‘Thank Heaven!’ he thought, ’I always felt “agin” ‘em, anyway!’ Yes!  Even before his first disastrous marriage he could remember fuming over the bludgeoning of Ireland, or the matrimonial suits of women trying to be free of men they loathed.  Parsons would have it that freedom of soul and body were quite different things!  Pernicious doctrine!  Body and soul could not thus be separated.  Free will was the strength of any tie, and not its weakness.  ’I ought to have told Soames,’ he thought, ‘that I think him comic.  Ah! but he’s tragic, too!’ Was there anything, indeed, more tragic in the world than a man enslaved by his own possessive instinct, who couldn’t see the sky for it, or even enter fully into what another person felt!  ‘I must write and warn her,’ he thought; ‘he’s going to have another try.’  And all the way home to Robin Hill he rebelled at the strength of that duty to his son which prevented him from posting back to Paris....

But Soames sat long in his chair, the prey of a no less gnawing ache—­a jealous ache, as if it had been revealed to him that this fellow held precedence of himself, and had spun fresh threads of resistance to his way out.  ‘Does that mean that you’re against me?’ he had got nothing out of that disingenuous question.  Feminist!  Phrasey fellow!  ’I mustn’t rush things,’ he thought.  ’I have some breathing space; he’s not going back to Paris, unless he was lying.  I’ll let the spring come!’ Though how the spring could serve him, save by adding to his ache, he could not tell.  And gazing down into the street, where figures were passing from pool to pool of the light from the high lamps, he thought:  ’Nothing seems any good—­nothing seems worth while.  I’m loney—­that’s the trouble.’

He closed his eyes; and at once he seemed to see Irene, in a dark street below a church—­passing, turning her neck so that he caught the gleam of her eyes and her white forehead under a little dark hat, which had gold spangles on it and a veil hanging down behind.  He opened his eyes—­so vividly he had seen her!  A woman was passing below, but not she!  Oh no, there was nothing there!

CHAPTER XIII

‘Here we are again!’

Imogen’s frocks for her first season exercised the judgment of her mother and the purse of her grandfather all through the month of March.  With Forsyte tenacity Winifred quested for perfection.  It took her mind off the slowly approaching rite which would give her a freedom but doubtfully desired; took her mind, too, off her boy and his fast approaching departure for a war from which the news remained disquieting.  Like bees busy on summer flowers, or bright gadflies hovering and darting over spiky autumn blossoms, she and her ‘little daughter,’ tall nearly as herself and with a bust measurement not far inferior, hovered in the shops of Regent Street, the establishments