wo hours every
morning to teach him her language, together with history, geography and
sums; nor were the piano lessons which his mother gave him disagreeable,
for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune, never making him
practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that he remained eager
to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his father he learned to
draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a highly educated little
boy. Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed in his mouth without
spoiling it, though "Da" sometimes said that other children would do him
a "world of good."

It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held
him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which she did
not approve. This first interference with the free individualism of a
Forsyte drove him almost frantic. There was something appalling in the
utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to whether it
would ever come to an end. Suppose she never let him get up any more!
He suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds. Worse
than anything was his perception that "Da" had taken all that time to
realise the agony of fear he was enduring. Thus, dreadfully, was
revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.

When he was let up he remained convinced that "Da" had done a dreadful
thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had been
compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say: "Mum, don't
let 'Da' hold me down on my back again."

His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
hair--"couleur de feuille morte," as little Jon had not yet learned to
call it--had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown velvet
tunic, and answered:

"No, darling, I won't."

She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his
father:

"Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's so devoted to him";
and his father's answer:

"Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it feels like
to be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it for a minute."

Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon
was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed where
he was, ravaged by des