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wilful!
Knowing her power too over her father! Soames often reflected on the
mistake it was to dote on his daughter. To get old and dote! Sixty-five!
He was getting on; but he didn't feel it, for, fortunately perhaps,
considering Annette's youth and good looks, his second marriage had
turned out a cool affair. He had known but one real passion in his
life--for that first wife of his--Irene. Yes, and that fellow, his Cousin
Jolyon, who had gone off with her, was looking very shaky, they said.
No wonder, at seventy-two, after twenty years of a third marriage!
Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the

Row. A suitable spot for reminiscence, half-way between that house in
Park Lane which had seen his birth and his parents' deaths, and the little
house in Montpellier Square where thirty- five years ago he had
enjoyed his first edition of matrimony. Now, after twenty years of his
second edition, that old tragedy seemed to him like a previous
existence--which had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he
had hoped for. For many years he had ceased regretting, even vaguely,
the son who had not been born; Fleur filled the bill in his heart. After
all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward at all to the time
when she would change it. Indeed, if he ever thought of such a calamity,
it was seasoned by the vague feeling that he could make her rich
enough to purchase perhaps and extinguish the name of the fellow who
married her--why not, since, as it seemed, women were equal to men
nowadays? And Soames, secretly convinced that they were not, passed
his curved hand over his face vigorously, till it reached the comfort of
his chin. Thanks to abstemious habits, he had not grown fat and flabby;
his nose was pale and thin, his grey moustache close-clipped, his
eyesight unimpaired. A slight stoop closened and corrected the
expansion given to his face by the heightening of his forehead in the
recession of his grey hair. Little change had Time wrought in the
"warmest" of the young Forsytes, as the last of the old
Forsytes--Timothy--now in his hundred and first year, would have
phrased it.
The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had
given up top hats--it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days
like these. Plane-trees! His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid--the
Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that
Goya picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter
on his spot. The fellow had impressed him--great range, real genius!
Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had
finished with him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than
the first; oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had--as never
before-- commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called "La
Vendimia," wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who
had reminded him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at
Mapledurham, and rather poor it was--you couldn't copy Goya. He

would still look at it, however, if his daughter were not there, for the
sake of something irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of
the figure, the width between the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming
of the dark eyes. Curious that Fleur should have dark eyes, when his
own were grey--no pure Forsyte had brown eyes--and her mother's blue!
But of course her grandmother Lamotte's eyes were dark as treacle!
He began to walk on again towards Hyde Park Corner. No greater
change in all England than in the Row! Born almost within hail of it, he
could remember it from 1860 on. Brought there as a child between the
crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with a
cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top hats;
the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in a long red
waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs on several
strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles spaniels, Italian
greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline--you never saw them now.
You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working people sitting in
dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young bouncing females in
pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials charging up and down on
dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there, little girls on ponies, or old
gentlemen jogging their livers, or an orderly trying a great galumphing
cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no scraping,
no gossip--nothing; only the trees the same--the