given employment in the making, and somebody must use them.  He bought pictures, but Art must be encouraged.  He was, in fact, an accidental channel through which money flowed, employing labour.  What was there objectionable in that?  In his charge money was in quicker and more useful flux than it would be in charge of the State and a lot of slow-fly money-sucking officials.  And as to what he saved each year—­it was just as much in flux as what he didn’t save, going into Water Board or Council Stocks, or something sound and useful.  The State paid him no salary for being trustee of his own or other people’s money he did all that for nothing.  Therein lay the whole case against nationalisation—­owners of private property were unpaid, and yet had every incentive to quicken up the flux.  Under nationalisation—­just the opposite!  In a country smarting from officialism he felt that he had a strong case.

It particularly annoyed him, entering that backwater of perfect peace, to think that a lot of unscrupulous Trusts and Combinations had been cornering the market in goods of all kinds, and keeping prices at an artificial height.  Such abusers of the individualistic system were the ruffians who caused all the trouble, and it was some satisfaction to see them getting into a stew at fast lest the whole thing might come down with a run—­and land them in the soup.

The offices of Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte occupied the ground and first floors of a house on the right-hand side; and, ascending to his room, Soames thought:  ‘Time we had a coat of paint.’

His old clerk Gradman was seated, where he always was, at a huge bureau with countless pigeonholes.  Half-the-clerk stood beside him, with a broker’s note recording investment of the proceeds from sale of the Bryanston Square house, in Roger Forsyte’s estate.  Soames took it, and said: 

“Vancouver City Stock.  H’m.  It’s down today!”

With a sort of grating ingratiation old Gradman answered him: 

“Ye-es; but everything’s down, Mr. Soames.”  And half-the-clerk withdrew.

Soames skewered the document on to a number of other papers and hung up his hat.

“I want to look at my Will and Marriage Settlement, Gradman.”

Old Gradman, moving to the limit of his swivel chair, drew out two drafts from the bottom lefthand drawer.  Recovering his body, he raised his grizzle-haired face, very red from stooping.

“Copies, Sir.”

Soames took them.  It struck him suddenly how like Gradman was to the stout brindled yard dog they had been wont to keep on his chain at The Shelter, till one day Fleur had come and insisted it should be let loose, so that it had at once bitten the cook and been destroyed.  If you let Gradman off his chain, would he bite the cook?