To Let

Standing by the bulwark rail, with her arm in his, she said:

“I’m afraid you haven’t enjoyed it much, Jon. But you’ve been very sweet to me.”

Jon squeezed her arm.

“Oh! yes, I’ve enjoyed it awfully—except for my head lately.”

And now that the end had come, he really had, feeling a sort of glamour over the past weeks—a kind of painful pleasure, such as he had tried to screw into those lines about the voice in the night crying; a feeling such as he had known as a small boy listening avidly to Chopin, yet wanting to cry. And he wondered why it was that he couldn’t say to her quite simply what she had said to him:

“You were very sweet to me.” Odd—one never could be nice and natural like that! He substituted the words: “I expect we shall be sick.”

They were, and reached London somewhat attenuated, having been away six weeks and two days, without a single allusion to the subject which had hardly ever ceased to occupy their minds.

Chapter II.

FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Deprived of his wife and son by the Spanish adventure, Jolyon found the solitude at Robin Hill intolerable. A philosopher when he has all that he wants is different from a philosopher when he has not. Accustomed, however, to the idea, if not to the reality of resignation, he would perhaps have faced it out but for his daughter June. He was a “lame duck” now, and on her conscience. Having achieved—momentarily—the rescue of an etcher in low circumstances, which she happened to have in hand, she appeared at Robin Hill a fortnight after Irene and Jon had gone. The little lady was living now in a tiny house with a big studio at Chiswick. A Forsyte of the best period, so far as the lack of responsibility was concerned, she had overcome the difficulty of a reduced income in a ma

Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered whence she got herself—her red-gold hair, now greyed into a special colour; her direct, spirited face, so different from his own rather folded and subtilised countenance, her little light figure, when he and most of the Forsytes were tall. And he would dwell on the origin of species, and debate whether she might be Danish or Celtic. Celtic, he thought, from her pugnacity, and her taste in fillets and djibbahs. It was not too much to say that he preferred her to the Age with which she was surrounded, youthful though, for the greater part, it was. She took, however, too much interest in his teeth, for he still had some of those natural symptoms. Her dentist at once found “staphylococcus aureus present in pure culture” (which might cause boils, of course) and wanted to take out all the teeth he had and supply him with two complete sets of u

“I perceive,” said Jolyon, “that you are trying to kill two birds with one stone.”

“To cure, you mean!” cried June.

“My dear, it’s the same thing.”

June protested. It was unfair to say that without a trial.

Jolyon thought he might not have the chance of saying it after.

“Dad!” cried June, “you’re hopeless.”

“That,” said Jolyon, “is a fact, but I wish to remain hopeless as long as possible. I shall let sleeping dogs lie, my child. They are quiet at present.”

“That’s not giving science a chance,” cried June. “You’ve no idea how devoted Pondridge is. He puts his science before everything.”

“Just,” replied Jolyon, puffing the mild cigarette to which he was reduced, “as Mr. Paul Post puts his art, eh? Art for Art’s sake—Science for the sake of Science. I know those enthusiastic egomaniac gentry. They vivisect you without blinking. I’m enough of a Forsyte to give them the go-by, June.”