He disengaged, he would be damned if he didn't--they were both phrases he repeatedly used--his responsibility.

The simplest, the sanest, the most obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant language.

His wife had once told him, in relation to his violence of speech; that such excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little fortresses of wood and little armies of tin.

Her husband's exaggerated emphasis was his box of toy soldiers, his military game.

It harmlessly gratified in him, for his declining years, the military instinct; bad words, when sufficiently numerous and arrayed in their might, could represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry.