Slowly, surely, with the secret inner process that works the destruction
of an old tree, the poison of the wounds to his happiness, his will, his
pride, had corroded the comely edifice of his philosophy. Life had worn
him down on one side, till, like that family of which he was the head,
he had lost balance.
To him, borne northwards towards his son's house, the thought of the
new disposition of property, which he had just set in motion, appeared
vaguely in the light of a stroke of punishment, levelled at that
family and that Society, of which James and his son seemed to him
the representatives. He had made a restitution to young Jolyon,
and restitution to young Jolyon satisfied his secret craving for
revenge-revenge against Time, sorrow, and interference, against all that
incalculable sum of disapproval that had been bestowed by the world for
fifteen years on his only son. It presented itself as the one possible
way of asserting once more the domination of his will; of forcing James,
and Soames, and the family, and all those hidden masses of Forsytes--a
great stream rolling against the single dam of his obstinacy--to
recognise once and for all that he would be master. It was sweet to
think that at last he was going to make the boy a richer man by far than
that son of James, that 'man of property.
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