Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur where he had left her.  She sat with crossed knees, slowly balancing a foot in silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that she was dreaming.  Her eyes showed it too—­they went off like that sometimes.  And then, in a moment, she would come to life, and be as quick and restless as a monkey.  And she knew so much, so self-assured, and not yet nineteen.  What was that odious word?  Flapper!  Dreadful young creatures—­squealing and squawking and showing their legs!  The worst of them bad dreams, the best of them powdered angels!  Fleur was not a flapper, not one of those slangy, ill-bred young females.  And yet she was frighteningly self-willed, and full of life, and determined to enjoy it.  Enjoy!  The word brought no puritan terror to Soames; but it brought the terror suited to his temperament.  He had always been afraid to enjoy to-day for fear he might not enjoy tomorrow so much.  And it was terrifying to feel that his daughter was divested of that safeguard.  The very way she sat in that chair showed it—­lost in her dream.  He had never been lost in a dream himself—­there was nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it from he did not know!  Certainly not from Annette!  And yet Annette, as a young girl, when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look.  Well, she had lost it now!

Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself down at a writing-table.  Seizing ink and writing paper, she began to write as if she had not time to breathe before she got her letter written.  And suddenly she saw him.  The air of desperate absorption vanished, she smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face as if she were a little puzzled and a little bored.

Ah!  She was “fine”—­“fine!”

III

AT ROBIN HILL

Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy’s nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill, quietly going into his affairs.  He did everything quietly now, because his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked the idea of dying.  He had never realised how much till one day, two years ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms, and been told: 

“At any moment, on any overstrain.”

He had taken it with a smile—­the natural Forsyte reaction against an unpleasant truth.  But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over him.  To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work—­though he did little enough work now!  To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable state, for such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.  Of such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he never could, and must still hover on the hope that he might see again those he loved!