Edith Wharton - Novel 14 by A Son at the Front (v2.1) Page A

impossible
to conceive of her being up and dressed and at the Gare de l’Est at five in the
morning—and how could she have got there without her motor? So Campton was
alone, in that crowd which seemed all made up of families.
                 But no—not all. Ahead of him he saw one woman moving away
alone, and recognized, across the welter of heads, Adele Anthony’s adamantine
hat and tight knob of hair.
                 Poor
Adele! So she had come too—and had evidently failed in her quest, not been able
to fend a way through the crowd, and perhaps not even had a glimpse of her
hero. The thought smote Campton with compunction: he regretted his sneering
words when they had last met, regretted refusing to dine with her. He wished
the barrier of people between them had been less impenetrable; but for the
moment it was useless to try to force a way through it. He had to wait till the
crowd shifted to other platforms, whence other trains were starting, and by
that time she was lost to sight.
                 At
last he was able to make his way through the throng, and as he came out of a
side entrance he saw her. She appeared to be looking for a taxi—she waved her
sunshade aimlessly. But no one who knew the Gare de l’Est would have gone
around that corner to look for a taxi; least of all the practical Adele. Besides,
Adele never took taxis: she travelled in the bowels of the earth or on the
dizziest omnibus tops.
                 Campton
knew at once that she was waiting for him. He went up to her and a guilty pink
suffused her nose.
                 “You
missed him after all?” he said.
                 “I—oh,
no, I didn’t.”
                 ‘You
didn’t? But I was with him all the time. We didn’t see you”
                 “No,
but I saw—distinctly. That was all I went for,” she jerked back.
                 He
slipped his arm through hers. “This crowd terrifies me. I’m glad you waited for
me,” he said.
                 He
saw her pleasure, but she merely answered: “I’m dying of thirst, aren’t you?”
                 “Yes—or hunger, or something. Could we find a laiterie?”
                 They
found one, and sat down among early clerks and shop-girls, and a few
dishevelled women with swollen faces whom Campton had noticed in the station.
One of them, who sat opposite an elderly man, had drawn out a pocket mirror and
was powdering her nose.
                 Campton
hated to see women powder their noses—one of the few merits with which he
credited Julia Brant was that of never having adopted these dirty modern
fashions, of continuing to make her toilet in private “like a lady,” as people
used to say when he was young. But now the gesture charmed him, for he had
recognized the girl who had been sobbing in the station.
                 “How
game she is! I like that. But why is she so frightened?” he wondered. For he
saw that her chocolate was untouched, and that the smile had stiffened on her
lips.
                 Since
his talk with Adamson he could not bring himself to be seriously alarmed. Fear
had taken him by the throat for a moment in the station, at the sound of the
girl’s sobs; but already he had thrown it off. Everybody agreed that the war
was sure to be over in a few weeks; even Dastrey had come round to that view;
and with Fortin’s protection, and the influences Anderson Brant could put in
motion, George was surely safe—as safe at his depot as anywhere else in the
precarious world. Campton poured out Adele’s coffee, and drank off his own as
if it had been champagne.
                 “Do
you know anything about the people George was dining with last night?” he
enquired abruptly.
                 Miss
Anthony knew everything and everybody in the American circle in Paris ; she was a clearing-house of
Franco-American