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
other man, had put up its head, and kept him quietly ardent for months
past. When a man has some thing good to live for it is astonishing how
sober he becomes; and what Dartie had was really good--a three to one
chance for an autumn handicap, publicly assessed at twenty-five to one.
The old-fashioned heaven was a poor thing beside it, and his shirt
was on the daughter of Shirt-on-fire. But how much more than his shirt
depended on this granddaughter of Suspender! At that roving age of
forty-five, trying to Forsytes--and, though perhaps less distinguishable
from any other age, trying even to Darties--Montague had fixed his
current fancy on a dancer. It was no mean passion, but without money,
and a good deal of it, likely to remain a love as airy as her skirts;
and Dartie never had any money, subsisting miserably on what he could
beg or borrow from Winifred--a woman of character, who kept him because
he was the father of her children, and from a lingering admiration
for those now-dying Wardour Street good looks which in their youth
had fascinated her. She, together with anyone else who would lend him
anything, and his losses at cards and on the turf (extraordinary how
some men make a good thing out of losses!) were his whole means of
subsistence; for James was now too old and nervous to approach, and
Soames too formidably adamant. It is not too much to say that Dartie
had been living on hope for months. He had never been fond of money for
itself, had always despised the Forsytes with their investing habits,
though careful to make such use of them as he could. What he liked about
money was what it bought--personal sensation.