She'll win hands down; I shall go the whole hog." George, who had laid off every penny, and a few besides, and stood to win, however it came out, grinned down on him from his bulky height, with the words: "So ho, my wild one!" for after a chequered apprenticeship weathered with the money of a deeply complaining Roger, his Forsyte blood was beginning to stand him in good stead in the profession of owner.
There are moments of disillusionment in the lives of men from which the sensitive recorder shrinks.

Suffice it to say that the good thing fell down.

Sleeve-links finished in the ruck.

Dartie's shirt was lost.
Between the passing of these things and the day when Soames turned his face towards Green Street, what had not happened! When a man with the constitution of Montague Dartie has exercised self-control for months from religious motives, and remains unrewarded, he does not curse God and die, he curses God and lives, to the distress of his family.
Winifred--a plucky woman, if a little too fashionable--who had borne the brunt of him for exactly twenty-one years, had never really believed that he would do what he now did.

Like so many wives, she thought she knew the worst, but she had not yet known him in his forty-fifth year, when he, like other men, felt that it was now or never.