“Well—yes. You must have noticed that she and Mr. Mayhew have been getting pretty chummy. You see, he’s done such a lot of talking that people think he’s at least an Oil King; and Mme. de Dolmetsch is dazzled. But she’s got her musical prodigy to provide for——” and Boylston outlined the situation which his astuteness had detected while it developed unperceived under Campton’s dreaming eyes. Mr. Mayhew was attending all their meetings now, finding fault, criticizing, asking to have the accounts investigated, though they had always been audited at regular intervals by expert accountants; and all this zeal originated in the desire to put Mme. de Dolmetsch in Miss Anthony’s place, on the plea that her greater social experience, her gift of attracting and interesting, would bring in immense sums of money—whereas, Boylston grimly hinted, they already had a large balance in the bank, and it was with an eye to that balance that Mme. de Dolmetsch was forcing Mayhew to press her claim.
“You see, sir, Mr. Mayhew never turns out to be as liberal as they expect when they first hear him talk; and though Mme. de Dolmetsch has him in her noose she’s not getting what she wants—by a long way. And so they’ve cooked this up between them—she and Mme. Beausite—without his actually knowing what they’re after.”
Campton stopped short, releasing Boylston’s arm. “But what you suggest is abominable,” he exclaimed.
“Yes. I know it.” But the young man’s voice remained steady. “Well, I wish you’d come to our meetings, now you’re back.”
“I will—I will! But I’m no earthly use on financial questions. You’re much stronger there.”
He felt Boylston’s grin through the darkness. “Oh, they’ll have me out too before long.”
“I mean that lots of people are beginning to speculate in war charities—oh, in all sorts of ways. Sometimes I’m sick to the point of chucking it all. But Miss Anthony keeps me going.”
As he walked home his mind was burdened with Boylston’s warning. It was not merely the affair itself, but all it symbolized, that made his gorge rise, made him, as Boylston said, sick to the point of wanting to chuck it all—to chuck everything connected with this hideous world that was dancing and flirting and money-making on the great red mounds of dead. He grinned at the thought that he had once believed in the regenerative power of war—the salutary shock of great moral and social upheavals. Yet he _had_ believed in it, and never more intensely than at George’s bedside at Doullens, in that air so cleansed by passion and pain that mere living seemed a meaningless gesture compared to the chosen surrender of life. But in the Paris to which he had returned after barely four months of absence the instinct of self-preservation seemed to have wiped all meaning from such words. Poor fatuous Mayhew dancing to Mme. de Dolmetsch’s piping, Jorgenstein sinking under the weight of his international honours, Mme. de Tranlay intriguing to push her daughter in such society, and Julia placidly abetting her—Campton hardly knew from which of these sorry visions he turned with a completer loathing....