was sworn at; once the whisper, "If only it could always be like
this!" sent the blood flying again from his heart, and he waited there,
patient and dogged, for the two to move. But it was only a poor thin
slip of a shop-girl in her draggled blouse who passed him, clinging to
her lover's arm.

A hundred other lovers too whispered that hope in the stillness of the
trees, a hundred other lovers clung to each other.

But shaking himself with sudden disgust, Soames returned to the path,
and left that seeking for he knew not what.

CHAPTER III--MEETING AT THE BOTANICAL

Young Jolyon, whose circumstances were not those of a Forsyte, found at
times a difficulty in sparing the money needful for those country
jaunts and researches into Nature, without having prosecuted which no
watercolour artist ever puts brush to paper.

He was frequently, in fact, obliged to take his colour-box into
the Botanical Gardens, and there, on his stool, in the shade of a
monkey-puzzler or in the lee of some India-rubber plant, he would spend
long hours sketching.

An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had delivered
himself as follows:

"In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of
them certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see, they're so
scattered; you'll never get the public to look at them. Now, if you'd
taken a definite subject, such as 'London by Night,' or 'The Crystal
Palace in the Spring,' and made a regular series, the public would have
known at once what they were looking at. I can't lay too much stress
upon that. All the men who are making great names in Art, like Crum
Stone or Bleeder, are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by
specializing and putting their works all in the same pigeon-hole, so
that the public know at once where to go. And this stands to reason,
for if a man's a collector he doesn't want people to smell at the canvas
to find out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say
at once, 'A capital Forsyte!' It is all the more important for you to be
careful to choose a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since
there's no very marked originality in your style."

Young Jolyon, standing by the little piano, where a bowl of dried rose
leaves, the only produce of the garden, was deposited on a bit of faded
damask, listened with his dim smile.

Turning to his wife, who was looking at the speaker with an angry
expression on her thin face,