nto the Goupenor Gallery. That chap
Jolyon's watercolours were on view there. He went in to look down his
nose at them--it might give him some faint satisfaction. The news had
trickled through from June to Val's wife, from her to Val, from Val to
his mother, from her to Soames, that the house--the fatal house at
Robin Hill--was for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British
Columbia, or some such place. For one wild moment the thought had come
to Soames: 'Why shouldn't I buy it back? I meant it for my!' No sooner
come than gone. Too lugubrious a triumph; with too many humiliating
memories for himself and Fleur. She would never live there after what
had happened. No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer.
It had been a bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud;
and with the woman gone, it was an empty shell. "For Sale or To Let."
With his mind's eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied
wall which he had built.

He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery. There was
certainly a body of work! And now that the fellow was dead it did not
seem so trivial. The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense
of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work. 'His father
and my father; he and I; his child and mine!' thought Soames. So it had
gone on! And all about that woman! Softened by the events of the past
week, affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came
nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth--passing the
understanding of a Forsyte pure--that the body of Beauty has a spiritual
essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks not of self. After
all, he was near that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps
that made him understand a little how he had missed the prize. And
there, among the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that
which he had found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a
tolerance which surprised him. But he did not buy a drawing.

Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air he
met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his mind
when he went into the Gallery--Irene, herself, coming in. So she had not
gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that fellow's remains!
He subdued the little involuntary leap of his subconsciousness, the
mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm of this once-owned woman,
and pa