Sweated to serenity, Soames dined at the Remove and turned his face toward Park Lane. His father had been unwell lately. This would have to be kept from him! Never till that moment had he realised how much the dread of bringing James’ grey hairs down with sorrow to the grave had counted with him; how intimately it was bound up with his own shrinking from scandal. His affection for his father, always deep, had increased of late years with the knowledge that James looked on him as the real prop of his decline. It seemed pitiful that one who had been so careful all his life and done so much for the family name⁠—so that it was almost a byword for solid, wealthy respectability⁠—should at his last gasp have to see it in all the newspapers. This was like lending a hand to Death, that final enemy of Forsytes. “I must tell mother,” he thought, “and when it comes on, we must keep the papers from him somehow. He sees hardly anyone.” Letting himself in with his latchkey, he was beginning to ascend the stairs when he became conscious of commotion on the second-floor landing. His mother’s voice was saying:

“Now, James, you’ll catch cold. Why can’t you wait quietly?”