th that hat, and the head swayed forward
and rested on his breast. Summer--summer! So went the hum.

The stable clock struck the quarter past. The dog Balthasar stretched
and looked up at his master. The thistledown no longer moved. The dog
placed his chin over the sunlit foot. It did not stir. The dog withdrew
his chin quickly, rose, and leaped on old Jolyon's lap, looked in his
face, whined; then, leaping down, sat on his haunches, gazing up. And
suddenly he uttered a long, long howl.

But the thistledown was still as death, and the face of his old master.

Summer--summer--summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!
1917

IN CHANCERY

Two households both alike in dignity, From ancient grudge, break into new
mutiny.

--Romeo and Juliet
TO JESSIE AND JOSEPH CONRAD

PART 1

CHAPTER I

AT TIMOTHY'S

The possessive instinct never stands still. Through florescence and
feud, frosts and fires, it followed the laws of progression even in the
Forsyte family which had believed it fixed for ever. Nor can it be
dissociated from environment any more than the quality of potato from the
soil.

The historian of the English eighties and nineties will, in his good
time, depict the somewhat rapid progression from self-contented and
contained provincialism to still more self-contented if less contained
imperialism--in other words, the 'possessive' instinct of the nation on
the move. And so, as if in conformity, was it with the Forsyte family.
They were spreading not merely on the surface, but within.

When, in 1895, Susan Hayman, the married Forsyte sister, followed her
husband at the ludicrously low age of seventy-four, and was cremated, it
made strangely little stir among the six old Forsytes left. For this
apathy there were three causes. First: the almost surreptitious burial
of old Jolyon in 1892 down at Robin Hill--first of the Forsytes to
desert the family grave at Highgate. That burial, coming a year after
Swithin's entirely proper funeral, had occasioned a great deal of talk on
Forsyte 'Change, the abode of Timothy Forsyte on the Bayswater Road,
London, which still collected and radiated family gossip. Opinions
ranged from the lamentation of Aunt Juley to the outspoken assertion of
Francie that it was 'a jolly good thing to stop all that stuffy Highgate
business.' Uncle Jolyon in his later years--indeed, ever since the
strange and lamentable affair between his granddaughter June