! he was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have
what he wanted be cause of her. There was one alleviation--much to do in
connection with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted
to June, though she had offered to undertake it. Both Jon and his mother
had felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings and
unfinished matter, away with her, the work would encounter such icy
blasts from Paul Post and other frequenters of her studio, that it would
soon be frozen out even of her warm heart. On its old-fashioned plane
and of its kind the work was good, and they could not bear the thought
of its subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition of his work was the
least testimony they could pay to one they had loved; and on preparation
for this they spent many hours together. Jon came to have a curiously
increased respect for his father. The quiet tenacity with which he
had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was
disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with
a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing
certainly went very deep, or reached very high--but such as the work
was, it was thorough, conscientious, and complete. And, remembering
his father's utter absence of "side" or self-assertion, the chaffing
humility with which he had always spoken of his own efforts, ever
calling himself "an amateur," Jon could not help feeling that he had
never really known his father. To take himself seriously, yet never
that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle. There was
something in this which appealed to the boy, and made him heartily
endorse his mother's comment: "He had true refinement; he couldn't help
thinking of others, whatever he did. And when he took a resolution which
went counter, he did it with the minimum of defiance--not like the Age,
is it? Twice in his life he had to go against everything; and yet it
never made him bitter." Jon saw tears running down her face, which
she at once turned away from him. She was so quiet about her loss that
sometimes he had thought she didn't feel it much. Now, as he looked at
her, he felt how far he fell short of the reserve power and dignity in
both his father and his mother. And, stealing up to her, he put his arm
round her waist. She kissed him swiftly, but with a sort of passion, and
went out of the room.

The studio, where they had been sorting and labelling, had once been
Holly'