of skin and eye and nose and
feeling, it beat to-day hollow--to-day with its Tubes and cars, its
perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the
knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the
satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and
their "So longs," and their "Old Beans," and their laughter--girls who
gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them;
and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him the
shudders too. No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their
eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a standard,
and reverence for past and future.

With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
upstairs. He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect order of
the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls. At the
top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors. Which of them was
Timothy's? And he listened. A sound, as of a child slowly dragging a
hobby-horse about, came to his ears. That must be Timothy! He tapped,
and a door was opened by Smither, very red in the face.

Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him to
attend. If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see him
through the door.

Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.

The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most
impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own
affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the window,
a distance of some twelve feet. The lower part of his square face, no
longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as short as it
could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where the hair was
also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a good yellow. One
hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the skirt of his Jaeger
dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked ankles and
feet thrust into Jaeger slippers. The expression on his face was that of
a crossed child, intent on something that he has not got. Each time he
turned he stumped the stick, and then dragged it, as if to show that he
could do without it:

"He still looks strong," said Soames under his breath.

"Oh! yes, sir. You should see him take his bath