‘Caprice!’ he thought.  ’I can’t tell.  She’s wilful.  What shall I do?  Fleur!’

And long into the “small” night he brooded.

Part II
I
mother and son

To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain unwillingly would scarcely have been adequate.  He went as a well-natured dog goes for a walk with its mistress, leaving a choice mutton-bone on the lawn.  He went looking back at it.  Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are wont to sulk.  But Jon had little sulkiness in his composition.  He adored his mother, and it was his first travel.  Spain had become Italy by his simply saying:  “I’d rather go to Spain, Mum; you’ve been to Italy so many times; I’d like it new to both of us.”

The fellow was subtle besides being naive.  He never forgot that he was going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks, and must therefore show no sign of wishing to do so.  For one with so enticing a mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good enough travelling companion, indifferent to where or when he arrived, superior to food, and thoroughly appreciative of a country strange to the most travelled Englishman.  Fleur’s wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.

It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their compatriots.  Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him which was not English, was often innately unhappy in the presence of his own countrymen.  He felt they had no nonsense about them, and took a more practical view of things than himself.  He confided to his mother that he must be an unsociable beast—­it was jolly to be away from everybody who could talk about the things people did talk about.  To which Irene had replied simply: 

“Yes, Jon, I know.”

In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of appreciating what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness of a mother’s love.  Knowledge of something kept from her made him, no doubt, unduly sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated his admiration for her type of beauty, which he had been accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which he now perceived to be no such thing.  Her beauty was neither English, French, Spanish, nor Italian—­it was special!  He appreciated, too, as never before, his mother’s subtlety of instinct.  He could not tell, for instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in that Goya picture, “La Vendimia,” or whether she knew that he had slipped back there after lunch and again next morning, to stand before it full half