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,