In Chancery

Two households both alike in dignity,

From ancient grudge, break into new mutiny.

— Romeo and Juliet TO JESSIE AND JOSEPH CONRAD

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’s lover, young Bosinney, and Irene, his nephew Soames Forsyte’s wife — had noticeably rapped the family’s knuckles; and that way of his own which he had always taken had begun to seem to them a little wayward.

The philosophic vein in him, of course, had always been too liable to crop out of the strata of pure Forsyteism, so they were in a way prepared for his interment in a strange spot.