How were they ever to see the same way about anything? And yet he detected in himself a strange pathetic desire to be liked by his father and himself to like in return; had he only known it, his father felt precisely the same towards himself—but the gulf of two generations was between them.
Indeed, on that very morning Mr. Cole had had a conversation with his brother-in-law Samuel about his son Jeremy. Mr. Cole was never at ease with his brother-in-law. He distrusted artists in general—his idea was that they were wasting the time that God had given them—and he distrusted his brother-in-law in particular because he thought that he often laughed at him, which indeed he often did.
“I’m unhappy about Jeremy,” he said, looking at Samuel’s blue smock with dissatisfaction. He did wish that Samuel wouldn’t wear his painting clothes at breakfast-time.
“Why?” asked Samuel.
“I don’t think the boy’s improving. School seems to be doing him no good.”
“Take him away, then,” said Samuel.
“Really,” said Mr. Cole, “I wish you wouldn’t joke about these things. He must go to school.”
“Send him to another school if this one isn’t satisfactory.”
“No. Thompson’s is a good school. I’m afraid it’s in the boy, not the school, that the fault lies.”
Samuel Trefusis said nothing.