A top sergeant was
evidently just what Madam had been looking for all her life--one trained
to receive orders and execute them. All went well until one day when Quin
refused to smuggle in some forbidden article of diet; then the
steam-roller of her wrath promptly passed over him also.
He waited respectfully until her breath and vocabulary were alike
exhausted, then said good-humoredly:
"I used to board with a woman up in Maine that had hysterics like that.
They always made her feel a lot better. Don't you want me to shift that
pulley a bit? You don't look comfortable."
Madam promptly ordered him out of the room. But next day she made an
excuse to send for him, and actually laughed when he stepped briskly up
to the bed, saluted smartly, and impudently asked her how her grouch was.
There was something in his very lack of reverence, in his impertinent
assumption of equality, in his refusal to pay her the condescending
homage due feebleness and old age, that seemed to flatter her.
"He's a mule," she told Randolph--"a mule with horse sense."
Quin's change from khaki to civilian clothes affected him in more ways
than one. Constitutionally he was opposed to saying "sir" to his fellow
men; to standing at attention until he was recognized; to acknowledging,
by word or gesture, that he was any one's inferior on this wide and
democratic planet.
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