rst had happened.
"Soames!"
Soames turned his head a very little.
"How are you?" he said. "Haven't seen you for twenty years."
"No. Whatever made you come here?"
"My sins," said Soames. "What stuff!"
"Stuff? Oh, yes--of course; it hasn't arrived yet.
"It never will," said Soames; "it must be making a dead loss."
"Of course it is."
"How d'you know?"
"It's my Gallery."
Soames sniffed from sheer surprise.
"Yours? What on earth makes you run a show like this?"
"I don't treat Art as if it were grocery."
Soames pointed to the Future Town. "Look at that! Who's going to live
in a town like that, or with it on his walls?"
June contemplated the picture for a moment.
"It's a vision," she said.
"The deuce!"
There was silence, then June rose. 'Crazylooking creature!' he thought.
"Well," he said, "you'll find your young stepbrother here with a woman I
used to know. If you take my advice, you'll close this exhibition."
June looked back at him. "Oh! You Forsyte!" she said, and moved on.
About her light, fly-away figure, passing so suddenly away, was a look of
dangerous decisions. Forsyte! Of course, he was a Forsyte! And so was
she! But from the time when, as a mere girl, she brought Bosinney into
his life to wreck it, he had never hit it off with June and never would!
And here she was, unmarried to this day, owning a Gallery!... And
suddenly it came to Soames how little he knew now of his own family. The
old aunts at Timothy's had been dead so many years; there was no
clearing-house for news. What had they all done in the War? Young
Roger's boy had been wounded, St. John Hayman's second son killed; young
Nicholas' eldest had got an O. B. E., or whatever they gave them. They
had all joined up somehow, he believed. That boy of Jolyon's and
Irene's, he supposed, had been too young; his own generation, of course,
too old, though Giles Hayman had driven a car for the Red Cross--and
Jesse Hayman been a special constable--those "Dromios" had always been of
a sporting type! As for himself, he had given a motor ambulance, read
the papers till he was sick of them, passed through much anxiety, bought
no clothes, lost seven pounds in weight; he didn't know what more he
could have done at his age. Indeed, thinking it over, it struck him that
he and his family had taken this war very differently to that affair with
the Boers, which had been supposed to tax all the resources of the
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