parasols would be doffed and furled, ten thousand mouths all speaking the same English would be filled.  There was life in the old dog yet!  Tradition!  And again Tradition!  How strong and how elastic!  Wars might rage, taxation prey, Trades Unions take toll, and Europe perish of starvation; but the ten thousand would be fed; and, within their ring fence, stroll upon green turf, wear their top hats, and meet—­themselves.  The heart was sound, the pulse still regular.  E-ton!  E-ton!  Har-r-o-o-o-w!

Among the many Forsytes, present on a hunting-ground theirs, by personal prescriptive right, or proxy, was Soames with his wife and daughter.  He had not been at either school, he took no interest in cricket, but he wanted Fleur to show her frock, and he wanted to wear his top hat parade it again in peace and plenty among his peers.  He walked sedately with Fleur between him and Annette.  No women equalled them, so far as he could see.  They could walk, and hold themselves up; there was substance in their good looks; the modern woman had no build, no chest, no anything!  He remembered suddenly with what intoxication of pride he had walked round with Irene in the first years of his first marriage.  And how they used to lunch on the drag which his mother would make his father have, because it was so “chic”—­all drags and carriages in those days, not these lumbering great Stands!  And how consistently Montague Dartie had drunk too much.  He supposed that people drank too much still, but there was not the scope for it there used to be.  He remembered George Forsyte—­whose brothers Roger and Eustace had been at Harrow and Eton —­towering up on the top of the drag waving a light-blue flag with one hand and a dark-blue flag with the other, and shouting “Etroow-Harrton!” Just when everybody was silent, like the buffoon he had always been; and Eustace got up to the nines below, too dandified to wear any colour or take any notice.  H’m!  Old days, and Irene in grey silk shot with palest green.  He looked, sideways, at Fleur’s face.  Rather colourless-no light, no eagerness!  That love affair was preying on her—­a bad business!  He looked beyond, at his wife’s face, rather more touched up than usual, a little disdainful—­not that she had any business to disdain, so far as he could see.  She was taking Profond’s defection with curious quietude; or was his “small” voyage just a blind?  If so, he should refuse to see it!  Having promenaded round the pitch and in front of the pavilion, they sought Winifred’s table in the Bedouin Club tent.  This Club—­a new “cock and hen”—­had been founded in the interests of travel, and of a gentleman with an old Scottish name, whose father had somewhat strangely been called Levi.  Winifred had joined, not because she had travelled, but because instinct told her that a Club with such a name and such a founder was bound to go far; if one didn’t join at once one might never have the chance.  Its tent, with