And across the terrace stones, growing grey in the moonlight, he passed

back within.

How should an old man live his days if not in dreaming of his well-spent

past? In that, at all events, there is no agitating warmth, only pale

winter sunshine. The shell can withstand the gentle beating of the

dynamos of memory. The present he should distrust; the future shun. From

beneath thick shade he should watch the sunlight creeping at his toes.

If there be sun of summer, let him not go out into it, mistaking it

for the Indian-summer sun! Thus peradventure he shall decline softly,

slowly, imperceptibly, until impatient Nature clutches his wind-pipe and

he gasps away to death some early morning before the world is aired,

and they put on his tombstone: 'In the fulness of years!' yea! If he

preserve his principles in perfect order, a Forsyte may live on long

after he is dead.

Old Jolyon was conscious of all this, and yet there was in him that

which transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a Forsyte shall not

love beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health.

And something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted

at the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he

could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had

told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you

down. No, no; a man did not live on his capital; it was not done! The

shibboleths of the past are ever more real than the actualities of

the present. And he, to whom living on one's capital had always been

anathema, could not have borne to have applied so gross a phrase to his

own case. Pleasure is healthful; beauty good to see; to live again in

the youth of the young--and what else on earth was he doing!

Methodically, as had been the way of his whole life, he now arranged his

time. On Tuesdays he journeyed up to town by train; Irene came and dined

with him. And they went to the opera. On Thursdays he drove to town,

and, putting that fat chap and his horses up, met her in Kensington

Gardens, picking up the carriage after he had left her, and driving home

again in time for dinner. He threw out the casual formula that he had

business in London on those two days. On Wednesdays and Saturdays she

came down to give Holly music lessons. The greater the pleasure he

took in her society, the more scrupulously fastidious he became, just a

matter-of-fact and friendly uncle. Not even in feeling, really, was he

more--for, after all, there was his age. And yet, if she were late he

fidgeted himself to death. If she missed coming, which happened twice,

his eyes grew sad as an old dog's, and he failed to sleep.




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