but to take steps would be deplorable.

Without an open scandal which they could not see their way to
recommending, it was difficult to see what steps could be taken. In this
impasse, the only thing was to say nothing to Soames, and nothing to
each other; in fact, to pass it over.

By displaying towards Irene a dignified coldness, some impression might
be made upon her; but she was seldom now to be seen, and there seemed
a slight difficulty in seeking her out on purpose to show her coldness.
Sometimes in the privacy of his bedroom James would reveal to Emily the
real suffering that his son's misfortune caused him.

"I can't tell," he would say; "it worries me out of my life. There'll
be a scandal, and that'll do him no good. I shan't say anything to him.
There might be nothing in it. What do you think? She's very artistic,
they tell me. What? Oh, you're a 'regular Juley! Well, I don't know; I
expect the worst. This is what comes of having no children. I knew how
it would be from the first. They never told me they didn't mean to have
any children--nobody tells me anything!"

On his knees by the side of the bed, his eyes open and fixed with worry,
he would breathe into the counterpane. Clad in his nightshirt, his neck
poked forward, his back rounded, he resembled some long white bird.

"Our Father-," he repeated, turning over and over again the thought of
this possible scandal.

Like old Jolyon, he, too, at the bottom of his heart set the blame of
the tragedy down to family interference. What business had that lot--he
began to think of the Stanhope Gate branch, including young Jolyon and
his daughter, as 'that lot'--to introduce a person like this Bosinney
into the family? (He had heard George's soubriquet, 'The Buccaneer,' but
he could make nothing of that--the young man was an architect.)

He began to feel that his brother Jolyon, to whom he had always looked
up and on whose opinion he had relied, was not quite what he had
expected.

Not having his eldest brother's force of character, he was more sad than
angry. His great comfort was to go to Winifred's, and take the little
Darties in his carriage over to Kensington Gardens, and there, by the
Round Pond, he could often be seen walking with his eyes fixed anxiously
on little Publius Dartie's sailing-boat, which he had himself freighted
with a penny, as though convinced that it would never again come to
shore; while little Publius--who, James delighted to say, was