Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/229
A SON AT THE FRONT
mured: "Ah, Boylston———" as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing.
"At his age too; it's extraordinary, the way the boy's got out of himself."
"Or into himself, rather. He was a pottering boy before—now he's a man, with a man's sense of things."
"Yes; but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries! He doesn't seem to me like the kind who was meant to be a missionary."
"Not a bit of it. . . But he's burnt up with shame at our not being in the war—as all the young Americans are."
Campton made an impatient movement. "Benny Upsher again———! Can't we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I wonder?"
"I wonder," echoed Miss Anthony.
Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not again raise the question. Miss Anthony's vision was too simplifying to penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year's incessant contact with the most savage realities her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas.
Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant was as absorbed in her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at Deauville had been turned into a hospital she was always on the road, in
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