She gave him back his look with profound earnestness; then she spoke in a voice of sudden resolution. “Why, I should say we don’t want it, sir—I’d have four in it if it came—but that this sort of thing has got to stop.”
Campton shrugged. “Oh, well—it’s not going to come, so don’t worry. And call me a taxi, will you? No, no, I’ll carry the bags down myself.”
II
“But even if they do mobilise: mobilisation is not war—is it?” Mrs. Anderson Brant repeated across the teacups.
Campton dragged himself up from the deep armchair he had inadvertently chosen. To escape from his hostess’s troubled eyes he limped across to the window and stood gazing out at the thick turf and brilliant flower-borders of the garden which was so unlike his own. After a moment he turned and glanced about him, catching the reflection of his heavy figure in a mirror dividing two garlanded panels. He had not entered Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room for nearly ten years; not since the period of the interminable discussions about the choice of a school for George; and in spite of the far graver preoccupations that now weighed on him, and of the huge menace with which the whole world was echoing, he paused for an instant to consider the contrast between his clumsy person and that expensive and irreproachable room.
“You’ve taken away Beausite’s portrait of you,” he said abruptly, looking up at the chimney-panel, which was filled with the blue and umber bloom of a Fragonard landscape.
A full-length of Mrs. Anderson Brant by Beausite had been one of Mr. Brant’s wedding-presents to his bride; a Beausite portrait, at that time, was as much a part of such marriages as pearls and sables.
“Yes. Anderson thought ... the dress had grown so dreadfully old-fashioned,” she explained indifferently; and went on again: “You think it’s not war: don’t you?”
What was the use of telling her what he thought? For years and years he had not done that—about anything. But suddenly, now, a stringent necessity had drawn them together, confronting them like any two plain people caught in a common danger—like husband and wife, for example!
“It is war, this time, I believe,” he said.