The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

The morning after a certain night on which Soames at last asserted his

rights and acted like a man, he breakfasted alone.

He breakfasted by gaslight, the fog of late November wrapping the town

as in some monstrous blanket till the trees of the Square even were

barely visible from the dining-room window.

He ate steadily, but at times a sensation as though he could not swallow

attacked him. Had he been right to yield to his overmastering hunger of

the night before, and break down the resistance which he had suffered

now too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly constituted

helpmate?

He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before

which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands--of her terrible

smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still

seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling

of remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the

flame of the single candle, before silently slinking away.

And somehow, now that he had acted like this, he was surprised at

himself.

Two nights before, at Winifred Dartie's, he had taken Mrs. MacAnder

into dinner. She had said to him, looking in his face with her

sharp, greenish eyes: "And so your wife is a great friend of that Mr.

Bosinney's?"

Not deigning to ask what she meant, he had brooded over her words.

They had roused in him a fierce jealousy, which, with the peculiar

perversion of this instinct, had turned to fiercer desire.

Without the incentive of Mrs. MacAnder's words he might never have done

what he had done. Without their incentive and the accident of finding

his wife's door for once unlocked, which had enabled him to steal upon

her asleep.

Slumber had removed his doubts, but the morning brought them again. One

thought comforted him: No one would know--it was not the sort of thing

that she would speak about.

And, indeed, when the vehicle of his daily business life, which needed

so imperatively the grease of clear and practical thought, started

rolling once more with the reading of his letters, those nightmare-like

doubts began to assume less extravagant importance at the back of his

mind. The incident was really not of great moment; women made a fuss

about it in books; but in the cool judgment of right-thinking men, of

men of the world, of such as he recollected often received praise in

the Divorce Court, he had but done his best to sustain the sanctity of

marriage, to prevent her from abandoning her duty, possibly, if she were

still seeing Bosinney, from....