It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went and sat down in an alcove.  What had possessed him to give his card to a rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that?  And Fleur, always at the back of his thoughts, started out like a filigree figure from a clock when the hour strikes.  On the screen opposite the alcove was a large canvas with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat.  He looked at his catalogue:  “No. 32 ’The Future Town’—­Paul Post.”  ’I suppose that’s satiric too,’ he thought.  ‘What a thing!’ But his second impulse was more cautious.  It did not do to condemn hurriedly.  There had been those stripey, streaky creations of Monet’s, which had turned out such trumps; and then the stippled school; and Gauguin.  Why, even since the Post-Impressionists there had been one or two painters not to be sneezed at.  During the thirty-eight years of his connoisseur’s life, indeed, he had marked so many “movements,” seen the tides of taste and technique so ebb and flow, that there was really no telling anything except that there was money to be made out of every change of fashion.  This too might quite well be a case where one must subdue primordial instinct, or lose the market.  He got up and stood before the picture, trying hard to see it with the eyes of other people.  Above the tomato blobs was what he took to be a sunset, till some one passing said:  “He’s got the airplanes wonderfully, don’t you think!” Below the tomato blobs was a band of white with vertical black stripes, to which he could assign no meaning whatever, till some one else came by, murmuring:  “What expression he gets with his foreground!” Expression?  Of what?  Soames went back to his seat.  The thing was “rich,” as his father would have said, and he wouldn’t give a damn for it.  Expression!  Ah! they were all Expressionists now, he had heard, on the Continent.  So it was coming here too, was it?  He remembered the first wave of influenza in 1887—­or ’8—­hatched in China, so they said.  He wondered where this—­this Expressionism had been hatched.  The thing was a regular disease!

He had become conscious of a woman and a youth standing between him and the “Future Town.”  Their backs were turned; but very suddenly Soames put his catalogue before his face, and drawing his hat forward, gazed through the slit between.  No mistaking that back, elegant as ever though the hair above had gone grey.  Irene!  His divorced wife—­Irene!  And this, no doubt, was—­her son—­by that fellow Jolyon Forsyte—­their boy, six months older than his own girl!  And mumbling over in his mind the bitter days of his divorce, he rose to get out of sight, but quickly sat down again.  She had turned her head to speak to her boy; her profile was still so youthful that it made her grey hair seem powdery, as if fancy-dressed; and her lips were smiling as Soames, first possessor of