at once in an expectant, strange, primeval immobility. He was ready to rise at a moment’s notice. He had not given adinner-party for months. This dinner in honour of June’s engagement had seemed a bore at first (among Forsytes the custom ofsolemnizing engagements by feasts was religiously observed), but the labours of sending invitations and ordering the repastover, he felt pleasantly stimulated.

And thus sitting, a watch in his hand, fat, and smooth, and golden, like a flattened globe of butter, he thought ofnothing.

A long man, with side whiskers, who had once been in Swithin’s service, but was now a greengrocer, entered andproclaimed:

“Mrs. Chessman, Mrs. Septimus Small!”

Two ladies advanced. The one in front, habited entirely in red, had large, settled patches of the same colour in hercheeks, and a hard, dashing eye. She walked at Swithin, holding out a hand cased in a long, primrose-coloured glove:

“Well! Swithin,” she said, “I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you? Why, my dear boy, how stout you’re getting!”

The fixity of Swithin’s eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to bestout, to talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his sister, he grasped her hand, and said in a toneof command:

“Well, Juley.”

Mrs. Septimus Small was the tallest of the four sisters; her good, round old face had gone a little sour; an innumerablepout clung all over it, as if it had been encased in an iron wire mask up to that evening, which, being suddenly removed,left little rolls of mutinous flesh all over her countenance. Even her eyes were pouting. It was thus that she recorded herpermanent resentment at the loss of Septimus Small.

She had quite a reputation for saying the wrong thing, and, tenacious like all her breed, she would hold to it when she