She owned three canaries, the cat Tommy, and half a parrot--in common with her sister Hester;--and these poor creatures (kept carefully out of Timothy's way--he was nervous about animals), unlike human beings, recognising that she could not help being blighted, attached themselves to her passionately.
She was sombrely magnificent this evening in black bombazine, with a mauve front cut in a shy triangle, and crowned with a black velvet ribbon round the base of her thin throat; black and mauve for evening wear was esteemed very chaste by nearly every Forsyte.
Pouting at Swithin, she said: "Ann has been asking for you.

You haven't been near us for an age!" 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.