"I'm on," Guy announced readily. "If it hadn't been for the family I'd have enlisted in Canada long ago."
His mother took this seriously. "Well that, thank God, can't happen to us. Darling, with your—"
"Oh, yes, with my fat! Same old bunk! But, mother, I'm losing weight like a snowbank in April. It's running away. I'm exercising; I'm taking Turkish baths; I don't hardly eat a damn thing. I weighed two-fifty-three six weeks ago, and now I'm down to two-forty-nine."
"Don't worry," his father assured him. "You'll get there. You'll make a fine target for Big Bertha. Couldn't miss you any more than she would a whole platoon."
"Philip, how can you!"
"Oh, they're all crazy to go." He looked toward Tom. "Suppose you are too. Exactly the big husky type they like to blow into hash."
Turning to help himself from the dish Pilcher happened to be passing, Tom's eyes encountered Hildred's. Seated beside him, she had veered round on hearing her father's words. The alarm in her face was a confession.
"Oh, I can wait," he tried to laugh. "If I've got to go I will, but I'm not tumbling over myself to get there."
A half hour later Mrs. Ansley and the three younger members of the party were in the music room, where Guy was at the piano. The mother sat on a gilded French canapé, making an excuse for keeping Hildred beside her. Tom had already begun to guess that the friendship between Hildred and himself was making Mrs. Ansley uneasy. For all these years she had taken him as Guy's protégé with whom "anything of that kind" was impossible. But lately she had so maneuvered as not to leave Hildred and himself alone. Whether Hildred noticed it or not he couldn't tell, since she never made a counter-move. If she was not unconscious of her mother's strategy she let it appear as if she was.
All the while Guy chimed out the Carillon de Cythère of Couperin le Grand Mrs. Ansley patted Hildred's hand, and rejoiced in her two children. Guy's touch was velvety because it was Guy's; Couperin le Grand was a noble composer because Guy played him. Her amorphous person quivered to the measure, with a tremor here and a dilation there, like the contraction and expansion of a medusa floating in the sea.