The Forsyte Saga - Volume 3

"The fixed idea," which has outrun more constables than any other form

of human disorder, has never more speed and stamina than when it takes

the avid guise of love. To hedges and ditches, and doors, to humans

without ideas fixed or otherwise, to perambulators and the contents

sucking their fixed ideas, even to the other sufferers from this fast

malady--the fixed idea of love pays no attention. It runs with eyes

turned inward to its own light, oblivious of all other stars. Those

with the fixed ideas that human happiness depends on their art, on

vivisecting dogs, on hating foreigners, on paying supertax, on remaining

Ministers, on making wheels go round, on preventing their neighbours

from being divorced, on conscientious objection, Greek roots, Church

dogma, paradox and superiority to everybody else, with other forms of

ego-mania--all are unstable compared with him or her whose fixed idea is

the possession of some her or him. And though Fleur, those chilly summer

days, pursued the scattered life of a little Forsyte whose frocks are

paid for, and whose business is pleasure, she was--as Winifred would

have said in the latest fashion of speech--"honest to God" indifferent

to it all. She wished and wished for the moon, which sailed in cold

skies above the river or the Green Park when she went to Town. She even

kept Jon's letters, covered with pink silk, on her heart, than which in

days when corsets were so low, sentiment so despised, and chests so

out of fashion, there could, perhaps, have been no greater proof of the

fixity of her idea.

After hearing of his father's death, she wrote to Jon, and received his

answer three days later on her return from a river picnic. It was

his first letter since their meeting at June's. She opened it with

misgiving, and read it with dismay.

"Since I saw you I've heard everything about the past. I won't tell it

you--I think you knew when we met at June's. She says you did. If you

did, Fleur, you ought to have told me. I expect you only heard your

father's side of it. I have heard my mother's. It's dreadful. Now that

she's so sad I can't do anything to hurt her more. Of course, I long

for you all day, but I don't believe now that we shall ever come

together--there's something too strong pulling us apart."

So! Her deception had found her out. But Jon--she felt--had forgiven

that. It was what he said of his mother which caused the guttering in

her heart and the weak sensation in her legs.

Her first impulse was to reply--her second, not to reply. These impulses

were constantly renewed in the days which followed, while desperation

grew within her. She was not her father's child for nothing. The

tenacity which had at once made and undone Soames was her backbone, too,

frilled and embroidered by French grace and quickness. Instinctively

she conjugated the verb "to have" always with the pronoun "I." She

concealed, however, all signs of her growing desperation, and pursued

such river pleasures as the winds and rain of a disagreeable July

permitted, as if she had no care in the world; nor did any "sucking

baronet" ever neglect the business of a publisher more consistently than

her attendant spirit, Michael Mont.