Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/429

reasons, the old instinctive dread of spending had reasserted itself, he couldn't tell how or why, unless through some dim opposition to the Brants' perpetual outpouring: their hospitals, their motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their monument—their monument!

He sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every day one of the newly-opened Soldiers' and Sailors' Clubs. Adele Anthony had already found a job there, and was making a success of it. She looked twenty years older since George was gone, but she stuck to her work with the same humorous pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness and ceremony, her funny resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and her ability to answer all their most disconcerting questions about Paris and France (Montmartre included), she easily eclipsed the ministering angels who twanged the home-town chord and called them "boys."

The young men appeared to return Campton's liking; it was as if they had guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy help. He was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely "the old gentleman" who was friendly to them; but he didn't mind. It was enough to sit and listen to their talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles which confronted them, to render them such fatherly