It was very original. Then there were her “Songs for Little People,” at once educational and witty, especially “Gran’ma’s Porgie,” and that ditty, almost prophetically imbued with the coming Imperial spirit, entitled “Black Him in His Little Eye.”

Any publisher would take these, and reviews like High Living , and the Ladies’ Genteel Guide went into raptures over: “Another of Miss Francie Forsyte’s spirited ditties, sparkling and pathetic. We ourselves were moved to tears and laughter. Miss Forsyte should go far.”

With the true instinct of her breed, Francie had made a point of knowing the right people⁠—people who would write about her, and talk about her, and people in Society, too⁠—keeping a mental register of just where to exert her fascinations, and an eye on that steady scale of rising prices, which in her mind’s eye represented the future. In this way she caused herself to be universally respected.

Once, at a time when her emotions were whipped by an attachment⁠—for the tenor of Roger’s life, with its wholehearted collection of house property, had induced in his only daughter a tendency towards passion⁠—she turned to great and sincere work, choosing the sonata form, for the violin. This was the only one of her productions that troubled the Forsytes. They felt at once that it would not sell.

Roger, who liked having a clever daughter well enough, and often alluded to the amount of pocket-money she made for herself, was upset by this violin sonata.

“Rubbish like that!” he called it. Francie had borrowed young Flageoletti from Euphemia, to play it in the drawing-room at Prince’s Gardens.

As a matter of fact Roger was right. It was rubbish, but⁠—annoying! the sort of rubbish that wouldn’t sell. As every Forsyte knows, rubbish that sells is not rubbish at all⁠—far from it.