He raised his head as old Jolyon came in, and muttered: "How are you, Jolyon? Haven't seen you for an age. You've been to Switzerland, they tell me. This young Bosinney, he's got himself into a mess. I knew how it would be!" He held out the papers, regarding his elder brother with nervous gloom. Old Jolyon read them in silence, and while he read them James looked at the floor, biting his fingers the while. Old Jolyon pitched them down at last, and they fell with a thump amongst a mass of affidavits in 're Buncombe, deceased,' one of the many branches of that parent and profitable tree, 'Fryer v. Forsyte.' "I don't know what Soames is about," he said, "to make a fuss over a few hundred pounds. I thought he was a man of property." James' long upper lip twitched angrily; he could not bear his son to be attacked in such a spot. "It's not the money," he began, but meeting his brother's glance, direct, shrewd, judicial, he stopped. There was a silence. "I've come in for my Will," said old Jolyon at last, tugging at his moustache. James' curiosity was roused at once. Perhaps nothing in this life was more stimulating to him than a Will; it was the supreme deal with property, the final inventory of a man's belongings, the last word on what he was worth. He sounded the bell. "Bring in Mr. Jolyon's Will," he said to an anxious, dark-haired clerk. "You going to make some alterations?" And through his mind there flashed the thought: 'Now, am I worth as much as he?' Old Jolyon put the Will in his breast pocket, and James twisted his long legs regretfully. "You've made some nice purchases lately, they tell me," he said. "I don't know where you get your information from," answered old Jolyon sharply. "When's this action coming on? Next month? I can't tell what you've got in your minds. You must manage your own affairs; but if you take my advice, you'll settle it out of Court. Good-bye!" With a cold handshake he was gone. James, his fixed grey-blue eye corkscrewing round some secret anxious image, began again to bite his finger. Old Jolyon took his Will to the offices of the New Colliery Company, and sat down in the empty Board Room to read it through. He answered 'Down-by-the-starn' Hemmings so tartly when the latter, seeing his Chairman seated there, entered with the new Superintendent's first report, that the Secretary withdrew with regretful dignity; and sending for the transfer clerk, blew him up till the poor youth knew not where to look. It was not--by George--as he (Down-by-the-starn) would have him know, for a whippersnapper of a young fellow like him, to come down to that office, and think that he was God Almighty. He (Down-by-the-starn) had been head of that office for more years than a boy like him could count, and if he thought that when he had finished all his work, he could sit there doing nothing, he did not know him, Hemmings (Down-by-the-starn), and so forth.