He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife’s not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife.  He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection.  They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behaviour under this attention had been beyond reproach.  That she was one of those women—­not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race—­born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him.  Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing!  ‘Then why did she marry me?’ was his continual thought.  He had, forgotten his courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence.  He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labours with success.  If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him.  He certainly did not remember the look on her face—­strange, passive, appealing—­when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady side.

The house wanted doing, up, unless he decided to move into the country, and build.

For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem.  There was no use in rushing into things!  He was very comfortably off, with an increasing income getting on for three thousand a year; but his invested capital was not perhaps so large as his father believed—­James had a tendency to expect that his children should be better off than they were.  ‘I can manage eight thousand easily enough,’ he thought, ’without calling in either Robertson’s or Nicholl’s.’

He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an ‘amateur’ of pictures, and had a little-room in No. 62, Montpellier Square, full of canvases, stacked against the wall, which he had no room to hang.  He brought them home with him on his way back from the City, generally after dark, and would enter this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend hours turning the pictures to the light, examining the marks on their backs, and occasionally making notes.

They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a sign of some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses, its interminable streets, where his life and the lives of his breed and class were passed.  Every now and then he would take one or two pictures away with him in a cab, and stop at Jobson’s on his way into the City.