June was at home; she had come down hotfoot on hearing the news of Jolly’s enlistment.  His patriotism had conquered her feeling for the Boers.  The atmosphere of his house was strange and pocketty when Jolyon came in and told them of the dog Balthasar’s death.  The news had a unifying effect.  A link with the past had snapped—­the dog Balthasar!  Two of them could remember nothing before his day; to June he represented the last years of her grandfather; to Jolyon that life of domestic stress and aesthetic struggle before he came again into the kingdom of his father’s love and wealth!  And he was gone!

In the afternoon he and Jolly took picks and spades and went out to the field.  They chose a spot close to the russet mound, so that they need not carry him far, and, carefully cutting off the surface turf, began to dig.  They dug in silence for ten minutes, and then rested.

“Well, old man,” said Jolyon, “so you thought you ought?”

“Yes,” answered Jolly; “I don’t want to a bit, of course.”

How exactly those words represented Jolyon’s own state of mind

“I admire you for it, old boy.  I don’t believe I should have done it at your age—­too much of a Forsyte, I’m afraid.  But I suppose the type gets thinner with each generation.  Your son, if you have one, may be a pure altruist; who knows?”

“He won’t be like me, then, Dad; I’m beastly selfish.”

“No, my dear, that you clearly are not.”  Jolly shook his head, and they dug again.

“Strange life a dog’s,” said Jolyon suddenly:  “The only four-footer with rudiments of altruism and a sense of God!”

Jolly looked at his father.

“Do you believe in God, Dad?  I’ve never known.”

At so searching a question from one to whom it was impossible to make a light reply, Jolyon stood for a moment feeling his back tried by the digging.

“What do you mean by God?” he said; “there are two irreconcilable ideas of God.  There’s the Unknowable Creative Principle—­one believes in That.  And there’s the Sum of altruism in man—­naturally one believes in That.”

“I see.  That leaves out Christ, doesn’t it?”

Jolyon stared.  Christ, the link between those two ideas!  Out of the mouth of babes!  Here was orthodoxy scientifically explained at last!  The sublime poem of the Christ life was man’s attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God.  And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all!  Funny—­how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way!

“What do you think, old man?” he said.

Jolly frowned.  “Of course, my first year we talked a good bit about that sort of thing.  But in the second year one gives it up; I don’t know why—­it’s awfully interesting.”

Jolyon remembered that he also had talked a good deal about it his first year at Cambridge, and given it up in his second.