Like the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in this great
city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet chairs, and know
that groups of modern Italian marble are 'vieux jeu,' Soames Forsyte
inhabited a house which did what it could. It owned a copper door
knocker of individual design, windows which had been altered to open
outwards, hanging flower boxes filled with fuchsias, and at the back
(a great feature) a little court tiled with jade-green tiles, and
surrounded by pink hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a
parchment-coloured Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants
or visitors could be screened from the eyes of the curious while they
drank tea and examined at their leisure the latest of Soames's little
silver boxes.
The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William Morris.
For its size, the house was commodious; there were countless nooks
resembling birds' nests, and little things made of silver were deposited
like eggs.
In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at war.
There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on a desert
island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an investment,
cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in accordance with the laws
of competition. This competitive daintiness had caused Soames in his
Marlborough days to be the first boy into white waistcoats in summer,
and corduroy waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing
in public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to dust
his patent leather boots before a great multitude assembled on Speech
Day to hear him recite Moliere.
Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners;
impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating
one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He
would not have gone without a bath for worlds--it was the fashion to
take baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!
But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside
streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.
In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the wall. As
in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation,
the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on it a
conventional superstructure.
Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of other
houses with the same high aspirations, having become: 'That very
charming little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite individual, my
dear--really elegant.'
For Soames Forsyte--read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel
Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middle class Englishman
in London with any pretensions to taste; and though the decoration be
different, the phrase is just.