CHAPTER XXV THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED––––––––
IDIOSYNCRASY AND vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.
He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a superfluity. Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.
On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as one of the most fortunate of his order. For it may be argued with great
