The dog Balthasar, as close as he might be to the tea-table, had fixed his eyes on the cake.
Young Jolyon felt a malicious desire to cut their enjoyment short.
What business had his father to come and upset his wife like this?
It was a shock, after all these years! He ought to have known; he ought to have given them warning; but when did a Forsyte ever imagine that his conduct could upset anybody! And in his thoughts he did old Jolyon wrong.
He spoke sharply to the children, and told them to go in to their tea.
Greatly surprised, for they had never heard their father speak sharply before, they went off, hand in hand, little Holly looking back over her shoulder.
Young Jolyon poured out the tea.
"My wife's not the thing today," he said, but he knew well enough that his father had penetrated the cause of that sudden withdrawal, and almost hated the old man for sitting there so calmly.
"You've got a nice little house here," said old Jolyon with a shrewd look; "I suppose you've taken a lease of it!" Young Jolyon nodded.
"I don't like the neighbourhood," said old Jolyon; "a ramshackle lot." Young Jolyon replied: "Yes, we're a ramshackle lot."' The silence was now only broken by the sound of the dog Balthasar's scratching.
Old Jolyon said simply: "I suppose I oughtn't to have come here, Jo; but I get so lonely!" At these words young Jolyon got up and put his hand on his father's shoulder.
In the next house someone was playing over and over again: 'La Donna mobile' on an untuned piano; and the little garden had fallen into shade, the sun now only reached the wall at the end, whereon basked a crouching cat, her yellow eyes turned sleepily down on the dog Balthasar.

There was a drowsy hum of very distant traffic; the creepered trellis round the garden shut out everything but sky, and house, and pear-tree, with its top branches still gilded by the sun.
For some time they sat there, talking but little.

Then old Jolyon rose to go, and not a word was said about his coming again.
He walked away very sadly.

What a poor miserable place; and he thought of the great, empty house in Stanhope Gate, fit residence for a Forsyte, with its huge billiard-room and drawing-room that no one entered from one week's end to another.
That woman, whose face he had rather liked, was too thin-skinned by half; she gave Jo a bad time he knew! And those sweet children! Ah! what a piece of awful folly! He walked towards the Edgware Road, between rows of little houses, all suggesting to him (erroneously no doubt, but the prejudices of a Forsyte are sacred) shady histories of some sort or kind.
Society, forsooth, the chattering hags and jackanapes--had set themselves up to pass judgment on his flesh and blood! A parcel of old women! He stumped his umbrella on the ground, as though to drive it into the heart of that unfortunate body, which had dared to ostracize his son and his son's son, in whom he could have lived again! He stumped his umbrella fiercely; yet he himself had followed Society's behaviour for fifteen years--had only today been false to it! He thought of June, and her dead mother, and the whole story, with all his old bitterness.

A wretched business! He was a long time reaching Stanhope Gate, for, with native perversity, being extremely tired, he walked the whole way.
After washing his hands in the lavatory downstairs, he went to the dining-room to wait for dinner, the only room he used when June was out--it was less lonely so.