ealer was that he relied on Nature. He had made a special
study of the symptoms of Nature--when his patient failed in any natural
symptom he supplied the poison which caused it--and there you were! She
was extremely hopeful. Her father had clearly not been living a natural
life at Robin Hill, and she intended to provide the symptoms. He
was--she felt--out of touch with the times, which was not natural;
his heart wanted stimulating. In the little Chiswick house she and the
Austrian--a grateful soul, so devoted to June for rescuing her that she
was in danger of decease from overwork--stimulated Jolyon in all
sorts of ways, preparing him for his cure. But they could not keep his
eyebrows down; as, for example, when the Austrian woke him at eight
o'clock just as he was going to sleep, or June took The Times away from
him, because it was unnatural to read "that stuff" when he ought to be
taking an interest in "life." He never failed, indeed, to be astonished
at her resource, especially in the evenings. For his benefit, as she
declared, though he suspected that she also got something out of it, she
assembled the Age so far as it was satellite to genius; and with
some solemnity it would move up and down the studio before him in the
Fox-trot, and that more mental form of dancing--the One-step--which so
pulled against the music, that Jolyon's eyebrows would be almost lost
in his hair from wonder at the strain it must impose on the dancer's
will-power. Aware that, hung on the line in the Water Colour Society, he
was a back number to those with any pretension to be called artists, he
would sit in the darkest corner he could find, and wonder about rhythm,
on which so long ago he had been raised. And when June brought some girl
or young man up to him, he would rise humbly to their level so far as
that was possible, and think: 'Dear me! This is very dull for them!'
Having his father's perennial sympathy with Youth, he used to get
very tired from entering into their points of view. But it was all
stimulating, and he never failed in admiration of his daughter's
indomitable spirit. Even genius itself attended these gatherings now and
then, with its nose on one side; and June always introduced it to her
father. This, she felt, was exceptionally good for him, for genius was a
natural symptom he had never had--fond as she was of him.

Certain as a man can be that she was his own daughter, he often wondered
whence she got herself--her red-go