The Forsyte Saga Read Online Free PDF Page B

given too much, though? It wanted a lot of doing to—He dared say he would want all his money before he had done with this affair of June’s. He ought never to have allowed the engagement. She had met this Bosinney at the house of Baynes, Baynes and Bildeboy, the architects. He believed that Baynes, whom he knew—a bit of an old woman—was the young man’s uncle by marriage. After that she’d been always running after him; and when she took a thing into her head there was no stopping her. She was continually taking up with lame ducks of one sort or another. This fellow had no money, but she must needs become engaged to him—a harum-scarum, unpractical chap, who would get himself into no end of difficulties.
    She had come to him one day in her slapdash way and told him; and, as if it were any consolation, she had added:
    â€œHe’s so splendid; he’s often lived on cocoa for a week!”
    â€œAnd he wants you to live on cocoa too?”
    â€œOh no; he is getting into the swim now.”
    Old Jolyon had taken his cigar from under his white moustaches, stained by coffee at the edge, and looked at her, that little slip of a thing who had got such a grip of his heart. He knew more about swims than his granddaughter. But she, having clasped her hands on his knees, rubbed her chin against him, making a sound like a purring cat. And, knocking the ash off his cigar, he had exploded in nervous desperation:
    â€œYou’re all alike: you won’t be satisfied till you’ve got what you want. If you must come to grief, you must;
I
wash my hands of it.”
    So, he had washed his hands of it, making the condition that they should not marry until Bosinney had at least four hundred a year.
    â€œ
I
shan’t be able to give you very much,” he had said, a formula to which June was not unaccustomed. “Perhaps this what’s-his-name will provide the cocoa.”
    He had hardly seen anything of her since it began. A bad business! He had no notion of giving her a lot of money to enable a fellow he knew nothing about to live on in idleness. He had seen that sort of thing before; no good ever came of it. Worst of all, he had no hope of shaking her resolution; she was as obstinate as a mule, always had been from a child. He didn’t see where it was to end. They must cut their coat according to their cloth. He would not give way till he saw young Bosinney with an income of his own. That June would have trouble with the fellow was as plain as a pikestaff; he had no more idea of money than a cow. As to this rushing down to Wales to visit the young man’s aunts, he fully expected they were old cats.
    And, motionless, old Jolyon stared at the wall; but for his open eyes, he might have been asleep. . . . The idea of supposing that young cub Soames could give him advice! He had always been a cub, with his nose in the air! He would be setting up as a man of property next, with a place in the country! A man of property! H’mph! Like his father, he was always nosing out bargains, a cold-blooded young beggar!
    He rose, and, going to the cabinet, began methodically stocking his cigar case from a bundle fresh in. They were not bad at the price, but you couldn’t get a good cigar, nowadays, nothing to hold a candle to those old Superfinos of Hanson and Bridger’s.
That
was a cigar!
    The thought, like some stealing perfume, carried him back to those wonderful nights at Richmond when after dinner he sat smoking on the terrace of the Crown and Sceptre with Nicholas Treffry and Traquair and Jack Herring and Anthony Thornworthy. How good his cigars were then! Poor old Nick!—dead, and Jack Herring—dead, and Traquair—dead of that wife of his, and Thornworthy—awfully shaky (no wonder, with his appetite).
    Of all the company of those days he himself alone seemed left, except Swithin, of course, and
he
so outrageously big there was no doing anything with