After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something wrong somewhere. Why had his son not gone to thedogs? But, then, who could tell?
He had heard, of course — in fact, he had made it his business to find out — that Jo lived in St. John’s Wood, that hehad a little house in Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into society — a queer sort ofsociety, no doubt — and that they had two children — the little chap they called Jolly (considering the circumstances thename struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since themarriage. Who could tell what his son’s circumstances really were? He had capitalized the income he had inherited from hismother’s father and joined Lloyd’s as an underwriter; he painted pictures, too — water-colours. Old Jolyon knew this, for hehad surreptitiously bought them from time to time, after chancing to see his son’s name signed at the bottom of arepresentation of the river Thames in a dealer’s window. He thought them bad, and did not hang them because of thesignature; he kept them locked up in a drawer.
In the great opera-house a terrible yearning came on him to see his son. He remembered the days when he had been wont toslide him, in a brown holland suit, to and fro under the arch of his legs; the times when he ran beside the boy’s pony,teaching him to ride; the day he first took him to school. He had been a loving, lovable little chap! After he went to Etonhe had acquired, perhaps, a little too much of that desirable manner which old Jolyon knew was only to be obtained at such