to the dungeons they have made for themselves.  You know the expression:  ’She has made her bed, she must lie on it!’ It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or lady in the best sense of those words; and I can use no stronger condemnation.  I have not been what is called a moral man, but I wish to use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly of ties or contracts into which you enter.  Heaven forbid!  But with the experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the understanding to know what they are doing.  But they haven’t!  Let them go!  They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them.  I have had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a position to judge your mother, and you are very young, without experience of what life is.  To go on with the story.  After three years of effort to subdue her shrinking—­I was going to say her loathing and it’s not too strong a word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing under such circumstances—­three years of what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother’s, Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fell in love with her.  He was the architect of this very house that we live in now, he was building it for her and Fleur’s father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in place of the one she inhabited with him in London.  Perhaps that fact played some part in what came of it.  But in any case she, too, fell in love with him.  I know it’s not necessary to explain to you that one does not precisely choose with whom one will fall in love.  It comes.  Very well!  It came.  I can imagine—­though she never said much to me about it—­the struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she was brought up strictly and was not light in her ideas—­not at all.  However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass that they loved in deed as well as in thought.  Then came a fearful tragedy.  I must tell you of it because if I don’t you will never understand the real situation that you have now to face.  The man whom she had married—­Soames Forsyte, the father of Fleur one night, at the height of her passion for this young man, forcibly reasserted his rights over her.  The next day she met her lover and told him of it.  Whether he committed suicide or whether he was accidentally run over in his distraction, we never knew; but so it was.  Think of your mother as she was that evening when she heard of his death.  I happened to see her.  Your grandfather sent me to help her if I could.  I only just saw her, before the door was shut against me by her husband.  But I have never forgotten her face, I can see it now.  I was not in love with her then, not for twelve years after, but I have never for gotten.  My dear boy—­it is not easy to write like this.  But you see, I must.  Your mother is wrapped up in you, utterly, devotedly.