how emotion before
his son, began quickly shovelling the earth on to that still shape.
There went the past! If only there were a joyful future to look forward
to! It was like stamping down earth on one's own life. They replaced
the turf carefully on the smooth little mound, and, grateful that they
had spared each other's feelings, returned to the house arm-in-arm.

CHAPTER XI

TIMOTHY STAYS THE ROT

On Forsyte 'Change news of the enlistment spread fast, together with the
report that June, not to be outdone, was going to become a Red Cross
nurse. These events were so extreme, so subversive of pure Forsyteism,
as to have a binding effect upon the family, and Timothy's was thronged
next Sunday afternoon by members trying to find out what they thought
about it all, and exchange with each other a sense of family credit.
Giles and Jesse Hayman would no longer defend the coast but go to South
Africa quite soon; Jolly and Val would be following in April; as to
June--well, you never knew what she would really do.

The retirement from Spion Kop and the absence of any good news from the
seat of war imparted an air of reality to all this, clinched in startling
fashion by Timothy. The youngest of the old Forsytes--scarcely eighty,
in fact popularly supposed to resemble their father, 'Superior Dosset,'
even in his best-known characteristic of drinking Sherry--had been
invisible for so many years that he was almost mythical. A long
generation had elapsed since the risks of a publisher's business had
worked on his nerves at the age of forty, so that he had got out with a
mere thirty-five thousand pounds in the world, and started to make his
living by careful investment. Putting by every year, at compound
interest, he had doubled his capital in forty years without having once
known what it was like to shake in his shoes over money matters. He was
now putting aside some two thousand a year, and, with the care he was
taking of himself, expected, so Aunt Hester said, to double his capital
again before he died. What he would do with it then, with his sisters
dead and himself dead, was often mockingly queried by free spirits such
as Francie, Euphemia, or young Nicholas' second, Christopher, whose
spirit was so free that he had actually said he was going on the stage.
All admitted, however, that this was best known to Timothy himself, and
possibly to Soames, who never divulged a secret.

Those few Forsytes who had seen him