e two days each year he and his son had been alone
together in the world, one on each side--and Democracy just born!

And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of
light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and
train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground. There, beside her in a
lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game,
and felt the old thrill stir within him.

When Soames passed, the day was spoiled, and Irene's face distorted by
compression of the lips. No good to go on sitting here with Soames or
perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals. And he
said:

"Well, dear, if you've had enough--let's go!"

That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he
waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study.
He opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still
hear her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair,
closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like
that passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata--so had been his life with her,
a divine third movement. And now this business of Jon's--this bad
business! Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it
were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see a
shape in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went,
and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting,
he saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed, glasses balanced
between thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep
eyes looking up below a dome of forehead, seeming to search his own;
seeming to speak. "Are you facing it, Jo? It's for you to decide. She's
only a woman!" How well he knew his father in that phrase; how all the
Victorian Age came up with it!--And his answer "No, I've funked
it--funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I've got a heart; I've
funked it." But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his
own, kept at it: "It's your wife, your son, your past. Tackle it, my
boy!" Was it a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his
sire living on within him? And again came that scent of cigar
smoke--from the old saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write
to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly
he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his
heart were swollen. He got up