Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-cab to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the Forsyte vault.  Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria, tall, ugly, and individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive system.  He could remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated the addition to its face of the pheasant proper.  The proposal had been rejected in favour of a wreath in stone, above the stark words:  “The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte:  1850.”  It was in good order.  All trace of the recent interment had been removed, and its sober grey gloomed reposefully in the sunshine.  The whole family lay there now, except old Jolyon’s wife, who had gone back under a contract to her own family vault in Suffolk; old Jolyon himself lying at Robin Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that none knew where she might be.  Soames gazed at it with satisfaction—­massive, needing little attention; and this was important, for he was well aware that no one would attend to it when he himself was gone, and he would have to be looking out for lodgings soon.  He might have twenty years before him, but one never knew.  Twenty years without an aunt or uncle, with a wife of whom one had better not know anything, with a daughter gone from home.  His mood inclined to melancholy and retrospection.

This cemetery was full, they said—­of people with extraordinary names, buried in extraordinary taste.  Still, they had a fine view up here, right over London.  Annette had once given him a story to read by that Frenchman, Maupassant, most lugubrious concern, where all the skeletons emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious inscriptions on the stones were altered to descriptions of their sins.  Not a true story at all.  He didn’t know about the French, but there was not much real harm in English people except their teeth and their taste, which was certainly deplorable.  “The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte:  1850.”  A lot of people had been buried here since then—­a lot of English life crumbled to mould and dust!  The boom of an airplane passing under the gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift his eyes.  The deuce of a lot of expansion had gone on.  But it all came back to a cemetery—­to a name and a date on a tomb.  And he thought with a curious pride that he and his family had done little or nothing to help this feverish expansion.  Good solid middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess.  “Superior Dosset,” indeed, had built in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted in a doubtful, period, but so far as he remembered not another of them all had soiled his hands by creating anything—­unless you counted Val Dartie and his horse-breeding.  Collectors, solicitors, barristers, merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even soldiers—­there they had been!  The country had expanded, as it were, in spite of them.  They had checked, controlled,