able, and opened it.
Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings. The thought
of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a revelation of
their relationship, startling to one little given to introspective
philosophy. Without saying another word he went out and up to the
picture-gallery. This came of marrying a Frenchwoman! And yet, without
her there would have been no Fleur! She had served her purpose.

'She's right,' he thought; 'I can do nothing. I don't even know that
there's anything in it.' The instinct of self-preservation warned him to
batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air. Unless one
believed there was something in a thing, there wasn't.

That night he went into her room. She received him in the most
matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them. And he
returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace. If one didn't
choose to see, one needn't. And he did not choose--in future he did not
choose. There was nothing to be gained by it--nothing! Opening the
drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed photograph
of Fleur. When he had looked at it a little he slipped it down, and
there was that other one--that old one of Irene. An owl hooted while he
stood in his window gazing at it. The owl hooted, the red climbing roses
seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom. God!
That had been a different thing! Passion--Memory! Dust!

VII

JUNE TAKES A HAND

One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York, an
egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June Forsyte's
studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick. On the evening of July 6,
Boris Strumolowski--several of whose works were on show there because
they were as yet too advanced to be on show anywhere else--had begun
well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like silence which admirably
suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned countenance framed in
bright hair banged like a girl's. June had known him three weeks, and he
still seemed to her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of the
future; a sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an
unappreciative West. Until that evening he had conversationally confined
himself to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust he
had just shaken from off his feet--a country, in his opinion, so
barbarous in every way that he had sold pra