en 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 be stout, to talk of being
stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his sister, he grasped
her hand, and said in a tone of command:

"Well, Juley."

Mrs. Septimus Small was the tallest of the four sisters; her good, round
old face had gone a little sour; an innumerable pout 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
her permanent 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 had said it, and add to
it another wrong thing, and so on. With the decease of her husband the
family tenacity, the family matter-of-factness, had gone sterile within
her. A great talker, when allowed, she would converse without the
faintest animation for hours together, relating, with epic monotony, the
innumerable occasions on which Fortune had misused her; nor did she ever
perceive that her hearers sympathized with Fortune, for her heart was
kind.

Having sat, poor soul, long by the bedside of Small (a man of poor
constitution), she had acquired, the habit, and there were countless
subsequent occasions when she had sat immense periods of time to amuse
sick people, children, and other helpless persons, and she could never
divest herself of the feeling that the world was the most ungrateful
place anybody could live in. Sunday after Sunday she sat at the feet of
that extremely witty preacher, the Rev. Thomas Scoles, who exercised a
great influence over her; but she succeeded in convincing everybody that
even this was a misfortune. She had passed into a proverb in the family,
and when anybody was observed to be peculiarly distressing, he was known
as a regular 'Juley.' The habit of her mind would have killed anybody but
a Forsyte at forty; but she was seventy-two, and had never looked better.
And one felt that there were capacities for enjoyment about her which
might yet come out. She owned three canaries, the cat Tommy, and half a
parrot--in common with her sister Hester;--and these poor creatures (kept
carefully out of Timothy's way-