lf-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 sm