his eyes, and said stubbornly:

"I can't afford it."

And slowly, with his mousing walk, he led the way back to the first site.

They spent some time there going into particulars of the projected house,
and then Soames returned to the agent's cottage.

He came out in about half an hour, and, joining Bosinney, started for the
station.

"Well," he said, hardly opening his lips, "I've taken that site of yours,
after all."

And again he was silent, confusedly debating how it was that this fellow,
whom by habit he despised, should have overborne his own decision.

CHAPTER V

A FORSYTE MENAGE

Like the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in this great
city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet chairs, and know that
groups of modern Italian marble are 'vieux jeu,' Soames Forsyte inhabited
a house which did what it could. It owned a copper door knocker of
individual design, windows which had been altered to open outwards,
hanging flower boxes filled with fuchsias, and at the back (a great
feature) a little court tiled with jade-green tiles, and surrounded by
pink hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a parchment-coloured
Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants or visitors could
be screened from the eyes of the curious while they drank tea and
examined at their leisure the latest of Soames's little silver boxes.

The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William Morris. For
its size, the house was commodious; there were countless nooks resembling
birds' nests, and little things made of silver were deposited like eggs.

In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at war.
There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on a desert
island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an investment,
cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in accordance with the laws
of competition. This competitive daintiness had caused Soames in his
Marlborough days to be the first boy into white waistcoats in summer, and
corduroy waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing in
public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to dust his
patent leather boots before a great multitude assembled on Speech Day to
hear him recite Moliere.

Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners;
impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating
one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicula