: When Timothy
died--why not? Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this
house--like Carlyle's--and put up a tablet, and show it? "Specimen of
mid-Victorian abode--entrance, one shilling, with catalogue." After all,
it was the completest thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of
to-day. Perfect in its special taste and culture, if, that is, he took
down and carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon pictures he
had given them. The still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned
with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the
cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of little
knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey, Cowper,
Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in
a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full
of family relics: Hester's first fan; the buckles of their mother's
father's shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant's
tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in
jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it,
recording God knew what! And the pictures crowding on the walls--all
water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like tile foreigners they
were, and doubtful customers at that--pictures bright and illustrative,
"Telling the Bees," "Hey for the Ferry!" and two in the style of Frith,
all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin. Oh! many, many
pictures at which Soames had gazed a thousand times in supercilious
fascination; a marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt frames.

And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically sealed as
ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it. And the
gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one side of the
fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann, and after her Aunt
Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light and bolt upright. And on
the other side of the fire the one really easy chair, back to the light,
for Aunt Hester. Soames screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them
sitting there. Ah! and the atmosphere--even now, of too many stuffs and
washed lace curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
thought, '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