“But anyhow that was in—” “Where the first volunteer, I mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he’d been drinking that he was doing something heroic—what are you laughing at, Hugh?” “It’s funny.” “And the second was a man who had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third—” Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly lowered his voice, “an artillery man, was the only one who struck him at first favourably. Yet what did he turn out to be? A cadet who’d failed in his examinations. All of them, you see,
