Swithin put his thumbs within the armholes of his waistcoat, and replied:
“Ann’s getting very shaky; she ought to have a doctor!”
“Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Forsyte!”
Nicholas Forsyte, cocking his rectangular eyebrows, wore a smile. He had succeeded during the day in bringing to fruition a scheme for the employment of a tribe from Upper India in the gold-mines of Ceylon. A pet plan, carried at last in the teeth of great difficulties—he was justly pleased. It would double the output of his mines, and, as he had often forcibly argued, all experience tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.
His ability was undoubted. Raising his broken nose towards his listener, he would add:
“For want of a few hundred of these fellows we haven’t paid a dividend for years, and look at the price of the shares. I can’t get ten shillings for them.”
He had been at Yarmouth, too, and had come back feeling that he had added at least ten years to his own life. He grasped Swithin’s hand, exclaiming in a jocular voice:
“Well, so here we are again!”
Mrs. Nicholas, an effete woman, smiled a smile of frightened jollity behind his back.
“Mr. and Mrs. James Forsyte! Mr. and Mrs. Soames Forsyte!”