re full of bargains
earned by the trained faculty of knowing better than other people.
Selling what was about to decline, keeping what was still going up, and
exercising judicious insight into future taste, he would make a unique
collection, which at his death would pass to the nation under the title
'Forsyte Bequest.'

If the divorce went through, he had determined on his line with Madame
Lamotte. She had, he knew, but one real ambition--to live on her
'renter' in Paris near her grandchildren. He would buy the goodwill of
the Restaurant Bretagne at a fancy price. Madame would live like a
Queen-Mother in Paris on the interest, invested as she would know how.
(Incidentally Soames meant to put a capable manager in her place, and
make the restaurant pay good interest on his money. There were great
possibilities in Soho.) On Annette he would promise to settle fifteen
thousand pounds (whether designedly or not), precisely the sum old Jolyon
had settled on 'that woman.'

A letter from Jolyon's solicitor to his own had disclosed the fact that
'those two' were in Italy. And an opportunity had been duly given for
noting that they had first stayed at an hotel in London. The matter was
clear as daylight, and would be disposed of in half an hour or so; but
during that half-hour he, Soames, would go down to hell; and after that
half-hour all bearers of the Forsyte name would feel the bloom was off
the rose. He had no illusions like Shakespeare that roses by any other
name would smell as sweet. The name was a possession, a concrete,
unstained piece of property, the value of which would be reduced some
twenty per cent. at least. Unless it were Roger, who had once refused to
stand for Parliament, and--oh, irony!--Jolyon, hung on the line, there
had never been a distinguished Forsyte. But that very lack of
distinction was the name's greatest asset. It was a private name,
intensely individual, and his own property; it had never been exploited
for good or evil by intrusive report. He and each member of his family
owned it wholly, sanely, secretly, without any more interference from the
public than had been necessitated by their births, their marriages, their
deaths. And during these weeks of waiting and preparing to drop the Law,
he conceived for that Law a bitter distaste, so deeply did he resent its
coming violation of his name, forced on him by the need he felt to
perpetuate that name in a lawful manner. The monstrous inj