ng; people oughtn't to own each other.
Everybody sees that now. If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?"

"It's not for me to disagree there," said Jolyon; "but that's all quite
beside the mark. This is a matter of human feeling."

"Of course it is," cried June, "the human feeling of those two young
things."

"My dear," said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; "you're talking
nonsense."

"I'm not. If they prove to be really fond of each other, why should they
be made unhappy because of the past?"

"You haven't lived that past. I have--through the feelings of my wife;
through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is devoted
can."

June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.

"If," she said suddenly, "she were the daughter of Philip Bosinney, I
could understand you better. Irene loved him, she never loved Soames."

Jolyon uttered a deep sound-the sort of noise an Italian peasant woman
utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously, but he paid
no attention to it, quite carried away by his feelings.

"That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I know him,
would mind a love-past. It's the brutality of a union without love.
This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned Jon's mother as a
negro-slave was owned. You can't lay that ghost; don't try to, June!
It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh and blood of the man who
possessed Jon's mother against her will. It's no good mincing words; I
want it clear once for all. And now I mustn't talk any more, or I shall
have to sit up with this all night." And, putting his hand over his
heart, Jolyon turned his back on his daughter and stood looking at the
river Thames.

June, who by nature never saw a hornet's nest until she had put her head
into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her arm through
his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself wrong, because
that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly impressed by the
obvious fact that the subject was very bad for him. She rubbed her cheek
against his shoulder, and said nothing.

After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at once, but
pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The peaceful beauty of
the afternoon seduced for a little one not much given to the vague and
poetic. In the field beyond the bank where her skiff lay up, a machine
drawn by a grey horse was turning an early field of hay. She watched the
grass