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.

And so a month went by—­a month of summer in the fields, and in his heart, with summer’s heat and the fatigue thereof.  Who could have believed a few weeks back that he would have looked forward to his son’s and his grand-daughter’s return with something like dread!  There was such a delicious freedom, such recovery of that independence a man enjoys before he founds a family, about these weeks of lovely weather, and this new companionship with one who demanded nothing, and remained always a little unknown, retaining the fascination of mystery.  It was like a draught of wine to him who has been drinking water for so long that he has almost forgotten the stir wine brings to his blood, the narcotic to his brain.  The flowers were coloured brighter, scents and music and the sunlight had a living value—­were no longer mere reminders of past enjoyment.  There was something now to live for which stirred him continually to anticipation.  He lived in that, not in retrospection; the difference is considerable to any so old as he.  The pleasures of the table, never of much consequence to one naturally abstemious, had lost all value.  He ate little, without knowing