“What our Shareholders don’t know about our affairs isn’t worth knowing.  You may take that from me, Mr. Soames.”

On one occasion, old Jolyon being present, Soames recollected a little unpleasantness.  His uncle had looked up sharply and said:  “Don’t talk nonsense, Hemmings!  You mean that what they do know isn’t worth knowing!” Old Jolyon detested humbug.

Hemmings, angry-eyed, and wearing a smile like that of a trained poodle, had replied in an outburst of artificial applause:  “Come, now, that’s good, sir—­that’s very good.  Your uncle will have his joke!”

The next time he had seen Soames he had taken the opportunity of saying to him:  “The chairman’s getting very old!—­I can’t get him to understand things; and he’s so wilful—­but what can you expect, with a chin like his?”

Soames had nodded.

Everyone knew that Uncle Jolyon’s chin was a caution.  He was looking worried to-day, in spite of his General Meeting look; he (Soames) should certainly speak to him about Bosinney.

Beyond old Jolyon on the left was little Mr. Booker, and he, too, wore his General Meeting look, as though searching for some particularly tender shareholder.  And next him was the deaf director, with a frown; and beyond the deaf director, again, was old Mr. Bleedham, very bland, and having an air of conscious virtue—­as well he might, knowing that the brown-paper parcel he always brought to the Board-room was concealed behind his hat (one of that old-fashioned class, of flat-brimmed top-hats which go with very large bow ties, clean-shaven lips, fresh cheeks, and neat little, white whiskers).

Soames always attended the General Meeting; it was considered better that he should do so, in case ‘anything should arise!’ He glanced round with his close, supercilious air at the walls of the room, where hung plans of the mine and harbour, together with a large photograph of a shaft leading to a working which had proved quite remarkably unprofitable.  This photograph—­a witness to the eternal irony underlying commercial enterprise till retained its position on the—­wall, an effigy of the directors’ pet, but dead, lamb.

And now old Jolyon rose, to present the report and accounts.

Veiling under a Jove-like serenity that perpetual antagonism deep-seated in the bosom of a director towards his shareholders, he faced them calmly.  Soames faced them too.  He knew most of them by sight.  There was old Scrubsole, a tar man, who always came, as Hemmings would say, ’to make himself nasty,’ a cantankerous-looking old fellow with a red face, a jowl, and an enormous low-crowned hat reposing on his knee.  And the Rev. Mr. Boms, who always proposed a vote of thanks to the chairman, in which he invariably expressed the hope that the Board would not forget to elevate their employees, using the word with a double e, as being more vigorous and Anglo-Saxon (he had the strong Imperialistic tendencies of his cloth).  It was his salutary custom to buttonhole a director afterwards, and ask him whether he thought the coming year would be good or bad; and, according to the trend of the answer, to buy or sell three shares within the ensuing fortnight.