This great and good woman, so highly thought of in ecclesiastical circles, was one of the principal priestesses in the temple of Forsyteism, keeping alive day and night a sacred flame to the God of Property, whose altar is inscribed with those inspiring words:  ’Nothing for nothing, and really remarkably little for sixpence.’

When she entered a room it was felt that something substantial had come in, which was probably the reason of her popularity as a patroness.  People liked something substantial when they had paid money for it; and they would look at her—­surrounded by her staff in charity ballrooms, with her high nose and her broad, square figure, attired in an uniform covered with sequins—­as though she were a general.

The only thing against her was that she had not a double name.  She was a power in upper middle-class society, with its hundred sets and circles, all intersecting on the common battlefield of charity functions, and on that battlefield brushing skirts so pleasantly with the skirts of Society with the capital ‘S.’  She was a power in society with the smaller ‘s,’ that larger, more significant, and more powerful body, where the commercially Christian institutions, maxims, and ‘principle,’ which Mrs. Baynes embodied, were real life-blood, circulating freely, real business currency, not merely the sterilized imitation that flowed in the veins of smaller Society with the larger ‘S.’  People who knew her felt her to be sound—­a sound woman, who never gave herself away, nor anything else, if she could possibly help it.

She had been on the worst sort of terms with Bosinney’s father, who had not infrequently made her the object of an unpardonable ridicule.  She alluded to him now that he was gone as her ’poor, dear, irreverend brother.’

She greeted June with the careful effusion of which she was a mistress, a little afraid of her as far as a woman of her eminence in the commercial and Christian world could be afraid—­for so slight a girl June had a great dignity, the fearlessness of her eyes gave her that.  And Mrs. Baynes, too, shrewdly recognized that behind the uncompromising frankness of June’s manner there was much of the Forsyte.  If the girl had been merely frank and courageous, Mrs. Baynes would have thought her ‘cranky,’ and despised her; if she had been merely a Forsyte, like Francie—­let us say—­she would have patronized her from sheer weight of metal; but June, small though she was—­Mrs. Baynes habitually admired quantity—­gave her an uneasy feeling; and she placed her in a chair opposite the light.

There was another reason for her respect which Mrs. Baynes, too good a churchwoman to be worldly, would have been the last to admit—­she often heard her husband describe old Jolyon as extremely well off, and was biassed towards his granddaughter for the soundest of all reasons.  To-day she felt the emotion with which we read a novel describing a hero and an inheritance, nervously anxious lest, by some frightful lapse of the novelist, the young man should be left without it at the end.