!" It was that great grey cat. 'Young Bosinney was like a great
cat!' he thought. 'It was him in there, that she--that she was--He's
got her still!' He walked to the edge of the terrace, and looked down
into the darkness; he could just see the powdering of the daisies on the
unmown lawn. Here to-day and gone to-morrow! And there came the moon,
who saw all, young and old, alive and dead, and didn't care a dump! His
own turn soon. For a single day of youth he would give what was left!
And he turned again towards the house. He could see the windows of the
night nursery up there. His little sweet would be asleep. 'Hope that
dog won't wake her!' he thought. 'What is it makes us love, and makes us
die! I must go to bed.'

And across the terrace stones, growing grey in the moonlight, he passed
back within.

How should an old man live his days if not in dreaming of his well-spent
past? In that, at all events, there is no agitating warmth, only pale
winter sunshine. The shell can withstand the gentle beating of the
dynamos of memory. The present he should distrust; the future shun.
From beneath thick shade he should watch the sunlight creeping at his
toes. If there be sun of summer, let him not go out into it, mistaking
it for the Indian-summer sun! Thus peradventure he shall decline softly,
slowly, imperceptibly, until impatient Nature clutches his wind-pipe and
he gasps away to death some early morning before the world is aired, and
they put on his tombstone: 'In the fulness of years!' yea! If he
preserve his principles in perfect order, a Forsyte may live on long
after he is dead.

Old Jolyon was conscious of all this, and yet there was in him that which
transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a Forsyte shall not love
beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health. And
something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted at
the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he
could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had
told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you down.
No, no; a man did not live on his capital; it was not done! The
shibboleths of the past are ever more real than the actualities of the
present. And he, to whom living on one's capital had always been
anathema, could not have borne to have applied so gross a phrase to his
own case. Pleasure is healthful; beauty good to see; to live ag