pecial taste and culture, if, that is, he
took down and carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon
pictures he had given them. The still sky-blue walls, the green
curtains patterned with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked
fire-screen before the cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with
glass windows, full of little knick-knacks; 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 bee's
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, screw