A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton

In the street Campton looked about him with the same confused sense as when he had watched Fortin-Lescluze driving away to Chalons, his dead son's image in his eyes.

Each time that Campton came in contact with people on whom this calamity had fallen he grew more acutely aware of his own inadequacy. If he had been Fortin-Lescluze it would have been impossible for him to go back to Chalons and resume his task. If he had been Harvey Mayhew, still less could he have accommodated himself to the intolerable, the really inconceivable, thought that Benny Upsher had vanished into that fiery furnace like a crumpled letter tossed into a grate. Young Fortin was defending his country-but Upsher, in God's name what was Benny Upsher of Connecticut doing in a war between the continental powers?

Suddenly Campton remembered that he had George's letter in his pocket, and that he had meant to go back with it to Mrs. Brant's. He had started out that morning full of the good intentions the letter had inspired; but now he had no heart to carry them out. Yet George had said: "Let mother know, and explain, please; " and such an injunction could not be disregarded.

He was still hesitating on a street corner when he remembered that Miss Anthony was probably on her way home for luncheon, and that if he made haste he might find her despatching her hurried meal. It was instinctive with him, in difficult hours, to turn to her, less for counsel than for shelter; her simple unperplexed view of things was as comforting as his mother's solution of the dark riddles he used to propound in the nursery.

He found her in her little dining-room, with Delft plates askew on imitation Cordova leather, and a Death's Head Pennon and a Prussian helmet surmounting the nymph in cast bronze on the mantelpiece. In entering he faced the relentless light of a ground-glass window opening on an air-shaft; and Miss Anthony, flinging him a look, dropped her fork and sprang up crying: "George -- "

"George-why George? " Campton recovered his presence of mind under the shock of her agitation. "What made you think of George?"

"Your-your face," she stammered, sitting down again. "So absurd of me. But you looked. A seat for monsieur, Jeanne," she cried over her shoulder to the pantry.

"Ah-my face? Yes, I suppose so. Benny Upsher has disappeared-I've just had to break it to Mayhew."

"Oh, that poor young Upsher? How dreadful! " Her own face grew instantly serene. "I'm so sorry-so very sorry. Yes, yes, you _shall_ lunch with me-I know there's another cutlet," she insisted.

He shook his head. "I couldn't."

"Well, then, I've finished. " She led the way into the drawing-room. There it was her turn to face the light, and he saw that her own features were as perturbed as she had apparently discovered his to be.

"Poor Benny, poor boy! " she repeated, in the happy voice she might have had if she had been congratulating Campton on the lad's escape. He saw that she was still thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her inability to fit her intonation to her words betrayed the violence of her relief. But why had she imagined George to be in danger?

Campton recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she continued to murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: "Why on earth should you have been afraid for George?"

Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. "My dear, if you were to cut me open George's name would run out of every vein," she said.

"But in that tone-it was your tone. You thought he'd been-that something had happened," Campton insisted. "How could it, where he is?"

She shrugged her shoulders in the "foreign" way she had picked up in her youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block of her character.

"Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren't there?"

"I don't know. " He pulled out the letter he had received that morning. A sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. "I don't even know where George is any longer."

She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: "What do you mean?"

"Here-look at this. We're to write to his base. I'm to tell his mother of the change. " He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back of her chair. "What can it mean," he broke out, "except that he's left Sainte Menehould, that he's been sent elsewhere, and that he doesn't want us to find out where?"