When Nicholas received this letter he was already in a state of considerable confusion—not to say anxiety—and he read it with a stupor unbecoming to the cleverest man in London. That a wife should have gone off by herself without giving notice had taken him—as he would not have expressed to anybody else—“flat aback.” That, on the top of it, she should ask him to send her money and make her a regular allowance seemed to him outrageous. He went to bed and passed a wretched night. What was the woman about? The more he did not sleep the more he was inclined to think that he had never heard of such a thing. Next day he wrote in reply:

He went to a Board meeting irritably convinced that he had clinched the matter and that she would be home tomorrow. She was not, and the day after he received a second letter.

Nicholas put the letter down with the remark: “Well, for obstinacy give me a woman!” What on earth had come to her! Debts, indeed! Fiddlesticks! He was none the less “in a regular stew.” To have his attention on important matters disturbed in this way was scandalous. Why! if it went on he would have to go down and bring her back! And it did go on. He answered the letter after waiting another day to see if she would come to her senses.

To this letter he received no answer. Three days passed during which he experienced every kind of mental and some physical discomfort. He even began to have dark thoughts about the nice solicitor. Fanny was only thirty-seven, and with a woman you never knew. At last, thoroughly alarmed, he cried off from a meeting of the Central Canal Corporation, and went down to Bournemouth. At the hotel they told him that Mrs. Forsyte had left two days before. No! They had no address. The callous indifference to his feelings disclosed by this conduct upset Nicholas completely. That he should have to confront an almost grinning hotel manager and betray the fact that his own wife was acting independently was—was monstrous! He did not even ask if she had paid her bill; but his knowledge of hotels—he was on the Board of one—told him that she had, or they would have presented him with it. Where was she getting money from—throwing away her jewellery he shouldn’t be surprised. He returned to London—there was nothing else to do. The next day he received a letter from her to say that she had moved on to Weymouth, but it was not as nice as she expected and she should not stay. She did not say where she was going. ‘H’m!’ thought Nicholas: ‘Playing cat and mouse with me, is she?’ And he went sullenly into the City.

Now a man may make the best resolutions about his wife, such as: “I’ll have nothing more to do with her,” or: “If she thinks she can tire me out she’s very much mistaken.” But when, like Nicholas, he has given her six children—three of them at home; when, like Nicholas, he has a reputation for always having had his own way, and for being an irreproachable householder, it was exceptionally galling not even to be able to say with truth that he knew where his wife was, to have to avoid Forsyte ‘Change as if it were the devil—as perhaps it was—and to sneak about his own house feeling that his children and his servants knew all about everything. He began to suffer severely from that kind of dyspepsia which arises from the thwarting of one’s will, one’s instincts, and one’s self-esteem. He often thought: ‘If she could see me, she wouldn’t go on behaving like this.’

At the end of a fortnight he received from her a letter dated from an hotel at Cheltenham which, though it seemed to show a certain softening, mentioned a nice doctor who had given her some very kind advice—Doctors, indeed, as if he didn’t know them!—and ended with the words: “I trust that you are now prepared, my dear husband, to make me a fixed and regular allowance, of course out of my own money. I think—do you not agree?—that £500 a year is the least amount that would be proper. I feel that if I had that I could come home again. In the meantime I have parted with my emerald pendant. Give my love to the dear children. Your affectionate wife, Fanny.”

Parted with her emerald pendant! The thing had cost him ninety pounds, and he supposed she had got thirty or forty for it. The sheer folly of women had never seemed to him so patent. Five hundred a year, indeed, to throw away in fallals! But a cloud had undoubtedly been lifted from his brain by this letter. Here was at least a definite situation. If he promised her a fixed five hundred a year she would come home. It all came of agitators putting ideas into women’s heads, a mischievous lot! But the boys would be back from school in another week or two; and it would look extremely odd if their mother were not there to go to the seaside with them.

An organ-grinder playing his confounded organ, had said to him only yesterday: “No, Guv’nor, I knows the valley of peace an’ quietness—I don’t move on under ‘arf-a-crown.” The impudence of the ruffian had tickled Nicholas and he had given him the half-crown. Fanny was behaving just like that. And who knew when she wouldn’t be off again to get out of him the rest of the thousand a year he’d received with her. No, on the whole, he didn’t think she’d be as unreasonable as that; but he continued to combat his desire for peace and quietness at so considerable a price. All the time he had a dim feeling that it wasn’t really the money she was after. She had never seemed to know or care much about money, in fact he had often had occasion to reproach her with indifference to its value. What exactly she had in her head he hesitated to characterize by a word which kept creeping nastily into his mind—independence. Fanny independent! Why she’d be in the workhouse tomorrow! Nicholas, indeed, was not unlike most people: he could not understand the need in others for that without which he himself would have been wholly miserable. What would be his own position if he made her independent—he would be subject to her whims and fancies and women’s nonsense of all sorts! And then—this was a bright moment—the solution occurred to him: Make her a fixed and regular allowance, and stop it when he wanted to! Everything seemed suddenly clear, he wondered he hadn’t thought of that before; and by the evening post he wrote off to say that he had reconsidered the matter and was prepared to pay her a regular allowance of a hundred and twenty-five pounds a quarter, and he would send the carriage to meet the five o’clock train the day after tomorrow.