husband being one
person. She had not looked at him once since they sat down; and he
wondered what on earth she had been thinking about all th