He looked at me sideways and shook in the air his grimy wrist and the brass identity disk that hung from it--a disk as big as a forest ranger's, perhaps a trophy of bygone days.

Hatred of the rich and titled appeared again upon his hairy, sly face.

"Those blasted nationalists," he growled; "they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks' heads, and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and their military tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when their war does come they say '_Go_ and fight.'" "There are some of them who have died in the first line.

Those have done more than their duty." With the revolutionary's unfairness, the little man would not admit it.
"No--they have only done their duty,--no more." I was going to urge Monsieur Joseph's weak constitution but in presence of that puny man with his thin, furry face, who might have stayed at home, I forebore.

But I decided to avoid, in his company, those subjects in which I felt he was full of sour hostility and always ready to bite.
Continually we saw Marcassin's eye fixed on us, though aloof.