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!"
Swithin drew his heels together, his deportment ever admirable.
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