The possessive instinct never stands still.

Through florescence and feud, frosts and fires, it followed the laws of progression even in the Forsyte family which had believed it fixed for ever.

Nor can it be dissociated from environment any more than the quality of potato from the soil.
The historian of the English eighties and nineties will, in his good time, depict the somewhat rapid progression from self-contented and contained provincialism to still more self-contented if less contained imperialism--in other words, the 'possessive' instinct of the nation on the move.

And so, as if in conformity, was it with the Forsyte family.
They were spreading not merely on the surface, but within.
When, in 1895, Susan Hayman, the married Forsyte sister, followed her husband at the ludicrously low age of seventy-four, and was cremated, it made strangely little stir among the six old Forsytes left.

For this apathy there were three causes.