nd ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen
before the cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows,
full of little knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley,
Southey, Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the
Victorian poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with
dim red plush, full of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles
of their mother's father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one
very yellow elephant's tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar
Forsyte, who had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up,
with spidery writing on it, recording God knew what! And the pictures
crowding on the walls--all water-colours save those four Barbizons
looking like the foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at
that--pictures bright and illustrative, "Telling the Bees," "Hey for the
Ferry!" and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines,
given them by Swithin. Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed
a thousand times in supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection of
bright, smooth gilt frames.

And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed
as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it. And the
gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one side of the
fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on
the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light,
for Aunt Hester. Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them
sitting there. Ah! and the atmosphere--even now, of too many stuffs and
washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.' And,
by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life
never departed from, for fastidiousness 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-ey