"I now move, 'That the report and accounts for the year 1886 be received and adopted.' You second that? Those in favour signify the same in the usual way. Contrary--no. Carried. The next business, gentlemen...." Soames smiled. Certainly Uncle Jolyon had a way with him! Forces regardless of family or class or custom were beating down his guard; impending events over which he had no control threw their shadows on his head. The irritation of one accustomed to have his way was, roused against he knew not what. "We are, of course, all of us the slaves of property, and I admit that it's a question of degree, but what I call a 'Forsyte' is a man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property--it doesn't matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or reputation--is his hall-mark."--"Ah!" murmured Bosinney. "You should patent the word."--"I should like," said young Jolyon, "to lecture on it: 'Properties and quality of a Forsyte': This little animal, disturbed by the ridicule of his own sort, is unaffected in his motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or I). Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence of competitive tranquillity." "My people," replied young Jolyon, "are not very extreme, and they have their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte--the power of never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body, and the 'sense of property'." An unhappy marriage! No ill-treatment--only that indefinable malaise, that terrible blight which killed all sweetness under Heaven; and so from day to day, from night to night, from week to week, from year to year, till death should end it. 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!' "Don't touch me!" she cried. He caught her wrist; she wrenched it away. "And where may you have been?" he asked. "In heaven--out of this house!" With those words she fled upstairs. It seemed to young Jolyon that he could hear her saying: "But, darling, it would ruin you!" For he himself had experienced to the full the gnawing fear at the bottom of each woman's heart that she is a drag on the man she loves. She had come back like an animal wounded to death, not knowing where to turn, not knowing what she was doing. "What do you mean by God?" he said; "there are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable Creative Principle--one believes in That. And there's the Sum of altruism in man naturally one believes in That."