Once he was sworn at; once the whisper, "If only it could always be like
this!" sent the blood flying again from his heart, and he waited there,
patient and dogged, for the two to move. But it was only a poor thin
slip of a shop-girl in her draggled blouse who passed him, clinging to
her lover's arm.
A hundred other lovers too whispered that hope in the stillness of the
trees, a hundred other lovers clung to each other.
But shaking himself with sudden disgust, Soames returned to the path,
and left that seeking for he knew not what.
CHAPTER III--MEETING AT THE BOTANICAL
Young Jolyon, whose circumstances were not those of a Forsyte, found at
times a difficulty in sparing the money needful for those country
jaunts and researches into Nature, without having prosecuted which no
watercolour artist ever puts brush to paper.
He was frequently, in fact, obliged to take his colour-box into
the Botanical Gardens, and there, on his stool, in the shade of a
monkey-puzzler or in the lee of some India-rubber plant, he would spend
long hours sketching.
An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had delivered
himself as follows:
"In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of
them certainly quite a feeling for Nature.
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