Page:A Son at the Front (1923) Wharton.djvu/17

 All these things were now nearly thirty years old. Beausite had vanished from the heavens, and the youth he had sneered at throned there in his stead. Most of the people who besieged Campton's studio were the lineal descendants of those who had echoed Beausite's sneer. They belonged to the types that Campton least cared to paint; but they were usually those who paid the highest prices, and he had lately had new and imperious reasons for wanting to earn all the money he could. So for two years he had let it be as difficult and expensive as possible to be "done by Campton"; and this oppressive July day had been crowded with the visits of suppliants of a sort unused to waiting on anybody's pleasure, people who had postponed St. Moritz and Deauville, Aix and Royat, because it was known that one had to accept the master's conditions or apply elsewhere.

The job bored him more than ever; the more of their fatuous faces he recorded the more he hated the task; but for the last two or three days the monotony of his toil had been relieved by a new element of interest. This was produced by what he called the "war-funk," and consisted in the effect on his sitters and their friends of the suggestion that something new, incomprehensible and uncomfortable might be about to threaten the ordered course of their pleasures.

Campton himself did not "believe in the war" (as the current phrase went); therefore he was able to note