of meannesss if it had not been for the fact that with wonderful
disinterestedness and all a comrade's readiness, his purse would be
opened for some harebrained boy who had ruined himself at cards or by
some other folly. He did a service of this kind with such thoughtful
tact, that it seemed as though he himself had at one time lost heavy
sums at play; he never considered that he had any right to control the
actions of his debtor; he never made mention of the loan. He was the
child of his company; he was alone in the world, so he had adopted the
army for his fatherland, and the regiment for his family. Very rarely,
therefore, did any one seek the motives underlying his praiseworthy
turn for thrift; for it pleased others, for the most part, to set it
down to a not unnatural wish to increase the amount of the savings
that were to render his old age comfortable. Till the eve of his
promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel of cavalry it was fair to
suppose that it was his ambition to retire in the course of some
campaign with a colonel's epaulettes and pension.

If Genestas' name came up when the officers gossiped after drill, they
were wont to classify him among the men who begin with taking the
good-conduct prize at school, and who, throughout the term of their
natural lives, continue to be punctilious, conscientious, and
passionless--as good as white bread, and just as insipid. Thoughtful
minds, however, regarded him very differently. Not seldom it would
happen that a glance, or an expression as full of significance as the
utterance of a savage, would drop from him and bear witness to past
storms in his soul; and a careful study of his placid brow revealed a
power of stifling down and repressing his passions into inner depths,
that had been dearly bought by a lengthy acquaintance with the perils
and disastrous hazards of war. An officer who had only just joined the
regiment, the son of a peer of France, had said one day of Genestas,