‘Beastly colour, the smoking-room!’ he thought. ‘The dining-room is good!’

Its gloomy chocolate, picked out with light green, took his fancy.

He ordered dinner, and sat down in the very corner, at the very table perhaps! (things did not progress much at the‘Disunion,’ a Club of almost Radical principles) at which he and young Jolyon used to sit twenty-five years ago, when he wastaking the latter to Drury Lane, during his holidays.

The boy had loved the theatre, and old Jolyon recalled how he used to sit opposite, concealing his excitement under acareful but transparent nonchalance.

He ordered himself, too, the very dinner the boy had always chosen-soup, whitebait, cutlets, and a tart. Ah! if he wereonly opposite now!

The two had not met for fourteen years. And not for the first time during those fourteen years old Jolyon wonderedwhether he had been a little to blame in the matter of his son. An unfortunate love-affair with that precious flirt DanaeThornworthy (now Danae Pellew), Anthony Thornworthy’s daughter, had thrown him on the rebound into the arms of June’smother. He ought perhaps to have put a spoke in the wheel of their marriage; they were too young; but after that experienceof Jo’s susceptibility he had been only too anxious to see him married. And in four years the crash had come! To haveapproved his son’s conduct in that crash was, of course, impossible; reason and training — that combination of potentfactors which stood for his principles — told him of this impossibility, and his heart cried out. The grim remorselessnessof that business had no pity for hearts. There was June, the atom with flaming hair, who had climbed all over him, twinedand twisted herself about him — about his heart that was made to be the plaything and beloved resort of tiny, helplessthings. With characteristic insight he saw he must part with one or with the other; no half-measures could serve in such asituation. In that lay its tragedy. And the tiny, helpless thing prevailed. He would not run with the hare and hunt with thehounds, and so to his son he said good-bye.