ut 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?"

"I'm much happier as I am, sir," replied Doggie, and that was the end
of the matter.

But Phineas, when he heard of it--it was on the East Coast--began: "If
you still consider yourself too fine to clean another man's boots----"

Doggie, in one of his quick fits of anger, interrupted: "If you think
I'm just a dirty little snob, if you don't understand why I begged to
be let off, you're the thickest-headed fool in creation!"

"I'm nae that, laddie," replied Phineas, with his usual ironic
submissiveness. "Haven't I kept your secret all this time?"

Thus it was Doggie's fixed idea to lose himself in the locust swarm,
to be prominent neither for good nor evil, even in the little clot of
fifty, outwardly, almost identical locusts that formed his platoon. It
braced him to the performance of hideous tasks; it restrained him from
display of superior intellectual power or artistic capability. The
world upheaval had thrown him from his peacock and ivory room, with
its finest collection on earth of little china