ave thought you'd be glad to get a
long job like that off your hands; but I suppose you feel it much as I do
when I part with a picture--a sort of child?"

He looked kindly at Bosinney.

"Yes," said the latter more cordially, "it goes out from you and there's
an end of it. I didn't know you painted."

"Only water-colours; I can't say I believe in my work."

"Don't believe in it? There--how can you do it? Work's no use unless
you believe in it!"

"Good," said young Jolyon; "it's exactly what I've always said.
By-the-bye, have you noticed that whenever one says 'Good,' one always
adds 'it's exactly what I've always said'! But if you ask me how I do
it, I answer, because I'm a Forsyte."

"A Forsyte! I never thought of you as one!"

"A Forsyte," replied young Jolyon, "is not an uncommon animal. There are
hundreds among the members of this Club. Hundreds out there in the
streets; you meet them wherever you go!"

"And how do you tell them, may I ask?" said Bosinney.

"By their sense of property. A Forsyte takes a practical--one might say
a commonsense--view of things, and a practical view of things is based
fundamentally on a sense of property. A Forsyte, you will notice, never
gives himself away."

"Joking?"

Young Jolyon's eye twinkled.

"Not much. As a Forsyte myself, I have no business to talk. But I'm a
kind of thoroughbred mongrel; now, there's no mistaking you: You're as
different from me as I am from my Uncle James, who is the perfect
specimen of a Forsyte. His sense of property is extreme, while you have
practically none. Without me in between, you would seem like a different
species. I'm the missing link. We are, of course, all of us the slaves
of property, and I admit that it's a question of degree, but what I call
a 'Forsyte' is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property.
He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on
property--it doesn't matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or
reputation--is his hall-mark."

"Ah!" murmured Bosinney. "You should patent the word."

"I should like," said young Jolyon, "to lecture on it:

"Properties and quality of a Forsyte: This little animal, disturbed by
the ridicule of his own sort, is unaffected in his motions by the
laughter of strange creatures (you or I). Hereditarily disposed to
myopia, he recognises only the persons of his own species, amongst which
he passes an existence of competitive tranquillity."