In descending the
steps he noticed that they wanted painting.
Young Jolyon, his wife, his two children, and his dog Balthasar, were
all out there under a pear-tree.
This walk towards them was the most courageous act of old Jolyon's life;
but no muscle of his face moved, no nervous gesture betrayed him. He
kept his deep-set eyes steadily on the enemy.
In those two minutes he demonstrated to perfection all that unconscious
soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made, of him and so
many others of his class the core of the nation. In the unostentatious
conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect of everything else, they
typified the essential individualism, born in the Briton from the
natural isolation of his country's life.
The dog Balthasar sniffed round the edges of his trousers; this friendly
and cynical mongrel--offspring of a liaison between a Russian poodle and
a fox-terrier--had a nose for the unusual.
The strange greetings over, old Jolyon seated himself in a wicker chair,
and his two grandchildren, one on each side of his knees, looked at him
silently, never having seen so old a man.
They were unlike, as though recognising the difference set between
them by the circumstances of their births.
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