er dated from there
eight years ago.

He had not been near the 'Disunion' for months, and the house had
undergone the piebald decoration which people bestow on old houses and
old ships when anxious to sell them.

'Beastly colour, the smoking-room!' he thought. 'The dining-room is
good!'

Its gloomy chocolate, picked out with light green, took his fancy.

He ordered dinner, and sat down in the very corner, at the very table
perhaps! (things did not progress much at the 'Disunion,' a Club of
almost Radical principles) at which he and young Jolyon used to sit
twenty-five years ago, when he was taking the latter to Drury Lane,
during his holidays.

The boy had loved the theatre, and old Jolyon recalled how he used to
sit opposite, concealing his excitement under a careful but transparent
nonchalance.

He ordered himself, too, the very dinner the boy had always chosen-soup,
whitebait, cutlets, and a tart. Ah! if he were only opposite now!

The two had not met for fourteen years. And not for the first time
during those fourteen years old Jolyon wondered whether he had been a
little to blame in the matter of his son. An unfortunate love-affair
with that precious flirt Danae Thornworthy (now Danae Pellew), Anthony
Thornworthy's daughter, had thrown him on the rebound into the arms
of June's mother. He ought perhaps to have put a spoke in the wheel of
their marriage; they were too young; but after that experience of Jo's
susceptibility he had been only too anxious to see him married. And in
four years the crash had come! To have approved his son's conduct
in that crash was, of course, impossible; reason and training--that
combination of potent factors which stood for his principles--told him
of this impossibility, and his heart cried out. The grim remorselessness
of that business had no pity for hearts. There was June, the atom with
flaming hair, who had climbed all over him, twined and twisted herself
about him--about his heart that was made to be the plaything and beloved
resort of tiny, helpless things. With characteristic insight he saw he
must part with one or with the other; no half-measures could serve in
such a situation. In that lay its tragedy. And the tiny, helpless thing
prevailed. He would not run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and
so to his son he said good-bye.

That good-bye had lasted until now.

He had proposed to continue a reduced allowance to young Jolyon, but
this had been refused, and