seen the tides of taste and technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion.  This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market.  He got up and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people.  Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said:  “He’s got the airplanes wonderfully, don’t you think!” Below the tomato blobs was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could assign no meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring:  “What expression he gets with his foreground!” Expression?  Of what?  Soames went back to his seat.  The thing was “rich,” as his father would have said, and he wouldn’t give a damn for it.  Expression!  Ah! they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent.  So it was coming here too, was it?  He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887—­or ’8—­hatched in China, so they said.  He wondered where this—­this Expressionism had been hatched.  The thing was a regular disease!

He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and the “Future Town.”  Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed through the slit between.  No mistaking that back, elegant as ever though the hair above had gone grey.  Irene!  His divorced wife—­Irene!  And this, no doubt, was—­her son—­by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte—­their boy, six months older than his own girl!  And mumbling over in his mind the bitter days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat down again.  She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor of them, had never seen them smile.  Grudgingly he admitted her still beautiful and in figure almost as young as ever.  And how that boy smiled back at her!  Emotion squeezed Soames’ heart.  The sight infringed his sense of justice.  He grudged her that boy’s smile—­it went beyond what Fleur gave him, and it was undeserved.  Their son might have been his son; Fleur might have been her daughter, if she had kept straight!  He lowered his catalogue.  If she saw him, all the better!  A reminder of her conduct in the presence of her son, who probably knew nothing of it, would be a salutary touch from the finger of that Nemesis which surely must soon or late visit her!  Then, half-conscious that such a thought was extravagant for a Forsyte of his age, Soames took out his watch.  Past four!  Fleur was late.  She had gone to his niece Imogen Cardigan’s, and there they would keep her smoking cigarettes and gossiping, and that.  He heard the boy laugh, and say eagerly:  “I say, Mum, is this by one of Auntie June’s lame ducks?”