conversation difficult; but Campton did not care. It was enough to sit and watch the face 28in which, after each absence, he noted a new and richer vivacity. He had often tried to make up his mind if his boy were handsome. Not that the father’s eye influenced the painter’s; but George’s young head, with its thick blond thatch, the complexion ruddy to the golden eyebrows, and then abruptly white on the forehead, the short amused nose, the inquisitive eyes, the ears lying back flat to the skull against curly edges of fair hair, defied all rules and escaped all classifications by a mixture of romantic gaiety and shrewd plainness like that in certain eighteenth-century portraits.

28

As father and son faced each other over the piled-up peaches, while the last sparkle of champagne died down in their glasses, Campton’s thoughts went back to the day when he had first discovered his son. George was a schoolboy of twelve, at home for the Christmas holidays. At home meant at the Brants’, since it was always there he stayed: his father saw him only on certain days. Usually Mariette fetched him to the studio on one afternoon in the week; but this particular week George was ill, and it had been arranged that in case of illness his father was to visit him at his mother’s. He had one of his frequent bad colds, and Campton recalled him, propped up in bed in his luxurious overheated room, a scarlet sweater over his nightshirt, a book on his thin knees, and his ugly little fever-flushed face bent over it in profound absorption. Till that moment George had never seemed to care 29for books: his father had resigned himself to the probability of seeing him grow up into the ordinary pleasant young fellow, with his mother’s worldly tastes. But the boy was reading as only a bookworm reads—reading with his very finger-tips, and his inquisitive nose, and the perpetual dart ahead of a gaze that seemed to guess each phrase from its last word. He looked up with a smile, and said: “Oh, Dad ...” but it was clear that he regarded the visit as an interruption. Campton, leaning over, saw that the book was a first edition of Lavengro.

29

“Where the deuce did you get that?”

George looked at him with shining eyes. “Didn’t you know? Mr. Brant has started collecting first editions. There’s a chap who comes over from London with things for him. He lets me have them to look at when I’m seedy. I say, isn’t this topping? Do you remember the fight?” And, marvelling once more at the ways of Providence, Campton perceived that the millionaire’s taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson 

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