Yet suddenly, very faint, far off in the deathly stillness, he heard a cry writhing, like the voice of some wandering soul barred out of heaven, and crying for its happiness. There it was again⁠—again! Soames shut the window, shuddering.

Then he thought: “Ah! it’s only the peacocks, across the water.”

June Pays Some Calls

Jolyon stood in the narrow hall at Broadstairs, inhaling that odour of oilcloth and herrings which permeates all respectable seaside lodging-houses. On a chair⁠—a shiny leather chair, displaying its horsehair through a hole in the top left-hand corner⁠—stood a black despatch case. This he was filling with papers, with the Times , and a bottle of eau de cologne. He had meetings that day of the Globular Gold Concessions and the New Colliery Company, Limited, to which he was going up, for he never missed a Board; to “miss a Board” would be one more piece of evidence that he was growing old, and this his jealous Forsyte spirit could not bear.

His eyes, as he filled that black despatch case, looked as if at any moment they might blaze up with anger. So gleams the eye of a schoolboy, baited by a ring of his companions; but he controls himself, deterred by the fearful odds against him. And old Jolyon controlled himself, keeping down, with his masterful restraint now slowly wearing out, the irritation fostered in him by the conditions of his life.

He had received from his son an unpractical letter, in which by rambling generalities the boy seemed trying to get out of answering a plain question. “I’ve seen Bosinney,” he said; “he is not a criminal. The more I see of people the more I am convinced that they are never good or bad⁠—merely comic, or pathetic. You probably don’t agree with me!”