He was considered
perhaps the leading man in breach of promise cases.
Soames used the underground again in going home.
The fog was worse than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the
still, thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their
reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned
with the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow
of lamp-light that seemed to drown in vapour before it reached the
pavement, cabs loomed dim-shaped ever and again, and discharged
citizens, bolting like rabbits to their burrows.
And these shadowy figures, wrapped each in his own little shroud of
fog, took no notice of each other. In the great warren, each rabbit for
himself, especially those clothed in the more expensive fur, who, afraid
of carriages on foggy days, are driven underground.
One figure, however, not far from Soames, waited at the station door.
Some buccaneer or lover, of whom each Forsyte thought: 'Poor devil!
looks as if he were having a bad time!' Their kind hearts beat a stroke
faster for that poor, waiting, anxious lover in the fog; but they
hurried by, well knowing that they had neither time nor money to spare
for any suffering but their own.
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