The sum was mounting up--next New Year's Day it would be
fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to say how much
satisfaction he had got out of that yearly transaction. But the
correspondence had ended.
In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly
constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class, of
the continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him to judge
conduct by results rather than by principle, there was at the bottom of
his heart a sort of uneasiness. His son ought, under the circumstances,
to have gone to the dogs; that law was laid down in all the novels,
sermons, and plays he had ever read, heard, or witnessed.
After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something
wrong somewhere. Why had his son not gone to the dogs? But, then, who
could tell?
He had heard, of course--in fact, he had made it his business to find
out--that Jo lived in St. John's Wood, that he had a little house in
Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into
society--a queer sort of society, no doubt--and that they had
two children--the little chap they called Jolly (considering the
circumstances the name struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both
feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since the
marriage.
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