r
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."

"My people," replied young Jolyon, "are not very extreme, and they have
their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they
possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real
tests of a Forsyte--the power of never being able to give yourself up to
anything soul and body, and the 'sense of property'."

An unhappy marriage! No ill-treatment--only that indefinable malaise,
that terrible blight which killed all sweetness under Heaven; and so from
day to day, from night to night, from week to week, from year to year,
till death should end it.

The more I see of people the more I am convinced that they are never good
or bad--merely comic, or pathetic. You probably don't agree with me!'

"Don't touch me!" she cried. He caught her wrist; she wrenched it away.
"And where may you have been?" he asked. "In heaven--out of this house!"
With those words she fled upstairs.

It seemed to young Jolyon that he could hear her saying: "But, darling,
it would ruin you!" For he himself had experienced to the full the
gnawing fear at the bottom of each woman's heart that she is a drag on
the man she loves.

She had come back like an animal wounded to death, not knowing
where to turn, not knowing what she was doing.

"What do you mean by God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas
of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle--one believes in That.
And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally one believes in That."

She was such a decided mortal; knew her own mind so terribly well; wanted
things so inexorably until she got them--and then, indeed, often dropped
them like a hot potato. Her mother had been like that, whence had come
all those tears. Not that his incompatibility with his daughter was
anything like what it had been with the first Mrs. Young Jolyon.
One could be amused where a daughter was concerned; in a wife's case
one could not be amused.

"Thank you for that go