In Chancery, by John Galsworthy

Part 1

Two households both alike in dignity,

From ancient grudge, break into new mutiny.

— Romeo and Juliet

TO JESSIE AND JOSEPH CONRADChapter 1At Timothy’s

The possessive instinct never stands still. Through florescence and feud, frosts and fires, it followed the laws ofprogression even in the Forsyte family which had believed it fixed for ever. Nor can it be dissociated from environment anymore 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 fromself-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 werespreading 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