A letter from Jolyon’s solicitor to his own had disclosed the fact that ‘those two’ were in Italy.  And an opportunity had been duly given for noting that they had first stayed at an hotel in London.  The matter was clear as daylight, and would be disposed of in half an hour or so; but during that half-hour he, Soames, would go down to hell; and after that half-hour all bearers of the Forsyte name would feel the bloom was off the rose.  He had no illusions like Shakespeare that roses by any other name would smell as sweet.  The name was a possession, a concrete, unstained piece of property, the value of which would be reduced some twenty per cent. at least.  Unless it were Roger, who had once refused to stand for Parliament, and—­oh, irony!—­Jolyon, hung on the line, there had never been a distinguished Forsyte.  But that very lack of distinction was the name’s greatest asset.  It was a private name, intensely individual, and his own property; it had never been exploited for good or evil by intrusive report.  He and each member of his family owned it wholly, sanely, secretly, without any more interference from the public than had been necessitated by their births, their marriages, their deaths.  And during these weeks of waiting and preparing to drop the Law, he conceived for that Law a bitter distaste, so deeply did he resent its coming violation of his name, forced on him by the need he felt to perpetuate that name in a lawful manner.  The monstrous injustice of the whole thing excited in him a perpetual suppressed fury.  He had asked no better than to live in spotless domesticity, and now he must go into the witness box, after all these futile, barren years, and proclaim his failure to keep his wife—­incur the pity, the amusement, the contempt of his kind.  It was all upside down.  She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they—­were in Italy!  In these weeks the Law he had served so faithfully, looked on so reverently as the guardian of all property, seemed to him quite pitiful.  What could be more insane than to tell a man that he owned his wife, and punish him when someone unlawfully took her away from him?  Did the Law not know that a man’s name was to him the apple of his eye, that it was far harder to be regarded as cuckold than as seducer?  He actually envied Jolyon the reputation of succeeding where he, Soames, had failed.  The question of damages worried him, too.  He wanted to make that fellow suffer, but he remembered his cousin’s words, “I shall be very happy,” with the uneasy feeling that to claim damages would make not Jolyon but himself suffer; he felt uncannily that Jolyon would rather like to pay them—­the chap was so loose.  Besides, to claim damages was not the thing to do.  The claim, indeed, had been made almost mechanically; and as the hour drew near Soames saw in it just another dodge of this insensitive and topsy-turvy Law to make him ridiculous; so that people might sneer and say:  “Oh, yes, he got quite a good price for her!”