Doggie grew very serious. “You’ve been killing men—like that?”
“Thousands, laddie,” replied Phineas, the picture of unboastful veracity. “And so has Mo.”
Mo Shendish, helmeted, browned, dried, toughened, a very different Mo from the pallid ferret whom Aggie had driven into the ranks of war, hunched himself up, his hands clasping his knees.
“I don’t mind doing it, when you’re so excited you don’t know where you are,” said he, “but I don’t like thinking of it afterwards.”
As a matter of fact, he had only once got home with the bayonet and the memory was unpleasant.
“But you’ve just thought of it,” said Phineas.
“It was you, not me,” said Mo. “That makes all the difference.”
“It’s astonishing,” Phineas remarked sententiously, “how many people not only refuse to catch pleasure as it flies, but spurn it when it sits up and begs at them. Laddie,” he turned to Doggie, “the more one wallows in hedonism, the more one realizes its unplumbed depths.”
A little girl of ten, neatly pigtailed but piteously shod, came near and cast a child’s envious eye on Doggie’s bread and jam.
“Approach, my little one,” Phineas cried in French words but with the accent of Sauchiehall Street. “If I gave you a franc, what would you do with it?”