Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no
coffee in it. In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in
his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony. Secure from
discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had spent the
fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow
without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final polish to his
terrestrial state. Having docketed and enclosed it in his father's
old Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words
outside: "Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the exact
state of me, J. F.," and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be
always about him, in case of accident. Then, ringing for tea, he went
out to have it under the old oak-tree.

All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little
more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought
habitually, like other people, of other things. He thought of his son
now.

Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a decision.
Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at Harrow, like his dead
half-brother, but at one of those establishments which, designed to
avoid the evil and contain the good of the Public School system, may
or may not contain the evil and avoid the good, Jon had left in April
perfectly ignorant of whit 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