ssly
'rum-ti-too' and the souls of his aunts dismally mid-Victorian. The
subject on which alone he wanted 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 knew might
well be folly in a Forsyte of forty-five. More and more of late he had
been conscious that he was 'getting on.' The fortune 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 was worth to-day well over a hundred thousand pounds, and had
no one to leave it to--no real object for going on with what was his
religion. Even if he were to relax his efforts, money made money, and he
felt that he would have a hundred and fifty thousand before he knew where
he was. There had always been a strongly domestic, philoprogenitive side
to Soames; baulked and frustrated, it had hidden itself away, but now had
crept out again in this his 'prime of life.' Concreted and focussed of
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 himself disliked 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
corner liaison. A marriage at the Embassy in Paris, a few months'
travel, and he could bring Annette back quite separated from a past which
in truth was not too distinguished, for she only kept the accounts in her
mother's Soho Restaurant; he could bring her back as something very new
and chic with her French taste and self-possession, to reign at 'The
Shelter' near Mapledurham. On Forsyte 'Change and among his riverside
friends it would be current that he had met a charming French girl on his
travels and married her. There would be the flavour of romance, and a
certain cachet about a French wife. No! He was not at all afraid of
that. It was only this cursed undivorced condition of his, and--and the
question whether Annette would take him, which he dared not put to the
touch until he had a