"Oh, don't I just! When I tell you I'm stone-broke."
"With you it's chronic. No, you don't want money. What you want is sense."
"Anything else?"
"Just a trifle of self-control, a smattering of principle, manliness—h'm—honour!"
"Thanks, awfully. Have one of these?" His face crimsoned, darkened, and set in a sullen ferocity. The elder man smiled behind his beard, glad to have touched some harder stuff under the facile sweetness.
"Yes, young one, that's the right word," he repeated.
The boy got up, very pale, thanked him for the luncheon, and said that he had to go. The man rose, too, put some silver on the table, and followed him into the sunny street. There they walked silently side by side till they reached the outskirts of the village, behind the Roman tower, where the turf was broken by grey boulders and dotted with thorn and bramble-bushes, and the air was sharp even in the brilliant sun.
"Very English," the elder man said, pointing to the turf; but the young one was silent still, and his friend saw that he was fighting to keep back tears.
"Just look at those soldiers," he added, when their road crossed another, quite open, but labelled défense militaire, where some men in shabby uniforms and dented képis were strolling. "Did they come out of a second-hand clothes shop?"
"They don't walk; they shamble," the young man replied, roused to look at them with a critical eye, and thinking of the smart, well-set-up fellows under his own command with a home-sick pang.