of Midian--he prowls and prowls around";
to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: "What's the use of keepin'
fit?" or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner, or alien as
it was now called. Certain, that Annette was looking particularly
handsome, and that Soames--had sold him a Gauguin and then torn up the
cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself had said: "I didn't get that
small picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde."

However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's evergreen
little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness which no one
mistook for naiv ete, a word hardly applicable to Monsieur Prosper
Profond. Winifred still found him "amusing," and would write him little
notes saying: "Come and have a 'jolly' with us"--it was breath of life to
her to keep up with the phrases of the day.

The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing in
it--which was unnatural. The English type of disillusionment was
familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable circles.
It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got something out of
it. But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose, but because there was
nothing in anything, was not English; and that which was not English one
could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not precisely bad form. It
was like having the mood which the War had left, seated--dark, heavy,
smiling, indifferent--in your Empire chair; it was like listening to that
mood talking through thick pink lips above a little diabolic beard. It
was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it--for the English character at
large--"a bit too thick"--for if nothing was really worth getting
excited about, there were always games, and one could make it so! Even
Winifred, ever a Forsyte at heart, felt that there was nothing to be had
out of such a mood of disillusionment, so that it really ought not to be
there. Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood too plain in a country
which decently veiled such realities.

When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to dinner
that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred's little
drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of seeing
nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with an air
of seeing a fire which was not there.

Monsieur Profond came from the window. He wa