‘there’s nothing like it left; it ought to be preserved.’  And, by George, they might laugh at it, but for a standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day hollow—­to-day with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate, and their “So longs,” and their “Old Beans,” and their laughter—­girls who gave him the shudders whenever he thought of Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed, capable, older women who managed life and gave him the shudders too.  No! his old aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or very much their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and reverence for past and future.

With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing upstairs.  He looked in at a place on the way:  H’m! in perfect order of the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the walls.  At the top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors.  Which of them was Timothy’s?  And he listened.  A sound, as of a child slowly dragging a hobby-horse about, came to his ears.  That must be Timothy!  He tapped, and a door was opened by Smither, very red in the face.

Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get him to attend.  If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he could see him through the door.

Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.

The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the most impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on his own affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed and the window, a distance of some twelve feet.  The lower part of his square face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy beard clipped as short as it could be, and his chin looked as broad as his brow where the hair was also quite white, while nose and cheeks and brow were a good yellow.  One hand held a stout stick, and the other grasped the skirt of his Jaeger dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers.  The expression on his face was that of a crossed child, intent on something that he has not got.  Each time he turned he stumped the stick, and then dragged it, as if to show that he could do without it: 

“He still looks strong,” said Soames under his breath.

“Oh! yes, sir.  You should see him take his bath—­it’s wonderful; he does enjoy it so.”

Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight.  Timothy had resumed his babyhood.

“Does he take any interest in things generally?” he said, also loud.