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 flabby; 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 width between the arching