The sum was mounting up--next New Year's Day it would be fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to say how much satisfaction he had got out of that yearly transaction.

But the correspondence had ended.
In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class, of the continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him to judge conduct by results rather than by principle, there was at the bottom of his heart a sort of uneasiness.

His son ought, under the circumstances, to have gone to the dogs; that law was laid down in all the novels, sermons, and plays he had ever read, heard, or witnessed.
After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something wrong somewhere.

Why had his son not gone to the dogs?
But, then, who could tell?
He had heard, of course--in fact, he had made it his business to find out--that Jo lived in St.John's Wood, that he had a little house in Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into society--a queer sort of society, no doubt--and that they had two children--the little chap they called Jolly (considering the circumstances the name struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since the marriage.

Who could tell what his son's circumstances really were?
He had capitalized the income he had inherited from his mother's father and joined Lloyd's as an underwriter; he painted pictures, too--water-colours.