And thus sitting, a watch in his hand, fat, and smooth, and golden, like a flattened globe of butter, he thought of nothing.

A long man, with side whiskers, who had once been in Swithin’s service, but was now a greengrocer, entered and proclaimed: 

“Mrs. Chessman, Mrs. Septimus Small!”

Two ladies advanced.  The one in front, habited entirely in red, had large, settled patches of the same colour in her cheeks, and a hard, dashing eye.  She walked at Swithin, holding out a hand cased in a long, primrose-coloured glove: 

“Well!  Swithin,” she said, “I haven’t seen 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—­he was nervous about animals), unlike human beings, recognising that she could not help being blighted, attached themselves to her passionately.