together, and love driving them apart, Jon passed very painful days
secretly disgusted and disappointed with himself. His mother would
look at him with such a patient sadness which yet had in it an
instinctive pride, as if she were reserving her defence. If she
smiled he was angry that his answering smile should be so grudging
and unnatural. He did not judge or condemn her; that was all too
remote--indeed, the idea of doing so had never come to him. No! he
was grudging and unnatural because he couldn't have what he wanted be
cause of her. There was one alleviation--much to do in connection
with his father's career, which could not be safely entrusted to
June, though she had offered to undertake it. Both Jon and his
mother had felt that if she took his portfolios, unexhibited drawings
and unfinished matter, away with her, the work would encounter such
icy blasts from Paul Post and other frequenters of her studio, that
it would soon be frozen out even of her warm heart. On its
old-fashioned plane and of its kind the work was good, and they could not
bear the thought of its subjection to ridicule. A one-man exhibition
of his work was the least testimony they could pay to one they had
loved; and on preparation for this they spent many hours together.
Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father. The
quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into
something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There
was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth
and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached
very high--but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious,
and complete. And, remembering his father's utter absence of "side"
or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always
spoken of his own efforts, ever calling himself "an amateur," Jon
could not help feeling that he had never really known his father. To
take himself seriously, yet never bore others by letting them know
that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle. There was
something in this which appealed to the boy, and made him heartily
endorse his mother's comment: "He had true refinement; he couldn't
help thinking of others, whatever he did. And when he took a
resolution which went counter, he did it with the minimum of
defiance--not like the Age, is it? Twice in his life he had to go
against everything; and yet it never made him bit