Soames Forsyte walked out of his green-painted front door three days
after the dinner at Swithin's, and looking back from across the Square,
confirmed his impression that the house wanted painting.
He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands
crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not
unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.
He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as
if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent;
were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.
The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery
to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made
a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not
love him, was obviously no reason.
He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting
on with him was certainly no Forsyte.
Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his
wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They
could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted
by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behaviour under
this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those
women--not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and
to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even
occurred to him. Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her
value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could
give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she
marry me?' was his continual thought. He had, forgotten his courtship;
that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her,
devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing
to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his
perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking
advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he
crowned his labours with success. If he remembered anything, it was the
dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl
had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her
face--strange, passive, appealing--when suddenly one day she had
yielded, and said that she would marry him.
It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people
praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till
it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.