What if Irene were to take it into her head to—­he could hardly frame the thought—­to leave Soames?  But he felt this thought so unbearable that he at once put it away; the shady visions it conjured up, the sound of family tongues buzzing in his ears, the horror of the conspicuous happening so close to him, to one of his own children!  Luckily, she had no money—­a beggarly fifty pound a year!  And he thought of the deceased Heron, who had had nothing to leave her, with contempt.  Brooding over his glass, his long legs twisted under the table, he quite omitted to rise when the ladies left the room.  He would have to speak to Soames —­would have to put him on his guard; they could not go on like this, now that such a contingency had occurred to him.  And he noticed with sour disfavour that June had left her wine-glasses full of wine.

‘That little, thing’s at the bottom of it all,’ he mused; ’Irene’d never have thought of it herself.’  James was a man of imagination.

The voice of Swithin roused him from his reverie.

“I gave four hundred pounds for it,” he was saying.  “Of course it’s a regular work of art.”

“Four hundred!  H’m! that’s a lot of money!” chimed in Nicholas.

The object alluded to was an elaborate group of statuary in Italian marble, which, placed upon a lofty stand (also of marble), diffused an atmosphere of culture throughout the room.  The subsidiary figures, of which there were six, female, nude, and of highly ornate workmanship, were all pointing towards the central figure, also nude, and female, who was pointing at herself; and all this gave the observer a very pleasant sense of her extreme value.  Aunt Juley, nearly opposite, had had the greatest difficulty in not looking at it all the evening.

Old Jolyon spoke; it was he who had started the discussion.

“Four hundred fiddlesticks!  Don’t tell me you gave four hundred for that?”

Between the points of his collar Swithin’s chin made the second painful oscillatory movement of the evening.

“Four-hundred-pounds, of English money; not a farthing less.  I don’t regret it.  It’s not common English—­it’s genuine modern Italian!”

Soames raised the corner of his lip in a smile, and looked across at Bosinney.  The architect was grinning behind the fumes of his cigarette.  Now, indeed, he looked more like a buccaneer.

“There’s a lot of work about it,” remarked James hastily, who was really moved by the size of the group.  “It’d sell well at Jobson’s.”

“The poor foreign dey-vil that made it,” went on Swithin, “asked me five hundred—­I gave him four.  It’s worth eight.  Looked half-starved, poor dey-vil!”

“Ah!” chimed in Nicholas suddenly, “poor, seedy-lookin’ chaps, these artists; it’s a wonder to me how they live.  Now, there’s young Flageoletti, that Fanny and the girls are always hav’in’ in, to play the fiddle; if he makes a hundred a year it’s as much as ever he does!”