LITMIR.BIZ

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"Four hundred fiddlesticks! Don't tell me you gave four hundred for that?"

       Between the points of his collar Swithin's chin made the second painful oscillatory movement of the evening.

       "Four-hundred-pounds, of English money; not a farthing less. I don't regret it. It's not common English--it's genuine modern Italian!"

       Soames raised the corner of his lip in a smile, and looked across at Bosinney. The architect was grinning behind the fumes of his cigarette. Now, indeed, he looked more like a buccaneer.

       "There's a lot of work about it," remarked James hastily, who was really moved by the size of the group. "It'd sell well at Jobson's." "The poor foreign dey-vil that made it," went on Swithin, "asked me five hundred--I gave him four. It's worth eight. Looked half-

       starved, poor dey-vil!"

       "Ah!" chimed in Nicholas suddenly, "poor, seedy-lookin' chaps, these artists; it's a wonder to me how they live. Now, there's young Flageoletti, that Fanny and the girls are always hav'in' in, to play the fiddle; if he makes a hundred a year it's as much as ever he does!"

       James shook his head. "Ah!" he said, "I don't know how they live!"

       Old Jolyon had risen, and, cigar in mouth, went to inspect the group at close quarters.

       "Wouldn't have given two for it!" he pronounced at last.

       Soames saw his father and Nicholas glance at each other anxiously; and, on the other side of Swithin, Bosinney, still shrouded in

       smoke.

       'I wonder what he thinks of it?' thought Soames, who knew well enough that this group was hopelessly vieux jeu; hopelessly of the last generation. There was no longer any sale at Jobson's for such works of art.

       Swithin's answer came at last. "You never knew anything about a statue. You've got your pictures, and that's all!"

       Old Jolyon walked back to his seat, puffing his cigar. It was not likely that he was going to be drawn into an argument with an obsti-

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       nate beggar like Swithin, pigheaded as a mule, who had never known a statue from a---straw hat.

       "Stucco!" was all he said.

       It had long been physically impossible for Swithin to start; his fist came down on the table.

       "Stucco! I should like to see anything you've got in your house half as good!"

       And behind his speech seemed to sound again that rumbling violence of primitive generations.

       It was James who saved the situation.

       "Now, what do you say, Mr. Bosinney? You're an architect; you ought to know all about statues and things!"

       Every eye was turned upon Bosinney; all waited with a strange, suspicious look for his answer.

       And Soames, speaking for the first time, asked: "Yes, Bosinney, what do you say?"

       Bosinney replied coolly:

       "The work is a remarkable one."

       His words were addressed to Swithin, his eyes smiled slyly at old Jolyon; only Soames remained unsatisfied. "Remarkable for what?"

       "For its naivete"

       The answer was followed by an impressive silence; Swithin alone was not sure whether a compliment was intended.

       CHAPTER IV--PROJECTION OF THE HOUSE

       Soames Forsyte walked out of his green-painted front door three days after the dinner at Swithin's, and looking back from across the

       Square, confirmed his impression that the house wanted painting.

       He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

       He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

       The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.

       He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

       Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behaviour under this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women--not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him. Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she marry me?' was his continual thought. He had forgotten his courtship; that year and

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       a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labours with success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her face--strange, passive, appealing--when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

       It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

       Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady side.

       The house wanted doing, up, unless he decided to move into the country, and build.

       For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem. There was no use in rushing into things! He was very comfortably off, with an increasing income getting on for three thousand a year; but his invested capital was not perhaps so large as his father believed--James had a tendency to expect that his children should be better off than they were. 'I can manage eight thousand easily enough,' he thought, 'without calling in either Robertson's or Nicholl's.'

       He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an 'amateur' of pictures, and had a little-room in No. 62, Montpellier Square, full of canvases, stacked against the wall, which he had no room to hang. He brought them home with him on his way back from the City, generally after dark, and would enter this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend hours turning the pictures to the light, examining the marks on their backs, and occasionally making notes.

       They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a sign of some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses, its interminable streets, where his life and the lives of his breed and class were passed. Every now and then he would take one or two pictures away with him in a cab, and stop at Jobson's on his way into the City.

       He rarely showed them to anyone; Irene, whose opinion he secretly respected and perhaps for that reason never solicited, had only been into the room on rare occasions, in discharge of some wifely duty. She was not asked to look at the pictures, and she never did. To Soames this was another grievance. He hated that pride of hers, and secretly dreaded it.

       In the plate-glass window of the picture shop his image stood and looked at him.

       His sleek hair under the brim of the tall hat had a sheen like the hat itself; his cheeks, pale and flat, the line of his clean-shaven lips, his firm chin with its greyish shaven tinge, and the buttoned strictness of his black cut-away coat, conveyed an appearance of reserve and secrecy, of imperturbable, enforced composure; but his eyes, cold,--grey, strained--looking, with a line in the brow between them, examined him wistfully, as if they knew of a secret weakness.

       He noted the subjects of the

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