Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/213

conscious that the only way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of ant-like agitation.

On the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before him in its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter's visions wear. "I want to be in this thing," he heard the boy repeating, as if impelled by some blind instinct flowing down through centuries and centuries of persistent childish minds.

"If he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would have been alive and safe to-day," Campton mused, "like George. . . The average person is always just obeying impulses stored up thousands, of years ago, and never re-examined since." But this consideration, though drawn from George's own philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.

At the Brants' a bewildered concierge admitted him and rang a bell which no one answered. The vestibule and the stairs were piled with bales of sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up hospital supplies. A boy in scout's uniform swung inadequate legs from the lofty porter's arm-chair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.

In the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and pâtes tendres, had vanished, and a plain moquette replaced the priceless Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day of his last visit.