the half dark, the mingled tobacco fumes and women’s scent, all that curious lure to promiscuity which belongs to Promenades, began to free young Val from his idealism.  He looked admiringly in a young woman’s face, saw she was not young, and quickly looked away.  Shades of Cynthia Dark!  The young woman’s arm touched his unconsciously; there was a scent of musk and mignonette.  Val looked round the corner of his lashes.  Perhaps she was young, after all.  Her foot trod on his; she begged his pardon.  He said: 

“Not at all; jolly good ballet, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I’m tired of it; aren’t you?”

Young Val smiled—­his wide, rather charming smile.  Beyond that he did not go—­not yet convinced.  The Forsyte in him stood out for greater certainty.  And on the stage the ballet whirled its kaleidoscope of snow-white, salmon-pink, and emerald-green and violet and seemed suddenly to freeze into a stilly spangled pyramid.  Applause broke out, and it was over!  Maroon curtains had cut it off.  The semi-circle of men and women round the barrier broke up, the young woman’s arm pressed his.  A little way off disturbance seemed centring round a man with a pink carnation; Val stole another glance at the young woman, who was looking towards it.  Three men, unsteady, emerged, walking arm in arm.  The one in the centre wore the pink carnation, a white waistcoat, a dark moustache; he reeled a little as he walked.  Crum’s voice said slow and level:  “Look at that bounder, he’s screwed!” Val turned to look.  The ‘bounder’ had disengaged his arm, and was pointing straight at them.  Crum’s voice, level as ever, said: 

“He seems to know you!” The ‘bounder’ spoke: 

“H’llo!” he said.  “You f’llows, look!  There’s my young rascal of a son!”

Val saw.  It was his father!  He could have sunk into the crimson carpet.  It was not the meeting in this place, not even that his father was ‘screwed’; it was Crum’s word ‘bounder,’ which, as by heavenly revelation, he perceived at that moment to be true.  Yes, his father looked a bounder with his dark good looks, and his pink carnation, and his square, self-assertive walk.  And without a word he ducked behind the young woman and slipped out of the Promenade.  He heard the word, “Val!” behind him, and ran down deep-carpeted steps past the ‘chuckersout,’ into the Square.

To be ashamed of his own father is perhaps the bitterest experience a young man can go through.  It seemed to Val, hurrying away, that his career had ended before it had begun.  How could he go up to Oxford now amongst all those chaps, those splendid friends of Crum’s, who would know that his father was a ‘bounder’!  And suddenly he hated Crum.  Who the devil was Crum, to say that?  If Crum had been beside him at that moment, he would certainly have been jostled off the pavement.  His own father—­his own!  A choke came up in his throat, and he dashed his hands down