With compunction tweaking at his chest Soames descended the stairs,
where was always that rather pleasant smell of camphor and port wine,
and house where draughts are not permitted. The poor old things--he
had not meant to be unkind! And in the street he instantly forgot them,
repossessed by the image of Annette and the thought of the cursed coil
around him. Why had he not pushed the thing through and obtained divorce
when that wretched Bosinney was run over, and there was evidence galore
for the asking! And he turned towards his sister Winifred Dartie's
residence in Green Street, Mayfair.




CHAPTER II--EXIT A MAN OF THE WORLD

That a man of the world so subject to the vicissitudes of fortunes
as Montague Dartie should still be living in a house he had inhabited
twenty years at least would have been more noticeable if the rent,
rates, taxes, and repairs of that house had not been defrayed by his
father-in-law. By that simple if wholesale device James Forsyte had
secured a certain stability in the lives of his daughter and his
grandchildren. After all, there is something invaluable about a safe
roof over the head of a sportsman so dashing as Dartie. Until the events
of the last few days he had been almost-supernaturally steady all this
year. The fact was he had acquired a half share in a filly of George
Forsyte's, who had gone irreparably on the turf, to the horror of Roger,
now stilled by the grave. Sleeve-links, by Martyr, out of Shirt-on-fire,
by Suspender, was a bay filly, three years old, who for a variety of
reasons had never shown her true form. With half ownership of this
hopeful animal, all the idealism latent somewhere in Dartie, as in every