I

ENCOUNTER


Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was
staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the
intention of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off
Cork Street, and looking into the Future. He walked. Since the War
he never took a cab if he could help it. Their drivers were, in
his view, an uncivil lot, though, now that the War was over and
supply beginning to exceed demand again, getting more civil in
accordance with the custom of human nature. Still, he had not
forgiven them, deeply identifying them with gloomy memories and,
now dimly, like all members of their class, with revolution. The
considerable anxiety he had passed through during the War, and the
more considerable anxiety he had since undergone in the Peace, had
produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature. He had,
mentally, so frequently experienced ruin, that he had ceased to
believe in its material probability. Paying away four thousand a
year in income and super-tax, one could not very well be worse
off! A fortune of a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a
wife and one daughter, and very diversely invested, afforded
substantial guarantee even against that "wildcat notion"--a levy
on capital. And as to confiscation of war profits, he was entirely
in favor of it, for he had none, and "serve the beggars right!"
The price of pictures, moreover, had, if anything, gone up, and he
had done better with his collection since the War began than ever
before. Air-raids, also, had acted beneficially on a spirit