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.