Jolly had said:

"All right, Dad, I won't," and he never had.

"And there's just one other thing. I don't know much about morality and
that, but there is this: It's always worth while before you do anything
to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is
absolutely necessary."

Jolly had looked thoughtful, and nodded, and presently had squeezed his
father's hand. And Jolyon had thought: 'I wonder if I had the right to
say that?' He always had a sort of dread of losing the dumb confidence
they had in each other; remembering how for long years he had lost his
own father's, so that there had been nothing between them but love at a
great distance. He under-estimated, no doubt, the change in the spirit
of the age since he himself went up to Cambridge in '65; and perhaps he
underestimated, too, his boy's power of understanding that he was
tolerant to the very bone. It was that tolerance of his, and possibly
his scepticism, which ever made his relations towards June so queerly
defensive. She was such a decided mortal; knew her own mind so terribly
well; wanted things so inexorably until she got them--and then, indeed,
often dropped them like a hot potato. Her mother had been like that,
whence had come all those tears. Not that his incompatibility with his
daughter was anything like what it had been with the first Mrs. Young
Jolyon. One could be amused where a daughter was concerned; in a wife's
case one could not be amused. To see June set her heart and jaw on a
thing until she got it was all right, because it was never anything which
interfered fundamentally with Jolyon's liberty--the one thing on which
his jaw was also absolutely rigid, a considerable jaw, under that short
grizzling beard. Nor was there ever any necessity for real
heart-to-heart encounters. One could break away into irony--as indeed he
often had to. But the real trouble with June was that she had never
appealed to his aesthetic sense, though she might well have, with her
red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes, and that touch of the
Berserker in her spirit. It was very different with Holly, soft and
quiet, shy and affectionate, with a playful imp in her somewhere. He
watched this younger daughter of his through the duckling stage with
extraordinary interest. Would she come out a swan? With her sallow oval
face and her grey wistful eyes and those long dark lashes, she might, or
she might not. Only this last year had