Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/270

The people about him—Miss Anthony, Bolyton, Mlle. Davril, and all their band of tired resolute workers—plodded ahead, their eyes on their task, seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial escape from the intolerable oppression. The women especially, with their gift of living in the particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development of the catastrophe; and Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly thought of it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard morning's work, went out to lunch together, that what he called the Lusitania look, suddenly darkening the younger man's face, moved the painter with an anguish like his own.

Boylston, breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day remonstrated with Campton for not going on with his painting: but the latter had merely rejoined: "We've each of us got to worry through this thing in our own way—" and the subject was not again raised between them.

The intervals between George's letters were growing longer. Campton, who noted in his pocket-diary the dates of all that he received, as well as those addressed to Mrs. Brant and Miss Anthony, had not had one to record since the middle of June. And in that there was no allusion to the Lusitania.

"It's queer," he said to Boylston, one day toward