And if, insatiate, the enquirer had gone on, “You do not look, then, for spiritual union in this marriage?” Soames would have lifted his sideway smile, and rejoined:  “That’s as it may be.  If I get satisfaction for my senses, perpetuation of myself; good taste and good humour in the house; it is all I can expect at my age.  I am not likely to be going out of my way towards any far-fetched sentimentalism.”  Whereon, the enquirer must in good taste have ceased enquiry.

The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears.  Fur-coated and top-hatted, with Annette beside him in dark furs, Soames crossed Park Lane on the morning of the funeral procession, to the rails in Hyde Park.  Little moved though he ever was by public matters, this event, supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period, impressed his fancy.  In ’37, when she came to the throne, ‘Superior Dosset’ was still building houses to make London hideous; and James, a stripling of twenty-six, just laying the foundations of his practice in the Law.  Coaches still ran; men wore stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels; ‘tigers’ swung behind cabriolets; women said, ‘La!’ and owned no property; there were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write.  Well-nigh two generations had slipped by—­of steamboats, railways, telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these motorcars—­of such accumulated wealth, that eight per cent. had become three, and Forsytes were numbered by the thousand!  Morals had changed, manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had become Mammon—­Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself:  Sixty-four years that favoured property, and had made the upper middle class; buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the nobility.  An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact.  An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.  A great Age, whose transmuting influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of the Universe.

And to witness the passing of this Age, London—­its pet and fancy—­was pouring forth her citizens through every gate into Hyde Park, hub of Victorianism, happy hunting-ground of Forsytes.  Under the grey heavens, whose drizzle just kept off, the dark concourse gathered to see the show.  The ‘good old’ Queen, full of years and virtue, had emerged from her seclusion for the last time to make a London holiday.  From Houndsditch, Acton, Ealing, Hampstead, Islington, and Bethnal Green; from Hackney, Hornsey, Leytonstone, Battersea, and Fulham; and from those green pastures where Forsytes flourish—­Mayfair and Kensington,