his 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 had written 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."

Her deception had found her out. But Jon--she felt--had forgiven that.
It was what he said of his mother which caused the fluttering 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
nothing. The tenacity, which had at once made and undone Soames, was
her backbone, too, frilled and embroidered by French grace and
quickn