a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers.  In his hands he turned and turned a piece of china.  Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired, rather bald, had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that aforesaid appearance of ‘sniff,’ as though despising an egg which he knew he could not digest.  Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests.  Something inherent to the occasion had affected them all.

Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies—­Aunts Ann, Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia), who not in first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry Septimus Small, a man of poor constitution.  She had survived him for many years.  With her elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her sixth and youngest brother, on the Bayswater Road.  Each of these ladies held fans in their hands, and each with some touch of colour, some emphatic feather or brooch, testified to the solemnity of the opportunity.

In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood the head of the family, old Jolyon himself.  Eighty years of age, with his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey eyes, and an immense white moustache, which drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks and hollows at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth.  He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining.  Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men.  Having had his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it.  It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or of defiance.

Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James, Swithin, Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference, much similarity.  In turn, each of these four brothers was very different from the other, yet they, too, were alike.

Through the varying features and expression of those five faces could be marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying surface distinctions, marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and permanent to discuss—­the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family fortunes.

Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and tentative obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was this same stamp—­less meaningful perhaps, but unmistakable—­a sign of something ineradicable in the family soul.  At one time or another during the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn an expression