She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened it.  Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings.  The thought of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a revelation of their relationship, startling to one little given to introspective philosophy.  Without saying another word he went out and up to the picture-gallery.  This came of marrying a Frenchwoman!  And yet, without her there would have been no Fleur!  She had served her purpose.

‘She’s right,’ he thought; ’I can do nothing.  I don’t even know that there’s anything in it.’  The instinct of self-preservation warned him to batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air.  Unless one believed there was something in a thing, there wasn’t.

That night he went into her room.  She received him in the most matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them.  And he returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace.  If one didn’t choose to see, one needn’t.  And he did not choose—­in future he did not choose.  There was nothing to be gained by it—­nothing!  Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed photograph of Fleur.  When he had looked at it a little he slipped it down, and there was that other one—­that old one of Irene.  An owl hooted while he stood in his window gazing at it.  The owl hooted, the red climbing roses seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom.  God!  That had been a different thing!  Passion—­Memory!  Dust!

VII

JUNE TAKES A HAND

One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York, an egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June Forsyte’s studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick.  On the evening of July 6, Boris Strumolowski—­several of whose works were on show there because they were as yet too advanced to be on show anywhere else—­had begun well, with that aloof and rather Christ-like silence which admirably suited his youthful, round, broad cheek-boned countenance framed in bright hair banged like a girl’s.  June had known him three weeks, and he still seemed to her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of the future; a sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an unappreciative West.  Until that evening he had conversationally confined himself to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust he had just shaken from off his feet—­a country, in his opinion, so barbarous in every way that he had sold practically nothing there, and become an object of suspicion to the police; a country, as he said, without a race of its own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity, without principles, traditions, taste, without—­in a word—­a soul.  He had left it for his own good, and come to the only other country where he could live well.  June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments, standing before his