"A girl! He says there's a girl who loves—who loves him," spluttered the soldier.
The dwarf looked from one to the other, an expression of blank dismay on his face.
"He laughs because a man courts a girl," Jean said to the other men. "Where is the humor in it? What goes he after when he goes courting? A talking parrot in a cage or a cat mow-wowing on a wall?"
"How long have you called yourself a man?" asked one of the soldiers, laughing.
"About as many years as you have. I warrant there were not many months between the time that you and I began to run alone," answered the dwarf; and then as though a reason for their mirth had only just occurred to him, Jean looked down at his deformed limbs. "Ah, now I see! That's the humor of it!" And he began to laugh uproariously too.
"You'd forgotten what you were like, eh, Jean?" they said in chorus.
The question only made the dwarf laugh the more, and his companions were astonished into seriousness.
"To think—to think that you are such fools!" Jean cried. "Do you suppose all girls love such men as you? Why, set you in a row, marching in step round the court-yard, and there aren't a dozen women in Vayenne who could pick out their own man. You're all alike, comrades, there are girls, mark you, who favor men more distinguished, men there is no mistake about, and care not a jot for just a sample of the ordinary kind, which look as though they had been turned out of the same mould by the dozen. My girl's of that sort."
"Pretty, Jean?" asked one.