rked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying surface distinctions,
marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and
permanent to discuss--the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family
fortunes.

Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid
strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and tentative
obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was this
same stamp--less meaningful perhaps, but unmistakable--a sign of
something ineradicable in the family soul. At one time or another during
the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn an
expression of distrust, the object of which was undoubtedly the man whose
acquaintance they were thus assembled to make. Philip Bosinney was known
to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged
to such before, and had actually married them. It was not altogether for
this reason, therefore, that the minds of the Forsytes misgave them.
They could not have explained the origin of a misgiving obscured by the
mist of family gossip. A story was undoubtedly told that he had paid his
duty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester, in a soft grey hat--a soft
grey hat, not even a new one--a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. "So,
extraordinary, my dear--so odd," Aunt Hester, passing through the little,
dark hall (she was rather short-sighted), had tried to 'shoo' it off a
chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat--Tommy had such
disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it did not move.

Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant trifle which
embodies the whole character of a scene, or place, or person, so those
unconscious artists--the Forsytes had fastened by intuition on this hat;
it was their significant trifle, the detail in which was embedded the
meaning of the whole matter; for each had asked himself: "Come, now,
should I have paid that visit in that hat?" and each had answered "No!"
and some, with more imagination than others, had added: "It would never
have come into my head!"

George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been worn
as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of such. "Very
haughty!" he said, "the wild Buccaneer."

And this mot, the 'Buccaneer,' was bandied from mouth to mouth, till it
became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.

Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.

"We don't t