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 strong pulling us apart."

So! Her deception had found her out. But Jon--she felt--had forgiven
that. It was what he said of his mother which caused the guttering in
her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.

Her first impulse was to reply--her second, not to reply. These impulses
were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while desperation
grew within her. She was not her father's child for no