possessive instinct--shutters up--To let? Silly!

The sultry air, charged with a scent of meadow-sweet, of river and roses,
closed on his senses, drowsing them.

V

THE FIXED IDEA

"The fixed idea," which has outrun more constables than any other form of
human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when it takes the
avid guise of love. To hedges and ditches, and doors, to humans without
ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the contents sucking their
fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from this fast malady--the fixed
idea of love pays no attention. It runs with eyes turned inward to its
own light, oblivious of all other stars. Those with the fixed ideas that
human happiness depends on their art, on vivisecting dogs, on hating
foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining Ministers, on making wheels
go round, on preventing their neighbours from being divorced, on
conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church dogma, paradox and
superiority to everybody else, with other forms of ego-mania--all are
unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is the possession of
some her or him. And though Fleur, those chilly summer days, pursued the
scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are paid for, and whose
business is pleasure, she was--as Winifred would have said in the latest
fashion of speech--"honest to God" indifferent to it all. She wished and
wished for the moon, which sailed in cold skies above the river or the
Green Park when she went to Town. She even kept Jon's letters, covered
with pink silk, on her heart, than which in days when corsets were so
low, sentiment so despised, and chests so out of fashion, there could,
perhaps, have been no greater proof of the fixity of her idea.

After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received his
answer three days later on her return from a river picnic. It was his
first letter since their meeting at June's. She opened it with
misgiving, and read it with dismay.

"Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past. I won't tell it
you--I think you knew when we met at June's. She says you did. If you
did, Fleur, you ought to have told me. I expect you only heard your
father's side of it. I have heard my mother's. It's dreadful. Now that
she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt her more. Of course, I long for
you all day, but I don't believe now that we shall ever come
together--there's something too stron