ike that from time immemorial"

"But you'll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?"

"I should say increasing among those who have none."

"Well, look at me! I'm heir to an entailed estate. I don't want the
thing; I'd cut the entail to-morrow."

"You're not married, and you don't know what you're talking about."

Fleur saw the young man's eyes turn rather piteously upon her.

"Do you really mean that marriage--?" he began.

"Society is built on marriage," came from between her father's close
lips; "marriage and its consequences. Do you want to do away with it?"

Young Mont made a distracted gesture. Silence brooded over the dinner
table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest--a pheasant
proper--under the electric light in an alabaster globe. And outside, the
river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and sweet scents.

'Monday,' thought Fleur; 'Monday!'

VI

DESPERATE

The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty
to the only Jolyon Forsyte left. The necessary forms and ceremonies
--the reading of the Will, valuation of the estate, distribution of
the legacies--were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet
of age. Jolyon was cremated. By his special wish no one attended
that ceremony, or wore black for him. The succession of his
property, controlled to some extent by old Jolyon's Will, left his
widow in possession of Robin Hill, with two thousand five hundred
pounds a year for life. Apart from this the two Wills worked
together in some complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon's
three children should have an equal share in their grandfather's and
father's property in the future as in the present, save only that
Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his capital when he
was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the spirit of
theirs, in order that their children might have the body after them.
If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he outlived
them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was
considered in Lincoln's Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of income
tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he
died. All this was nothing to Jon, and little enough to his mother.
It was June who did everything needful for one who had left his
affairs in perfect order. When she had gone, and those two were
alone again in the great house, alone with death drawing them