Like the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in this great

city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet chairs, and know

that groups of modern Italian marble are 'vieux jeu,' Soames Forsyte

inhabited a house which did what it could. It owned a copper door

knocker of individual design, windows which had been altered to open

outwards, hanging flower boxes filled with fuchsias, and at the back

(a great feature) a little court tiled with jade-green tiles, and

surrounded by pink hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a

parchment-coloured Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants

or visitors could be screened from the eyes of the curious while they

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drank tea and examined at their leisure the latest of Soames's little

silver boxes.

The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William Morris.

For its size, the house was commodious; there were countless nooks

resembling birds' nests, and little things made of silver were deposited

like eggs.

In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at war.

There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on a desert

island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an investment,

cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in accordance with the laws

of competition. This competitive daintiness had caused Soames in his

Marlborough days to be the first boy into white waistcoats in summer,

and corduroy waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing

in public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to dust

his patent leather boots before a great multitude assembled on Speech

Day to hear him recite Moliere.

Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners;

impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating

one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He

would not have gone without a bath for worlds--it was the fashion to

take baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!

But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside

streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.

In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the wall. As

in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation,

the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on it a

conventional superstructure.

Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of other

houses with the same high aspirations, having become: 'That very

charming little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite individual, my

dear--really elegant.'

For Soames Forsyte--read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel

Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middle class Englishman

in London with any pretensions to taste; and though the decoration be

different, the phrase is just.




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