“How are you?” he said, brooding over her.  “So you’re going to Wales to-morrow to visit your young man’s aunts?  You’ll have a lot of rain there.  This isn’t real old Worcester.”  He tapped the bowl.  “Now, that set I gave your mother when she married was the genuine thing.”

June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and turned to Aunt Ann.  A very sweet look had come into the old lady’s face, she kissed the girl’s check with trembling fervour.

“Well, my dear,” she said, “and so you’re going for a whole month!”

The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little figure.  The old lady’s round, steel grey eyes, over which a film like a bird’s was beginning to come, followed her wistfully amongst the bustling crowd, for people were beginning to say good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing and pressing against each other, were busy again with the recharging of her will against that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.

‘Yes,’ she thought, ’everybody’s been most kind; quite a lot of people come to congratulate her.  She ought to be very happy.’  Amongst the throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng drawn from the families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock Exchange, and all the innumerable avocations of the upper-middle class—­there were only some twenty percent of Forsytes; but to Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes—­and certainly there was not much difference—­she saw only her own flesh and blood.  It was her world, this family, and she knew no other, had never perhaps known any other.  All their little secrets, illnesses, engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether they were making money—­all this was her property, her delight, her life; beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and persons of no real significance.  This it was that she would have to lay down when it came to her turn to die; this which gave to her that importance, that secret self-importance, without which none of us can bear to live; and to this she clung wistfully, with a greed that grew each day!  If life were slipping away from her, this she would retain to the end.

She thought of June’s father, young Jolyon, who had run away with that foreign girl.  And what a sad blow to his father and to them all.  Such a promising young fellow!  A sad blow, though there had been no public scandal, most fortunately, Jo’s wife seeking for no divorce!  A long time ago!  And when June’s mother died, six years ago, Jo had married that woman, and they had two children now, so she had heard.  Still, he had forfeited his right to be there, had cheated her of the complete fulfilment of her family pride, deprived her of the rightful pleasure of seeing and kissing him of whom she had been so proud, such a promising young fellow!  The thought rankled with the bitterness of a long-inflicted injury in her tenacious old heart.  A little water stood in her eyes.  With a handkerchief of the finest lawn she wiped them stealthily.