something fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over within him.  Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish!  Wealth there was—­oh, yes! wealth—­he himself was a richer man than his father had ever been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.  Little half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and there, dispersed and chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever again firm and coherent to look up to.  And into this new hurly-burly of bad manners and loose morals his daughter—­flower of his life—­was flung!  And when those Labour chaps got power—­if they ever did—­the worst was yet to come.

He passed out under the archway, at last no longer—­thank goodness! —­disfigured by the gungrey of its search-light.  ’They’d better put a search-light on to where they’re all going,’ he thought, ’and light up their precious democracy!’ And he directed his steps along the Club fronts of Piccadilly.  George Forsyte, of course, would be sitting in the bay window of the Iseeum.  The chap was so big now that he was there nearly all his time, like some immovable, sardonic, humorous eye noting the decline of men and things.  And Soames hurried, ever constitutionally uneasy beneath his cousin’s glance.  George, who, as he had heard, had written a letter signed “Patriot” in the middle of the War, complaining of the Government’s hysteria in docking the oats of race-horses.  Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous, neat, clean-shaven, with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of the best hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand.  Well, he didn’t change!  And for perhaps the first time in his life Soames felt a kind of sympathy tapping in his waistcoat for that sardonic kinsman.  With his weight, his perfectly parted hair, and bull-like gaze, he was a guarantee that the old order would take some shifting yet.  He saw George move the pink paper as if inviting him to ascend—­the chap must want to ask something about his property.  It was still under Soames’ control; for in the adoption of a sleeping partnership at that painful period twenty years back when he had divorced Irene, Soames had found himself almost insensibly retaining control of all purely Forsyte affairs.

Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in.  Since the death of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide—­the Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames.  George, too, he knew, had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the joys of the table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight down, and owning, as he said, “just one or two old screws to give me an interest in life.”  He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he had been used to feel up there.  George put out a well-kept hand.