“It would be the best thing that could happen to her in many ways.”

At those words such a turmoil began taking place in Jolyon that he could barely sit still in the cab. It was as if he were boxed up with hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, boxed up with that something in the national character which had always been to him revolting, something which he knew to be extremely natural and yet which seemed to him inexplicable⁠—their intense belief in contracts and vested rights, their complacent sense of virtue in the exaction of those rights. Here beside him in the cab was the very embodiment, the corporeal sum as it were, of the possessive instinct⁠—his own kinsman, too! It was uncanny and intolerable! “But there’s something more in it than that!” he thought with a sick feeling. “The dog, they say, returns to his vomit! The sight of her has reawakened something. Beauty! The devil’s in it!”

“As I say,” said Soames, “I have not made up my mind. I shall be obliged if you will kindly leave her quite alone.”