There was a drowsy hum of very distant traffic; the creepered
trellis round the garden shut out everything but sky, and house, and
pear-tree, with its top branches still gilded by the sun.
For some time they sat there, talking but little. Then old Jolyon rose
to go, and not a word was said about his coming again.
He walked away very sadly. What a poor miserable place; and he thought
of the great, empty house in Stanhope Gate, fit residence for a Forsyte,
with its huge billiard-room and drawing-room that no one entered from
one week's end to another.
That woman, whose face he had rather liked, was too thin-skinned by
half; she gave Jo a bad time he knew! And those sweet children! Ah! what
a piece of awful folly!
He walked towards the Edgware Road, between rows of little houses, all
suggesting to him (erroneously no doubt, but the prejudices of a Forsyte
are sacred) shady histories of some sort or kind.
Society, forsooth, the chattering hags and jackanapes--had set
themselves up to pass judgment on his flesh and blood! A parcel of old
women! He stumped his umbrella on the ground, as though to drive it into
the heart of that unfortunate body, which had dared to ostracize his son
and his son's son, in whom he could have lived again!
He stumped his umbrella fiercely; yet he himself had followed Society's
behaviour for fifteen years--had only today been false to it!
He thought of June, and her dead mother, and the whole story, with all
his old bitterness.
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