“Really: it’s a case of my money or my life!” the young lady continued with a studied laugh. She stood between them, artificial and yet so artless, conscious of intruding but evidently used to having her intrusions pardoned; and her large eyes turned interrogatively to Campton.
“Of course my husband will do all he can for you. I’ll telephone,” said Mrs. Brant; then, perceiving that her visitor continued to gaze at Campton, she added: “Oh, no, this is not ... this is Mr. Campton.”
“John Campton? I knew it!” Mrs. Talkett’s eyes became devouring and brilliant. “Of course I ought to have recognized you at once—from your photographs. I have one pinned up in my room. But I was so flurried when I came in.” She detained the painter’s hand. “Do forgive me! For years I’ve dreamed of your doing me ... you see, I paint a little myself ... but it’s ridiculous to speak of such things now.” She added, as if she were risking something: “I knew your son at St. Moritz. We saw a great deal of him there, and in New York last winter.”
“Ah——” said Campton, bowing awkwardly.
“Cursed fools—all women,” he anathematized her on the way downstairs.
In the street, however, he felt grateful to her for reducing Mrs. Brant to such confusion that she had made no attempt to detain him. His way of life lay so far apart from his former wife’s that they had hardly ever been exposed to accidents of the kind, and he saw that Julia’s embarrassment kept all its freshness.
The fact set him thinking curiously of what her existence had been since they had parted. She had long since forgotten her youthful art-jargon to learn others more consonant to her tastes. As the wife of the powerful American banker she dispensed the costliest hospitality with the simple air of one who has never learnt that human life may be sustained without the aid of orchids and champagne. With guests either brought up in the same convictions or bent on acquiring them she conversed earnestly and unweariedly about motors, clothes and morals; but perhaps her most stimulating hours were those brightened by the weekly visit of the Rector of her parish. With happy untrammelled hands she was now free to rebuild to her own measure a corner of the huge wicked welter of Paris; and immediately it became as neat, as empty, as air-tight as her own immaculate drawing-room. There he seemed to see her, throning year after year in an awful emptiness of wealth and luxury and respectability, seeing only dull people, doing only dull things, and fighting feverishly to defend the last traces of a beauty which had never given her anything but the tamest and most unprofitable material prosperity.
“She’s never even had the silly kind of success she wanted—poor Julia!” he mused, wondering that she had been able to put into her life so few of the sensations which can be bought by wealth and beauty. “And now what will be left—how on earth will she fit into a war?”
He was sure all her plans had been made for the coming six months: her week-end sets of heavy millionaires secured for Deauville, and after that for the shooting at the big château near Compiègne, and three weeks reserved for Biarritz before the return to Paris in January. One of the luxuries Julia had most enjoyed after her separation from Campton (Adele had told him) had been that of planning things ahead: Mr. Brant, thank heaven, was not impulsive. And now here was this black bolt of war falling among all her carefully balanced arrangements with a crash more violent than any of Campton’s inconsequences!
As he reached the Place de la Concorde a newsboy passed with the three o’clock papers, and he bought one and read of the crossing of Luxembourg and the invasion of Belgium. The Germans were arrogantly acting up to their menace: heedless of international law, they were driving straight for France and England by the road they thought the most accessible....