Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/404

Olida's, and had always brought away the same reassuring formula: she thought it striking, and so did her friends, that the clairvoyante's prediction never varied.

There was reason to believe that George's regiment had been sent to Verdun, and from Verdun the news was growing daily more hopeful. This seemed to Mrs. Brant a remarkable confirmation of Olida's prophecy. Apparently it did not occur to her that, in the matter of human life, victories may be as ruinous as defeats; and she triumphed in the fact—it had grown to be a fact to her—that her boy was at Verdun, when he might have been in the Somme, where things, though stagnant, were on the whole going less well. Mothers prayed for "a quiet sector"—and then, she argued, what happened? The men grew careless, the officers were oftener away; your son was ordered out to see to the repairs of a barbed-wire entanglement, and a sharpshooter picked him off while you were sitting reading one of his letters, and thinking: Thank God he's out of the fighting." And besides, Olida was sure, and all her predictions had been so wonderful. . .

Campton began to dread his wife's discovering Mme. Olida's fears for her own son. Every endeavour to get news of Pepito had been fruitless; finally Campton and Boylston concluded that the young man must be a prisoner. The painter had a second visit from Mme. Olida, in the course of which he besought her (without