good, Jon had left in April
perfectly ignorant of what 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 smile, and answered:

"All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first Jolyon
in 1760. It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally, no doubt, you
may grow a better tu