Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/268
A SON AT THE FRONT
left the Ministry to resume his ambulance work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of refugees. Mrs. Brant had taken a small house at Deauville (on the pretext of being near her hospital), and Campton heard of the Talketts' being with her, and others of their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the studio one day, in tennis flannels and a new straw hat, announcing that he "needed rest," and rather sheepishly adding that Mrs. Brant had suggested his spending "a quiet fortnight" with her. "I've got to do it, if I'm to see this thing through," Mr. Mayhew added in a stern voice, as if commanding himself not to waver.
A few days later, glancing over the Herald, Campton read that Mme. de Dolmetsch, "the celebrated artiste," was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Brant at Deauville, where she had gone to give recitations for the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled, and then thought with a tightening heart of Benny Upsher and Ladislas Isador, so incredibly unlike in their lives, so strangely one in their death. Finally, not long afterward, he read that the celebrated financier, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (recently knighted by the British Government) had bestowed a gift of a hundred thousand francs upon Mrs. Brant's hospital. It was rumoured, the paragraph ended, that Sir Cyril would soon receive the Legion of Honour for his magnificent liberalities to France.
And still the flood of war rolled on. Success here,
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