ught them on to the Zoo, so as to have more, if possible, for
their money, before going back to Rutland Gate or Bryanston Square.

"Let's go on to the Zoo," they had said to each other; "it'll be great
fun!" It was a shilling day; and there would not be all those horrid
common people.

In front of the long line of cages they were collected in rows, watching
the tawny, ravenous beasts behind the bars await their only pleasure of
the four-and-twenty hours. The hungrier the beast, the greater the
fascination. But whether because the spectators envied his appetite, or,
more humanely, because it was so soon to be satisfied, young Jolyon could
not tell. Remarks kept falling on his ears: "That's a nasty-looking
brute, that tiger!" "Oh, what a love! Look at his little mouth!" "Yes,
he's rather nice! Don't go too near, mother."

And frequently, with little pats, one or another would clap their hands
to their pockets behind and look round, as though expecting young Jolyon
or some disinterested-looking person to relieve them of the contents.

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 st