A well-fed man in a white waistcoat said slowly through his teeth: "It's
all greed; they can't be hungry. Why, they take no exercise." At these
words a tiger snatched a piece of bleeding liver, and the fat man
laughed. His wife, in a Paris model frock and gold nose-nippers,
reproved him: "How can you laugh, Harry? Such a horrid sight!"

Young Jolyon frowned.

The circumstances of his life, though he had ceased to take a too
personal view of them, had left him subject to an intermittent contempt;
and the class to which he had belonged--the carriage class--especially
excited his sarcasm.

To shut up a lion or tiger in confinement was surely a horrible
barbarity. But no cultivated person would admit this.

The idea of its being barbarous to confine wild animals had probably
never even occurred to his father for instance; he belonged to the old
school, who considered it at once humanizing and educational to confine
baboons and panthers, holding the view, no doubt, that in course of time
they might induce these creatures not so unreasonably to die of misery
and heart-sickness against the bars of their cages, and put the society
to the expense of getting others! In his eyes, as in the eyes of all
Forsytes, the pleasure of seeing these beautiful creatures in a state
of captivity far outweighed the inconvenience of imprisonment to beasts
whom God had so improvidently placed in a state of freedom! It was for
the animals good, removing them at once from the countless dangers of
open air and exercise, and enabling them to exercise their functions
in the guaranteed seclusion of a private compartment! Indeed, it was
doubtful what wild animals were made for but to be shut up in cages!

But as young Jolyon had in his constitution the elements of
impartiality, he reflected that to stigmatize as barbarity that which
was merely lack of imagination must be wrong; for none who held these
views had been placed in a similar position to the animals they caged,
and could not, therefore, be expected to enter into their sensations. It
was not until they were leaving the gardens--Jolly and Holly in a state
of blissful delirium--that old Jolyon found an opportunity of speaking
to his son on the matter next his heart. "I don't know what to make of
it," he said; "if she's to go on as she's going on now, I can't tell
what's to come. I wanted her to see the doctor, but she won't. She's not
a bit like me. She's your mother all over. Obstinate as a