Page:Mary Rinehart - More Tish .djvu/179

 Rh   later, he might have been speaking to the butler.

"He might at least have said 'Mister,' and a 'please' hurts no one," she said. As for giving him only an hour when we had come a hundred miles—it was absurd. But war does queer things.

It had indeed strangely altered Tish's nephew. We were all worried about him that day. It was his manner that was odd. He seemed, as Tish said later, suppressed. When for instance we wished to take him back to headquarters and present him to the colonel he said at once: "Who? Me? The colonel! Say, you'd better get this and get it right: I'm nothing here. I'm less than nothing. Why, the colonel could walk right over me on the parade ground and never even know he'd stepped on anything. If I was a louse and he was a can of insect powder"

"Now see here, Charlie Sands," Tish said firmly, "I'll trouble you to remember that there are certain words not in my vocabulary; and louse is one of them."

"Still, a vocabulary is a better place than some others I can think of," he observed.

"What is more," Tish added, "you are misjudging that charming colonel. He told us himself that he tried to be a mother to you all."

She then told him how interested the colonel