Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/316

"Perhaps, after all, it's only a flirtation—a mere sentimental friendship," he hazarded.

"A flirtation?" Mrs. Brant's Mater Dolorosa face suddenly sharpened to worldly astuteness. "A sentimental friendship? Have you ever heard George mention her name—or make any sort of allusion to such a friendship?"

Campton considered. "No. I don't remember his ever speaking of her."

"Well, then———" Her eyes had the irritated look he had seen on the far-off day when he had thrown Beausite's dinner invitation into the fire. Once more, they seemed to say, she had taken the measure of his worldly wisdom.

George's silence—his care not even to mention that the Talketts were so much as known to him—certainly made it look as though the matter went deep with him. Campton, recalling the tone of the Talkett drawing-room and its familiars, had an even stronger recoil of indignation than Julia's; but he was silenced by a dread of tampering with his son's privacy, a sense of the sacredness of everything pertaining to that still-mysterious figure in the white bed upstairs.

Mrs. Brant's face had clouded again. "It's all so dreadful—and this Extreme Unction too! What is it exactly, do you know? A sort of baptism? Will the Roman Church try to get hold of him on the strength of it?"