London. Annette had once given
him a story to read by that Frenchman, Maupassant--a most lugubrious
concern, where all the skeletons emerged from their graves one night,
and all the pious inscriptions on the stones were altered to
descriptions of their sins. Not a true story at all. He didn't know
about the French, but there was not much real harm in English people
except their teeth and their taste, which were certainly deplorable.
"The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte, 1850." A lot of people had been
buried here since then--a lot of English life crumbled to mould and
dust! The boom of an airplane passing under the gold-tinted clouds
caused him to lift his eyes. The deuce of a lot of expansion had gone
on. But it all came back to a cemetery--to a name and a date on a tomb.
And he thought with a curious pride that he and his family had done
little or nothing to help this feverish expansion. Good solid
middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.
"Superior Dosset," indeed, had built, in a dreadful, and Jolyon
painted, in a doubtful period, but so far as he remembered not another
of them all had soiled his hands by creating anything--unless you
counted Val Dartie and his horse-breeding. Collectors, solicitors,
barristers, merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents,
even soldiers--there they had been! The country had expanded, as it
were, in spite of them. They had checked, controlled, defended, and
taken advantage of the process--and when you considered how "Superior
Dosset" had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal descendants
already owned what old Gradman estimated at between a million and a
million and a half, it was not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as if
the family bolt was shot, their possessive instinct dying out. They
seemed unable to make money--this fourth generation; they were going
into art, literature, farming, or the army; or just living on what was
left them--they had no push and no tenacity. They would die out if they
didn't take care.

Soames turned from the vault and faced towards the breeze. The air up
here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the feeling
that mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the crosses and the
urns, the angels, the "immortelles," the flowers, gaudy or withering;
and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so different from anything
else up there that he was obliged to walk the few necessary yards and
loo