Its gloomy chocolate, picked out with light green, took his fancy.

He ordered dinner, and sat down in the very corner, at the very table perhaps! (things did not progress much at the ‘Disunion,’ a Club of almost Radical principles) at which he and young Jolyon used to sit twenty-five years ago, when he was taking the latter to Drury Lane, during his holidays.

The boy had loved the theatre, and old Jolyon recalled how he used to sit opposite, concealing his excitement under a careful but transparent nonchalance.

He ordered himself, too, the very dinner the boy had always chosen-soup, whitebait, cutlets, and a tart.  Ah! if he were only opposite now!

The two had not met for fourteen years.  And not for the first time during those fourteen years old Jolyon wondered whether he had been a little to blame in the matter of his son.  An unfortunate love-affair with that precious flirt Danae Thornworthy (now Danae Pellew), Anthony Thornworthy’s daughter, had thrown him on the rebound into the arms of June’s mother.  He ought perhaps to have put a spoke in the wheel of their marriage; they were too young; but after that experience of Jo’s susceptibility he had been only too anxious to see him married.  And in four years the crash had come!  To have approved his son’s conduct in that crash was, of course, impossible; reason and training—­that combination of potent factors which stood for his principles—­told him of this impossibility, and his heart cried out.  The grim remorselessness of that business had no pity for hearts.  There was June, the atom with flaming hair, who had climbed all over him, twined and twisted herself about him—­about his heart that was made to be the plaything and beloved resort of tiny, helpless things.  With characteristic insight he saw he must part with one or with the other; no half-measures could serve in such a situation.  In that lay its tragedy.  And the tiny, helpless thing prevailed.  He would not run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and so to his son he said good-bye.

That good-bye had lasted until now.

He had proposed to continue a reduced allowance to young Jolyon, but this had been refused, and perhaps that refusal had hurt him more than anything, for with it had gone the last outlet of his penned-in affection; and there had come such tangible and solid proof of rupture as only a transaction in property, a bestowal or refusal of such, could supply.

His dinner tasted flat.  His pint of champagne was dry and bitter stuff, not like the Veuve Clicquots of old days.

Over his cup of coffee, he bethought him that he would go to the opera.  In the Times, therefore—­he had a distrust of other papers—­he read the announcement for the evening.  It was ‘Fidelio.’

Mercifully not one of those new-fangled German pantomimes by that fellow Wagner.

Putting on his ancient opera hat, which, with its brim flattened by use, and huge capacity, looked like an emblem of greater days, and, pulling out an old pair of very thin lavender kid gloves smelling strongly of Russia leather, from habitual proximity to the cigar-case in the pocket of his overcoat, he stepped into a hansom.