t he was doing was
in the nature of retributive justice, richly deserved.

Slowly, surely, with the secret inner process that works the destruction
of an old tree, the poison of the wounds to his happiness, his will, his
pride, had corroded the comely edifice of his philosophy. Life had worn
him down on one side, till, like that family of which he was the head, he
had lost balance.

To him, borne northwards towards his son's house, the thought of the new
disposition of property, which he had just set in motion, appeared
vaguely in the light of a stroke of punishment, levelled at that family
and that Society, of which James and his son seemed to him the
representatives. He had made a restitution to young Jolyon, and
restitution to young Jolyon satisfied his secret craving for
revenge-revenge against Time, sorrow, and interference, against all that
incalculable sum of disapproval that had been bestowed by the world for
fifteen years on his only son. It presented itself as the one possible
way of asserting once more the domination of his will; of forcing James,
and Soames, and the family, and all those hidden masses of Forsytes--a
great stream rolling against the single dam of his obstinacy--to
recognise once and for all that he would be master. It was sweet to
think that at last he was going to make the boy a richer man by far than
that son of James, that 'man of property.' And it was sweet to give to
Jo, for he loved his son.

Neither young Jolyon nor his wife were in (young Jolyon indeed was not
back from the Botanical), but the little maid told him that she expected
the master at any moment:

"He's always at 'ome to tea, sir, to play with the children."

Old Jolyon said he would wait; and sat down patiently enough in the
faded, shabby drawing room, where, now that the summer chintzes were
removed, the old chairs and sofas revealed all their threadbare
deficiencies. He longed to send for the children; to have them there
beside him, their supple bodies against his knees; to hear Jolly's:
"Hallo, Gran!" and see his rush; and feel Holly's soft little hand
stealing up against his cheek. But he would not. There was solemnity in
what he had come to do, and until it was over he would not play. He
amused himself by thinking how with two strokes of his pen he was going
to restore the look of caste so conspicuously absent from everything in
that little house; how he could fill these rooms, or others in some
larger m