The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

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 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.