But it was at her lips—­asking a question, giving an answer, with that shadowy smile—­that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower.

The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this passive goddess.  It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked her name.

June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.

“Irene is my greatest chum,” she said:  “Please be good friends, you two!”

At the little lady’s command they all three smiled; and while they were smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind the woman with the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said: 

“Ah! introduce me too!”

He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene’s side at public functions, and even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse, could be seen following her about with his eyes, in which were strange expressions of watchfulness and longing.

At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks on the piece of china.

“I wonder at Jolyon’s allowing this engagement,” he said to Aunt Ann.  “They tell me there’s no chance of their getting married for years.  This young Bosinney” (he made the word a dactyl in opposition to general usage of a short o) “has got nothing.  When Winifred married Dartie, I made him bring every penny into settlement—­lucky thing, too—­they’d ha’ had nothing by this time!”

Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair.  Grey curls banded her forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished in the family all sense of time.  She made no reply, for she rarely spoke, husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy of conscience, her look was as good as an answer.

“Well,” he said, “I couldn’t help Irene’s having no money.  Soames was in such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance on her.”

Putting the bowl pettishly down on the piano, he let his eyes wander to the group by the door.

“It’s my opinion,” he said unexpectedly, “that it’s just as well as it is.”

Aunt Ann did not ask him to explain this strange utterance.  She knew what he was thinking.  If Irene had no money she would not be so foolish as to do anything wrong; for they said—­they said—­she had been asking for a separate room; but, of course, Soames had not....

James interrupted her reverie: 

“But where,” he asked, “was Timothy?  Hadn’t he come with them?”

Through Aunt Ann’s compressed lips a tender smile forced its way: 

“No, he didn’t think it wise, with so much of this diphtheria about; and he so liable to take things.”

James answered: 

“Well, he takes good care of himself.  I can’t afford to take the care of myself that he does.”

Nor was it easy to say which, of admiration, envy, or contempt, was dominant in that remark.