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If Soames thought this or thought that, one had better save oneself the bother of thinking too. He guaranteed, as it were, irresponsibility to numerous Forsytes of the third and fourth generations.
'He is not he is not! were the words which kept forming on her lips. A little private hotel over a well-known restaurant near the Gare St. Lazare was Jolyon's haunt in Paris. He hated his fellow Forsytes abroad vapid as fish out of water in their well-trodden runs, the Opera, Rue de Rivoli, and Moulin Rouge.
After those visits to the Restaurant Bretagne began, other visits ceased without, indeed, any definite decision, for Soames, like all Forsytes, and the great majority of their countrymen, was a born empiricist.
Who would have thought that behind them, within ten miles, London began that London of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise; its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and stucco? That London which had seen Irene's early tragedy, and Jolyon's own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse of the possessive instinct!
This brother had a high forehead, and the freshest colour of any of the Forsytes; his light grey eyes measured the street frontage of the houses by the way, and now and then he would level his, umbrella and take a 'lunar, as he expressed it, of the varying heights. "She'd no money," replied Nicholas.
We are so exhausted with living that no hours are too small for us. We will lose our shirts with equanimity. We have flown fast and are past everything. All is cigarette smoke. Bismillah! Competitive spirit, bone-deep in the English, was obliging those two young Forsytes to have ideals; and at the close of a century ideals are mixed.
Was there, in the crease of his trousers, the expression of his moustache, his accent, or the shine on his top-hat, a pin to choose between Soames and the ninth baronet himself? Was not Fleur as self-possessed, quick, glancing, pretty, and hard as the likeliest Muskham, Mont, or Charwell filly present? If anything, the Forsytes had it in dress and looks and manners.
It presented itself as the one possible way of asserting once more the domination of his will; of forcing James, and Soames, and the family, and all those hidden masses of Forsytes a great stream rolling against the single dam of his obstinacy to recognise once and for all that he would be master.
First: the almost surreptitious burial of old Jolyon in 1892 down at Robin Hill first of the Forsytes to desert the family grave at Highgate. That burial, coming a year after Swithin's entirely proper funeral, had occasioned a great deal of talk on Forsyte 'Change, the abode of Timothy Forsyte on the Bayswater Road, London, which still collected and radiated family gossip.
Both these Forsytes, wide asunder as the poles in many respects, possessed in their different ways to a greater degree than the rest of the family that essential quality of tenacious and prudent insight into 'affairs, which is the highwater mark of their great class.
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