“What is June like now?” he asked.

“She’s a little thing,” returned old Jolyon; they say she’s like me, but that’s their folly. She’s more like your mother— the same eyes and hair.”

“Ah! and she is pretty?”

Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely; especially anything for which he had a genuineadmiration.

“Not bad looking — a regular Forsyte chin. It’ll be lonely here when she’s gone, Jo.”

The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had felt on first seeing his father.

“What will you do with yourself, Dad? I suppose she’s wrapped up in him?”

“Do with myself?” repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his voice. “It’ll be miserable work living here alone. Idon’t know how it’s to end. I wish to goodness....” He checked himself, and added: “The question is, what had I better dowith this house?”

Young Jolyon looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still lifethat he remembered as a boy — sleeping dogs with their noses resting on bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapeslying side by side in mild surprise. The house was a white elephant, but he could not conceive of his father living in asmaller place; and all the more did it all seem ironical.

In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the figurehead of his family and class and creed, with his whitehead and dome-like forehead, the representative of moderation, and order, and love of property. As lonely an old man asthere was in London.

There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of great forces that cared nothing for family orclass or creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, whohad the impersonal eye.