e enemy.

In those two minutes he demonstrated to perfection all that unconscious
soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made, of him and so many
others of his class the core of the nation. In the unostentatious conduct
of their own affairs, to the neglect of everything else, they typified
the essential individualism, born in the Briton from the natural
isolation of his country's life.

The dog Balthasar sniffed round the edges of his trousers; this friendly
and cynical mongrel--offspring of a liaison between a Russian poodle and
a fox-terrier--had a nose for the unusual.

The strange greetings over, old Jolyon seated himself in a wicker chair,
and his two grandchildren, one on each side of his knees, looked at him
silently, never having seen so old a man.

They were unlike, as though recognising the difference set between them
by the circumstances of their births. Jolly, the child of sin,
pudgy-faced, with his tow-coloured hair brushed off his forehead, and a
dimple in his chin, had an air of stubborn amiability, and the eyes of a
Forsyte; little Holly, the child of wedlock, was a dark-skinned, solemn
soul, with her mother's, grey and wistful eyes.

The dog Balthasar, having walked round the three small flower-beds, to
show his extreme contempt for things at large, had also taken a seat in
front of old Jolyon, and, oscillating a tail curled by Nature tightly
over his back, was staring up with eyes that did not blink.

Even in the garden, that sense of things being pokey haunted old Jolyon;
the wicker chair creaked under his weight; the garden-beds looked
'daverdy'; on the far side, under the smut-stained wall, cats had made a
path.

While he and his grandchildren thus regarded each other with the peculiar
scrutiny, curious yet trustful, that passes between the very young and
the very old, young Jolyon watched his wife.

The colour had deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows,
and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from
her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the
sudden vivid colour in her cheeks painfully pathetic.

The look on her face, such as he had never seen there before, such as she
had always hidden from him, was full of secret resentments, and longings,
and fears. Her eyes, under their twitching brows, stared painfully. And
she was silent.

Jolly alone sustained the conversation; he had many possessions, and was
anxiou