Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/256

manicured hand. Mme. Olida continued to look at her visitors.

Mrs. Brant wiped her dry lips and stammered: "We're his parents—a son at the front. . ."

Mme. Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lips droop over her magnificent eyes, and rested her head against a soiled sofa-pillow. Presently she held out both hands.

"You are his parents? Yes? Give me each a hand, please." As her cushioned palm touched Campton's he thought he felt a tremor of recognition, and saw, in the half-light, the tremor communicate itself to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly, and she lifted her eyes, looked straight into his with her heavy velvety stare, and said: "You should hold my hand more loosely; the currents must not be compressed." She turned her palm upward, so that his finger-tips rested on it as if on a keyboard; he noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had placed in Mrs. Brant's.

Suddenly he remembered that one sultry noon, lying under the olives, she had taught him, by signals tapped on his own knee, how to say what he chose to her without her brothers' knowing it. He looked at the huge woman, seeking the curve of the bowed upper lip on which what used to be a faint blue shadow had now become a line as thick as her eyebrows, and recalling how her laugh used to lift the lip above her little round