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Updated: May 13, 2025
"Grey; but otherwise much the same." "And the daughter?" "Pretty. At least, Jon thought so." Jolyon's heart side-slipped again. His wife's face had a strained and puzzled look. "You didn't ?" he began. "No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief and he picked it up." Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance! "June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?"
And she was silent. No doubt it seemed to him too precious; a tempting of Providence to mention it yet. And the sunlight played through the leaves on that little party of the three generations grouped tranquilly under the pear-tree, which had long borne no fruit. Old Jolyon's furrowed face was reddening patchily, as old men's faces redden in the sun.
On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes. This was the occasion of an 'at home' to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon's granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney.
His father had loved the house, had loved the view, the grounds, that tree; his last years had been happy there, and no one had lived there before him. These last eleven years at Robin Hill had formed in Jolyon's life as a painter, the important period of success. He was now in the very van of water-colour art, hanging on the line everywhere. His drawings fetched high prices.
A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow buttonholed with cornflowers by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at a trifle less expense again Jolyon had experienced the heat and counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up.
The boy had got it from George Forsyte, he believed, who had seen Bosinney in the fog the day he was run over something which explained the young fellow's distress an act of Soames towards his wife a shocking act. Jo had seen her, too, that afternoon, after the news was out, seen her for a moment, and his description had always lingered in old Jolyon's mind 'wild and lost' he had called her.
In a quarter of an hour he was due at the General Meeting of the New Colliery Company one of Uncle Jolyon's concerns; he should see Uncle Jolyon there, and say something to him about Bosinney he had not made up his mind what, but something in any case he should not answer this letter until he had seen Uncle Jolyon. He got up and methodically put away the draft of his defence.
One could be amused where a daughter was concerned; in a wife's case one could not be amused. To see June set her heart and jaw on a thing until she got it was all right, because it was never anything which interfered fundamentally with Jolyon's liberty the one thing on which his jaw was also absolutely rigid, a considerable jaw, under that short grizzling beard.
Apart from this the two Wills worked together in some complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon's three children should have an equal share in their grandfather's and father's property in the future as in the present, save only that Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his capital when he was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the spirit of theirs, in order that their children might have the body after them.
When he had finished he rubbed the place he had been scratching against his master's calf, and settled down again with his chin over the instep of the disturbing boot. And into old Jolyon's mind came a sudden recollection a face he had seen at that opera three weeks ago Irene, the wife of his precious nephew Soames, that man of property!
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