oathsome, I'm not a
boor, I'm not a fool. What is it? What's the mystery about me?"

Her answer was a long sigh.

He clasped his hands with a gesture that for him was strangely full of
expression. "When I came here to-night I was--I hoped--I meant
everything that I could to do away with the past, and start fair again.
And you meet me with 'nerves,' and silence, and sighs. There's nothing
tangible. It's like--it's like a spider's web."

"Yes."

That whisper from across the room maddened Soames afresh.

"Well, I don't choose to be in a spider's web. I'll cut it." He walked
straight up to her. "Now!" What he had gone up to her to do he really
did not know. But when he was close, the old familiar scent of her
clothes suddenly affected him. He put his hands on her shoulders and
bent forward to kiss her. He kissed not her lips, but a little hard line
where the lips had been drawn in; then his face was pressed away by her
hands; he heard her say: "Oh! No!" Shame, compunction, sense of futility
flooded his whole being, he turned on his heel and went straight out.

CHAPTER III

VISIT TO IRENE

Jolyon found June waiting on the platform at Paddington. She had
received his telegram while at breakfast. Her abode--a studio and two
bedrooms in a St. John's Wood garden--had been selected by her for the
complete independence which it guaranteed. Unwatched by Mrs. Grundy,
unhindered by permanent domestics, she could receive lame ducks at any
hour of day or night, and not seldom had a duck without studio of its own
made use of June's. She enjoyed her freedom, and possessed herself with
a sort of virginal passion; the warmth which she would have lavished on
Bosinney, and of which--given her Forsyte tenacity--he must surely have
tired, she now expended in championship of the underdogs and budding
'geniuses' of the artistic world. She lived, in fact, to turn ducks into
the swans she believed they were. The very fervour of her protection
warped her judgments. But she was loyal and liberal; her small eager
hand was ever against the oppressions of academic and commercial opinion,
and though her income was considerable, her bank balance was often a
minus quantity.

She had come to Paddington Station heated in her soul by a visit to Eric
Cobbley. A miserable Gallery had refused to let that straight-haired
genius have his one-man show after all. Its impudent manager, after
visiting his studio, had expressed the