all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward at all to the
time when she would change it. Indeed, if he ever thought of such a
calamity, it was seasoned by the vague feeling that he could make her
rich enough to purchase perhaps and extinguish the name of the fellow
who married her--why not, since, as it seemed, women were equal to men
nowadays? And Soames, secretly convinced that they were not, passed his
curved hand over his face vigorously, till it reached the comfort of his
chin. Thanks to abstemious habits, he had not grown fat and gabby; his
nose was pale and thin, his grey moustache close-clipped, his eyesight
unimpaired. A slight stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to
his face by the heightening of his forehead in the recession of his
grey hair. Little change had Time wrought in the "warmest" of the young
Forsytes, as the last of the old Forsytes--Timothy-now in his hundred
and first year, would have phrased it.

The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had
given up top hats--it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days
like these. Plane-trees! His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid--the
Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that Goya
picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his
spot. The fellow had impressed him--great range, real genius! Highly as
the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with
him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first;
oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had--as never
before--commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called "La Vendimia,"
wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded
him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and
rather poor it was--you couldn't copy Goya. He would still look at
it, however, if his daughter were not there, for the sake of something
irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the