l young glances, and hid himself up-stairs. He found when he came
into the warm house that he was hazier than he had believed. His head
whirled. He dared not lie down. He tried to soak out the alcohol in a
hot bath. For the moment his head was clearer but when he moved about
the bathroom his calculations of distance were wrong, so that he dragged
down the towels, and knocked over the soap-dish with a clatter which, he
feared, would betray him to the children. Chilly in his dressing-gown he
tried to read the evening paper. He could follow every word; he seemed
to take in the sense of things; but a minute afterward he could not have
told what he had been reading. When he went to bed his brain flew in
circles, and he hastily sat up, struggling for self-control. At last
he was able to lie still, feeling only a little sick and dizzy--and
enormously ashamed. To hide his "condition" from his own children!
To have danced and shouted with people whom he despised! To have
said foolish things, sung idiotic songs, tried to kiss silly girls!
Incredulously he remembered that he had by his roaring familiarity with
them laid himself open to the patronizing of youths whom he would have
kicked out of his office; that by dancing too ardently he had exposed
himself to rebukes from the rattiest of withering women. As it came
relentlessly back to him he snarled, "I hate myself! God how I hate
myself!" But, he raged, "I'm through! No more! Had enough, plenty!"

He was even surer about it the morning after, when he was trying to be
grave and paternal with his daughters at breakfast. At noontime he was
less sure. He did not deny that he had been a fool; he saw it almost
as clearly as at midnight; but anything, he struggled, was better than
going back to a life of barren heartiness. At four he wanted a drink. He
kept a whisky flask in his desk now, and after two minutes of battle he
had his drink. Three drinks later he began to see the Bunch as tender
and amusing friends, and by six he was with them . . . and the tale was
to be told all over.

Each morning his head ached a little less. A bad head for drinks had
been his safeguard, but the safeguard was crumbling. Presently he
could be drunk at dawn, yet not feel particularly wretched in his
conscience--or in his stomach--when he awoke at eight. No regret, no
desire to escape the toil of keeping up with the arduous merriment of
the Bunch, was so great as his feeling of social inferiority when he