to custom.

His uniforms lasted longer than those of any other officer in his
regiment, as a consequence of the sedulously careful habits that
somewhat straitened means had so instilled into him, that they had come
to be like a second nature. Perhaps he might have been suspected
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,
that he would have made one of the most conscientious of priests, or the
most upright of tradesmen.

"Add, the least of a courtier among marquises," put in Genestas,
scanning the young puppy, who did not know th