His conversation, as usual of late, had turned at once upon Irene, and he had lost no time in giving Aunts Juley and Hester his opinion with regard to this rumour he heard was going about.  No—­as he said—­she might want a bit of flirtation—­a pretty woman must have her fling; but more than that he did not believe.  Nothing open; she had too much good sense, too much proper appreciation of what was due to her position, and to the family!  No sc..., he was going to say ‘scandal’ but the very idea was so preposterous that he waved his hand as though to say—­’but let that pass!’

Granted that Swithin took a bachelor’s view of the situation—­still what indeed was not due to that family in which so many had done so well for themselves, had attained a certain position?  If he had heard in dark, pessimistic moments the words ‘yeomen’ and ‘very small beer’ used in connection with his origin, did he believe them?

No! he cherished, hugging it pathetically to his bosom the secret theory that there was something distinguished somewhere in his ancestry.

“Must be,” he once said to young Jolyon, before the latter went to the bad.  “Look at us, we’ve got on!  There must be good blood in us somewhere.”

He had been fond of young Jolyon:  the boy had been in a good set at College, had known that old ruffian Sir Charles Fiste’s sons—­a pretty rascal one of them had turned out, too; and there was style about him—­it was a thousand pities he had run off with that half-foreign governess!  If he must go off like that why couldn’t he have chosen someone who would have done them credit!  And what was he now?—­an underwriter at Lloyd’s; they said he even painted pictures—­pictures!  Damme! he might have ended as Sir Jolyon Forsyte, Bart., with a seat in Parliament, and a place in the country!

It was Swithin who, following the impulse which sooner or later urges thereto some member of every great family, went to the Heralds’ Office, where they assured him that he was undoubtedly of the same family as the well-known Forsites with an ‘i,’ whose arms were ’three dexter buckles on a sable ground gules,’ hoping no doubt to get him to take them up.

Swithin, however, did not do this, but having ascertained that the crest was a ‘pheasant proper,’ and the motto ‘For Forsite,’ he had the pheasant proper placed upon his carriage and the buttons of his coachman, and both crest and motto on his writing-paper.  The arms he hugged to himself, partly because, not having paid for them, he thought it would look ostentatious to put them on his carriage, and he hated ostentation, and partly because he, like any practical man all over the country, had a secret dislike and contempt for things he could not understand he found it hard, as anyone might, to swallow ’three dexter buckles on a sable ground gules.’

He never forgot, however, their having told him that if he paid for them he would be entitled to use them, and it strengthened his conviction that he was a gentleman.  Imperceptibly the rest of the family absorbed the ‘pheasant proper,’ and some, more serious than others, adopted the motto; old Jolyon, however, refused to use the latter, saying that it was humbug meaning nothing, so far as he could see.