his mother.

IV

THE MAUSOLEUM

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time,
leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the
condition of "Timothy's" on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's soul
still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither kept the
atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows
are only opened to air it twice a day.

To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box, a
series of layers in the last of which was Timothy. One did not reach
him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of
old-time habit or absent-mindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon
and ask after their surviving uncle. Such were Francie, now quite
emancipated from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia,
emancipated from old Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her "man of the
world." But, after all, everybody was emancipated now, or said they
were--perhaps not quite the same thing!

When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on the
morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of
seeing Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a faint demonstration
within him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened
doorstep of that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and
now but one dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had
come and out of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or
burdened with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the "old people"
of another century, another age.

The sight of Smither--still corseted up to the armpits because the new
fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been
considered "nice" by Aunts Juley and Hester--brought a pale
friendliness to Soames's lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to
old pattern in every detail, an invaluable servant--none such
left--smiling back at him, with the words: "Why! it's Mr. Soames, after
all this time! And how are YOU, sir? Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to
know you've been."

"How is he?"

"Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's a
wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It
WOULD please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how he
relishes a baked apple still. But he's quite deaf. And a mercy, I
always think. For what we should have done with him in the air-raids,