67hanging table-lamp under a beaded shade, an India-rubber plant on a plush pedestal, and napkins that were just being restored to their bone rings by the four persons seated about the red-and-white checkered table-cloth.

67

These were: the great man himself, a tall large woman with grey hair, a tiny old lady, her face framed in a peasant’s fluted cap, and a plain young man wearing a private’s uniform, who had a nose like the doctor’s and simple light blue eyes.

The two ladies and the young man—so much more interesting to the painter’s eye than the sprawling beauties of the studio—were introduced by Fortin-Lescluze as his wife, his mother and his son. Mme. Fortin said, in a deep alto, a word or two about the privilege of meeting the famous painter who had portrayed her husband, and the old mother, in a piping voice, exclaimed: “Monsieur, I was at Sedan in 1870. I saw the Germans. I saw the Emperor sitting on a bench. He was crying.”

“My mother’s heard everything, she’s seen everything. There’s no one in the world like my mother!” the physician said, laying his hand on hers.

“You won’t see the Germans again, ma bonne mère!” her daughter-in-law added, smiling.

ma bonne mère

Campton took coffee with them, bore with a little inevitable talk about the war, and then eagerly questioned the son. The young man was a chemist, a 68préparateur in the laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. He was also, it appeared, given to prehistoric archæology, and had written a “thesis” on the painted caves of the Dordogne. He seemed extremely serious, and absorbed in questions of science and letters. But it appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to join his regiment. “The war had to come. This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.

68

préparateur

He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.

Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and 

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