“You can go to bed, Parfitt,” said old Jolyon.  “I will lock up and put out.”

When he again entered the dining-room the cat unfortunately preceded him, with her tail in the air, proclaiming that she had seen through this manouevre for suppressing the butler from the first....

A fatality had dogged old Jolyon’s domestic stratagems all his life.

Young Jolyon could not help smiling.  He was very well versed in irony, and everything that evening seemed to him ironical.  The episode of the cat; the announcement of his own daughter’s engagement.  So he had no more part or parcel in her than he had in the Puss!  And the poetical justice of this appealed to him.

“What is June like now?” he asked.

“She’s a little thing,” returned old Jolyon; they say she’s like me, but that’s their folly.  She’s more like your mother—­the same eyes and hair.”

“Ah! and she is pretty?”

Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely; especially anything for which he had a genuine admiration.

“Not bad looking—­a regular Forsyte chin.  It’ll be lonely here when she’s gone, Jo.”

The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had felt on first seeing his father.

“What will you do with yourself, Dad?  I suppose she’s wrapped up in him?”

“Do with myself?” repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his voice.  “It’ll be miserable work living here alone.  I don’t know how it’s to end.  I wish to goodness....”  He checked himself, and added:  “The question is, what had I better do with this house?”

Young Jolyon looked round the room.  It was peculiarly vast and dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that he remembered as a boy—­sleeping dogs with their noses resting on bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapes lying side by side in mild surprise.  The house was a white elephant, but he could not conceive of his father living in a smaller place; and all the more did it all seem ironical.

In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the figurehead of his family and class and creed, with his white head and dome-like forehead, the representative of moderation, and order, and love of property.  As lonely an old man as there was in London.

There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends.  This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had the impersonal eye.

The poor old Dad!  So this was the end, the purpose to which he had lived with such magnificent moderation!  To be lonely, and grow older and older, yearning for a soul to speak to!