The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had given up top hats—­it was no use attracting attention to wealth in days like these.  Plane-trees!  His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid—­the Easter before the War, when, having to make up his mind about that Goya picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his spot.  The fellow had impressed him—­great range, real genius!  Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with him.  The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first; oh, yes!  And he had bought.  On that visit he had—­as never before—­commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called “La Vendimia,” wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his daughter.  He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather poor it was—­you couldn’t copy Goya.  He would still look at it, however, if his daughter were not there, for the sake of something irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the width between the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes.  Curious that Fleur should have dark eyes, when his own were grey—­no pure Forsyte had brown eyes—­and her mother’s blue!  But of course her grandmother Lamotte’s eyes were dark as treacle!

He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner.  No greater change in all England than in the Row!  Born almost within hail of it, he could remember it from 1860 on.  Brought there as a child between the crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with a cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top hats; the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in a long red waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with dogs on several strings, and try to sell one to his mother:  King Charles spaniels, Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her crinoline—­you never saw them now.  You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working people sitting in dull rows with nothing to stare at but a few young bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials charging up and down on dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there, little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their livers, or an orderly trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no gossip—­nothing; only the trees the same—­the trees in—­different to the generations and declensions of mankind.  A democratic England—­dishevelled, hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an apex.  And that something fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over within him.  Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish!  Wealth there was—­oh, yes! wealth—­he himself was a richer man than his father had ever been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling Cheerio.  Little half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and there, dispersed and chetif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever again firm and coherent to look up to.  And into this new hurly-burly of bad manners and loose morals his daughter—­flower of his life—­was flung!  And when those Labour chaps got power—­if they ever did—­the worst was yet to come.