Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/80

préparateur in the laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. He was also, it appeared, given to prehistoric archæology, and had written a "thesis" on the painted caves of the Dordogne. He seemed extremely serious, and absorbed in questions of science and letters. But it appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to join his regiment. "The war had to come. This sort of thing couldn't go on," he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.

He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.

Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. "'For every man hath business and desire,'" he muttered as he followed the physician.

In the consulting-room he explained: "It's about my son———"

He had not been able to bring the phrase out in the presence of the young man who must have been just George's age, and who was leaving in an hour for his regiment. But between Campton and the father there were complicities, and there might therefore be accommodations. In the consulting-room one breathed a lower air.