Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.  Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his dead half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed to avoid the evil and contain the good of the Public School system, may or may not contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in April perfectly ignorant of whit he wanted to become.  The War, which had promised to go on for ever, had ended just as he was about to join the Army, six months before his time.  It had taken him ever since to get used to the idea that he could now choose for himself.  He had held with his father several discussions, from which, under a cheery show of being ready for anything—­except, of course, the Church, Army, Law, Stage, Stock Exchange, Medicine, Business, and Engineering—­Jolyon had gathered rather clearly that Jon wanted to go in for nothing.  He himself had felt exactly like that at the same age.  With him that pleasant vacuity had soon been ended by an early marriage, and its unhappy consequences.  Forced to become an underwriter at Lloyd’s, he had regained prosperity before his artistic talent had outcropped.  But having—­as the simple say —­“learned” his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew that Jon would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion that his aversion from everything else meant that he was going to be a writer.  Holding, however, the view that experience was necessary even for that profession, there seemed to Jolyon nothing in the meantime, for Jon, but University, travel, and perhaps the eating of dinners for the Bar.  After that one would see, or more probably one would not.  In face of these proffered allurements, however, Jon had remained undecided.

Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt whether the world had really changed.  People said that it was a new age.  With the profundity of one not too long for any age, Jolyon perceived that under slightly different surfaces the era was precisely what it had been.  Mankind was still divided into two species:  The few who had “speculation” in their souls, and the many who had none, with a belt of hybrids like himself in the middle.  Jon appeared to have speculation; it seemed to his father a bad lookout.

With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had heard the boy say, a fortnight ago:  “I should like to try farming, Dad; if it won’t cost you too much.  It seems to be about the only sort of life that doesn’t hurt anybody; except art, and of course that’s out of the question for me.”

Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered: 

“All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first Jolyon in 1760.  It’ll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no doubt, you may grow a better turnip than he did.”

A little dashed, Jon had answered: 

“But don’t you think it’s a good scheme, Dad?”

“’Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it, you’ll do more good than most men, which is little enough.”