The Island Pharisees

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 practised, and was told to write by Joseph Conrad; 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.