out such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin. Why, even
since the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to
be sneezed at. During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur's life,
indeed, he had marked so many "movements," seen the tides of taste and
technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything
except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion.
This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial
instinct, or lose the market. He got up and stood before the picture,
trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people. Above the tomato
blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said:
"He's got the airplanes wonderfully, don't you think!" Below the tomato
blobs was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he
could assign no meaning whatever, till some one else came by,
murmuring: "What expression he gets with his foreground!" Expression?
Of what? Soames went back to his seat. The thing was "rich," as his
father would have said, and he wouldn't give a damn for it. Expression!
Ah! they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent.
So it was coming here too, was it? He remembered the first wave of
influenza in 1887--or 8--hatched in China, so they said. He wondered
where this--this Expressionism--had been hatched. The thing was a
regular disease!

He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and
the "Future Town." Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames
put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed
through the slit between. No mistaking that back, elegant as ever
though the hair above had gone grey. Irene! His divorced wife--Irene!
And this, no doubt, was her son--by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte--their
boy, six months older than his own girl! And mumbling over in his mind
the bitter days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but
quickly sat down again. She had turned her head to speak to her boy;
her profile was still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem
powdery, as if fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames,
first possessor of them, had never seen them smile. Grudgingly he
admitted her still beautiful, and in figure almost as young as ever.
And how that boy smiled back at her! Emotion squeezed Soames' heart.
The sight infringed his sense of justice. He grudged her that boy's
smile--it went beyond what Fleur