eelings.

"That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I know him,
would mind a love-past. It's the brutality of a union without love.
This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's mother as a
negro-slave was owned. You can't lay that ghost; don't try to, June!
It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and blood of the man who
possessed Jon's mother against her will. It's no good mincing words; I
want it clear once for all. And now I mustn't talk any more, or I shall
have to sit up with this all night." And, putting his hand over his
heart, Jolyon turned his back on his daughter and stood looking at the
river Thames.

June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her head
into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her arm through
his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because
that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the
obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him. She rubbed her cheek
against his shoulder, and said nothing.

After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but
pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The peaceful beauty of the
afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and
poetic. In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine
drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of hay. She watched the
grass cascading over and behind the light wheels with fascination--it
looked so cool and fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of
the willows and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true
river song. Alongside, in the deep green water, weeds, like yellow
snakes, were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the
farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It was an
afternoon to dream. And she took out Jon's letters--not flowery
effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and done by a
longing very agreeable to her, and all ending "Your devoted J." Fleur
was not sentimental, her desires were ever concrete and concentrated, but
what poetry there was in the daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly
in those weeks of waiting gathered round her memories of Jon. They all
belonged to grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She enjoyed
him in the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars could
persuade her that she was standing beside him in the