ey. 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, his work--though he did little enough
work now! To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable
state, for such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind
stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.
Of such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he
never could, and must still hover on the hope that he mi