egan.

"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 together, and love driving
them apart, Jon passed very painful days secretly disgusted and
disappointed with himself. His mother would look at him with such a
patient sadness which yet had in it an instinctive pride, as if she were
reserving her defence. If she smiled he was angry that his answering
smile should be so grudging and unnatural. He did not judge or condemn
her; that was all too remote--indeed, the idea of doing so had never
come to him. No