A young man of good family walks out of his own class one afternoon, falls in with a penniless Belgian vagabond who asks awkward questions, and finds he can no longer sit through a dinner party. Galsworthy trained as a barrister, never practiced, and began to write at the urging of Ada, the woman he later married; this 1904 novel is where he began the work of the Forsytes - the pharisees are his own people, and he never lets the reader off either. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Luke Fildes and John Lavery carry the novel's own English conscience into paint, from the mantilla and the shelling of peas to the fields and farmyards of the same guarded island.