publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even soldiers--there
they had been! The country had expanded, as it were, in spite of them.
They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken advantage of the
process and when you considered how "Superior Dosset" had begun life with
next to nothing, and his lineal descendants already owned what old
Gradman estimated at between a million and a million and a half, it was
not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as if the family bolt was shot,
their possessive instinct dying out. They seemed unable to make
money--this fourth generation; they were going into art, literature,
farming, or the army; or just living on what was left them--they had no
push and no tenacity. They would die out if they didn't take care.

Soames turned from the vault and faced toward the breeze. The air up
here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the feeling
that mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the crosses and the
urns, the angels, the "immortelles," the flowers, gaudy or withering; and
suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different from anything else
up there that he was obliged to walk the few necessary yards and look at
it. A sober corner, with a massive queer-shaped cross of grey rough-hewn
granite, guarded by four dark yew-trees. The spot was free from the
pressure of the other graves, having a little box-hedged garden on the
far side, and in front a goldening birch-tree. This oasis in the desert
of conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and he
sat down there in the sunshine. Through those trembling gold birch
leaves he gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of memory. He
thought of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair was rusty-golden
and her white shoulders his--Irene, the prize of his love-passion,
resistant to his ownership. He saw Bosinney's body lying in that white
mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa looking at space with the eyes of
a dying bird. Again he thought of her by the little green Niobe in the
Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him. His fancy took him on beside
his drifting river on the November day when Fleur was to be born, took
him to the dead leaves floating on the green-tinged water and the
snake-headed weed for ever swaying and nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered.
And on again to the window opened to the cold starry night above Hyde
Park, with his father lying dead. His fancy darted to that