TIMOTHY STAYS THE ROT
On Forsyte 'Change news of the enlistment spread fast,together with the report that June,not to be outdone,was going to become a Red Cross nurse.These events were so extreme,so subversive of pure Forsyteism,as to have a binding effect upon the family,and Timothy's was thronged next Sunday afternoon by members trying to find out what they thought about it all,and exchange with each other a sense of family credit.Giles and Jesse Hayman would no longer defend the coast but go to South Africa quite soon;Jolly and Val would be following in April;as to June--well,you never knew what she would really do.
The retirement from Spion Kop and the absence of any good news from the seat of war imparted an air of reality to all this,clinched in startling fashion by Timothy.The youngest of the old Forsytes--scarcely eighty,in fact popularly supposed to resemble their father,'Superior Dosset,'even in his best-known characteristic of drinking Sherry--had been invisible for so many years that he was almost mythical.A long generation had elapsed since the risks of a publisher's business had worked on his nerves at the age of forty,so that he had got out with a mere thirty-five thousand pounds in the world,and started to make his living by careful investment.Putting by every year,at compound interest,he had doubled his capital in forty years without having once known what it was like to shake in his shoes over money matters.He was now putting aside some two thousand a year,and,with the care he was taking of himself,expected,so Aunt Hester said,to double his capital again before he died.What he would do with it then,with his sisters dead and himself dead,was often mockingly queried by free spirits such as Francie,Euphemia,or young Nicholas'second,Christopher,whose spirit was so free that he had actually said he was going on the stage.All admitted,however,that this was best known to Timothy himself,and possibly to Soames,who never divulged a secret.