r it; and
they would look at her--surrounded by her staff in charity ballrooms,
with her high nose and her broad, square figure, attired in an uniform
covered with sequins--as though she were a general.

The only thing against her was that she had not a double name. She was a
power in upper middle-class society, with its hundred sets and circles,
all intersecting on the common battlefield of charity functions, and on
that battlefield brushing skirts so pleasantly with the skirts of Society
with the capital 'S.' She was a power in society with the smaller 's,'
that larger, more significant, and more powerful body, where the
commercially Christian institutions, maxims, and 'principle,' which Mrs.
Baynes embodied, were real life-blood, circulating freely, real business
currency, not merely the sterilized imitation that flowed in the veins of
smaller Society with the larger 'S.' People who knew her felt her to be
sound--a sound woman, who never gave herself away, nor anything else, if
she could possibly help it.

She had been on the worst sort of terms with Bosinney's father, who had
not infrequently made her the object of an unpardonable ridicule. She
alluded to him now that he was gone as her 'poor, dear, irreverend
brother.'

She greeted June with the careful effusion of which she was a mistress, a
little afraid of her as far as a woman of her eminence in the commercial
and Christian world could be afraid--for so slight a girl June had a
great dignity, the fearlessness of her eyes gave her that. And Mrs.
Baynes, too, shrewdly recognized that behind the uncompromising frankness
of June's manner there was much of the Forsyte. If the girl had been
merely frank and courageous, Mrs. Baynes would have thought her 'cranky,'
and despised her; if she had been merely a Forsyte, like Francie--let us
say--she would have patronized her from sheer weight of metal; but June,
small though she was--Mrs. Baynes habitually admired quantity--gave her
an uneasy feeling; and she placed her in a chair opposite the light.

There was another reason for her respect which Mrs. Baynes, too good a
churchwoman to be worldly, would have been the last to admit--she often
heard her husband describe old Jolyon as extremely well off, and was
biassed towards his granddaughter for the soundest of all reasons.
To-day she felt the emotion with which we read a novel describing a hero
and an inheritance, nervously anxious lest, by some frightful lapse of