“I should buy nourishment (de la nourriture) for maman.”
“Lend me a franc, laddie,” said McPhail, and when Doggie had slipped the coin into his palm, he addressed the child in unintelligible grandiloquence and sent her on her way mystified but rejoicing. Ces bons drôles d’Anglais!
“Ah, laddie!” cried Phineas, stretching himself out comfortably by the jamb of the door, “you’ve got to learn to savour the exquisite pleasure of a genuinely kindly act.”
“Hold on!” cried Mo. “It was Doggie’s money you were flinging about.”
McPhail withered him with a glance.
“You’re an unphilosophical ignoramus,” said he.
CHAPTER XII
Perhaps one of the greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the means of revealing the disgrace which bit like an acid into his soul. His undisguisable air of superior breeding could not fail to attract notice. Often his officers asked him what he was in civil life. His reply, “A clerk, sir,” had to satisfy them. He had developed a curious self-protective faculty of shutting himself up like a hedgehog at the approach of danger. Once a breezy subaltern had selected him as his batman; but Doggie’s agonized, “It would be awfully good of you, sir, if you wouldn’t mind not thinking of it,” and the appeal in his eyes, established the freemasonry of caste and saved him from dreaded intimate relations.
“All right, if you’d rather not, Trevor,” said the subaltern. “But why doesn’t a chap like you try for a commission?”