The magazine dropped from his fingers, and he sat staring out of the large windows at the flowers about to sleep. He hadn’t so many more years before him now, he supposed. They said that people lived longer than they used to, but how he was going to outlive the old Forsytes, he didn’t know–the ten of them had averaged eighty-seven years–a monstrous age! And yet he didn’t feel it would be natural to die in another sixteen years, with the flowers growing like that out there, and his grandson coming along nicely. With age one suffered from the feeling that one might have enjoyed things more. Cows, for instance, and rooks, and good smells. Curious how the country grew on you as you got older! But he didn’t know that it would ever grow on Fleur–she wanted people about her; still she might lose that when she found out once for all that there was so little in them. The light faded on the garden and his reverie. There were lots of people out on the sea front, and a band had begun to play. A band was playing behind him, too, in the hotel somewhere. They must be dancing! He might have a look at that before he went up. On his trip round the world with Fleur he had often put his nose out and watched the dancing on deck–funny business nowadays, shimmying, bunnyhugging, didn’t they call it? – dreadful! He remembered the academy of dancing where he had been instructed as a small boy in the polka, the mazurka, deportment and calisthenics. And a pale grin spread over his chaps–that little old Miss Shears, who had taught him and Winifred, what wouldn’t she have died of if she had lived to see these modern dances! People despised the old dances, and when he came to think of it, he had despised them himself, but compared with this modern walking about and shaking at the knees, they had been dances, after all. Look at the Highland schottische, where you spun round and howled, and the old galop to the tune “D’ye ken John Peel”–some stingo in them; and you had to change your collar. No changing collars nowadays–they just dawdled. For an age that prided itself on enjoying life, they had a funny idea of it. He remembered once, before his first marriage, going–by accident–to one of those old dancing clubs, the Athenians, and seeing George Forsyte and his cronies waltzing and swinging the girls round and round clean off their feet. The girls at those clubs, then, were all professional lights-o’-love. Very different now, he was told; but there it was–people posed nowadays, they posed as viveurs, and all the rest of it, but they didn’t vive; they thought too much about how to.
The music–all jazz–died behind him and rose again, and he, too, rose. He would just have a squint and go to bed.
The ball-room was somewhat detached, and Soames went down a corridor. At its end he came on a twirl of sound and colour. They were hard at it, “dolled up” to the nines–Mephistopheleses, ladies of Spain, Italian peasants, Pierrots. His bewildered eyes with difficulty took in the strutting, wheeling mass; his bewildered ears decided that the tune was trying to be a waltz. He remembered that the waltz was in three-time, remembered the waltz of olden days–too well–that dance at Roger’s, and Irene, his own wife, waltzing in the arms of young Bosinney; to this day remembered the look on her face, the rise and fall of her breast, the scent of the gardenias she was wearing, and that fellow’s face when she raised to his her dark eyes–lost to all but themselves and their guilty enjoyment; remembered the balcony on which he had refuged from that sight, and the policeman down below him on the strip of red carpet from house to street.
“‘Always’–good tune!” said someone behind his ears.
Not bad, certainly–a sort of sweetness in it. His eyes, from behind the neck of a large lady who seemed trying to be a fairy, roved again among the dancers. What! Over there! Fleur! Fleur in her Goya dress, grape-coloured–“La Vendimia–the Vintage”–floating out from her knees, with her face close to the face of a sheik, and his face close to hers. Fleur! And that sheik, that Moor in a dress all white and flowing! In Soames a groan was converted to a cough. THOSE TWO! So close–so–so lost–it seemed to him! As Irene with Bosinney, so she with that young Jon! They passed, not seeing him behind the fairy’s competent bulk. Soames’ eyes tracked them through the shifting, yawing throng. Round again they came–her eyes so nearly closed that he hardly knew them; and young Jon’s over her fichued shoulder, deep-set and staring. Where was the fellow’s wife? And just then Soames caught sight of her, dancing, too, but looking back at them–a nymph all trailing green, the eyes surprised, and jealous. No wonder, since under her very gaze was Fleur’s swinging skirt, the rise and falling of her breast, the languor in her eyes! “Always!” Would they never stop that cursed tune, stop those two, who with every bar seemed to cling closer and closer! And, fearful lest he should be seen, Soames turned away and mounted slowly to his room. He had had his squint. It was enough!
The band had ceased to play on the sea front, people were deserting, lights going out; by the sound out there, the tide must be rising. Soames touched himself where he was sore, beneath his starched shirt, and stood still. “Always!” Incalculable consequences welled in on his consciousness, like the murmuring tide of that sea. Daughter exiled, grandson lost to him; memories deflowered; hopes in the dust! “Always!” Forsooth! Not if he knew it–not for Joe! And all that grim power of self-containment which but twice or three times in his life had failed him, and always with disastrous consequence, again for a moment failed him, so that to any living thing present in the dim and austere hotel bedroom, he would have seemed like one demented. The paroxysm passed. No use to rave! Worse than no use–far; would only make him ill, and he would want all his strength. For what? For sitting still; for doing nothing; for waiting to see! Venus! Touch not the goddess–the hot, the jealous one with the lost dark eyes! He had touched her in the past, and she had answered with a blow. Touch her not! Possess his sore and anxious heart! Nothing to do but wait and see!

PART III
Chapter I.
SOAMES GIVES ADVICE
On her return to Nettlefold from her night in town, Fleur had continued to ‘eat her heart out’ by ‘the sad sea wave.’ For still neither Jon nor his wife came to see her. Clearly she was labelled “poison.” Twice she had walked over to Green Hill Farm hoping for another “jolly accident.” She had seen there an attractive old house with aged farm buildings flanked by a hill and a wide prospect towards the sea. Calm, broad, and homelike, the place roused hostility in her. It could never be HER home, and so was inimical, part of the forces working against her. Loose ends in Jon’s life were all in her favour. In exploitation of those calm acres he would be secured to that girl his wife, out of her reach again, this time for good–the twice-burnt child! And yet, with all her heartache, she was still uncertain what, precisely, she wanted. Not having to grapple with actual decision, things seemed possible which, in her bones, she knew might not be possible. Even to fling her ‘cap over the windmill,’ did not seem like rank and staring madness. To retrieve Spain with Jon! Her hands clenched and her lips loosened at the thought of it–an Odyssey together, till in the shifting, tolerant, modern world, all was forgotten, if not forgiven! Every form of companionship with him from decorous and platonic friendship to the world well lost; from guilty and secret liaison to orderly and above-board glimpses of him at not too long-intervals. According to the tides in her blood, all seemed possible, if not exactly probable, so long as she did not lose him again altogether.
To these feverish veerings of her spirit, a letter from her Aunt Winifred supplied a point of anchorage:
“I hear from Val that they are not going to Goodwood after all–their nice two-year-old is not in form. Such a bore. It’s the most comfortable meeting of the year. They seem to be very busy settling about the farm that Jon Forsyte is going to take. It will be pleasant for Val and Holly to have them so close, though I’m afraid that American child will find it dull. Holly writes that they are going to an amusing little fancy dress affair at the hotel in Nettlefold. Anne is to go as a water-nymph–she will make quite a good one with her nice straight legs. Holly is to be Madame Vigee le Brun; and Val says he’ll go as a tipster or not at all. I do hope he won’t redden his nose. Young Jon Forsyte has an Arab dress he brought from Egypt.”
‘And I,’ thought Fleur, ‘have the dress I wore the night I went to his room at Wansdon.’ How she had wished now that she had come out of that room his wife; after that nothing could have divided them. But they had been such innocents then!
For at once she had made up her mind to go to that dance herself. She was there first, and with malicious pleasure watched the faces of those two when she met them at the entrance of the room. Her grape-dress. She could see that Jon remembered it, and quickly she began to praise Anne’s. A water-nymph to the life! As for Jon–another wife or two was all he needed to be perfect! She was discretion itself until that waltz; and even then she had tried to be discreet to all but Jon. For him she kept (or so she hoped) the closeness, the clinging, and the languor of her eyes; but in those few minutes she let him know quite surely that love ran in her veins.
“‘Always,’” was all she said when at last they stopped.
And, after that dance, she stole away; having no heart to see him dance with his water-nymph. She crept up to her small bedroom trembling, and on her bed fell into a passion of silent weeping.
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