Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/341

"George!" Mrs. Brant called; and across the intervening groups Campton saw his son bowing to the Marquise de Tranlay.

Mme. de Dolmetsch jumped up, her bracelets jangling like a prompter's call. "Silence!" she cried. The ladies squeezed into their seats, the men resigned themselves to door-posts and window-embrasures, and the pianist attacked Stravinsky. . .

"Dancing?" Campton heard his hostess answering some one. "N—no: not quite yet, I think. Though in London, already . . . oh, just for the officers on leave, of course. Poor darlings—why shouldn't they? But to-day, you see, it's for a charity." Her smile appealed to her hearer to acknowledge the distinction.

The music was over, and scanning the groups at the tea-tables, Campton saw Adele and Mlle. Davril squeezed away in the remotest corner of the room. He took a chair at their table, and Boylston presently blinked his way to them through the crowd.

They seemed, all four, more like unauthorized intruders on the brilliant scene than its laborious organizers. The entertainment, escaping from their control, had speedily reverted to its true purpose of feeding and amusing a crowd of bored and restless people; and the little group recognized the fact, and joked over it in their different ways. But Mlle. Davril was happy at the sale of tickets, which must have been immense to judge from the crowd (spying about the entrance,