e well, and was a
'gentleman,' I cultivated him. One night he asked me to meet a
girl he had an appointment with and tell her he was not well
enough to meet her. He foolishly told me the purpose of their
intended meeting. I went to the trysting-place, at the back of
the hotel, and met the girl. On delivering my message she smiled,
made some joke about her friend, and looked at me as much as to
say: 'You will do as well.' I had been drinking, and in the most
brutal manner I took her into a closet. By some strange chance or
state of nerves she gave me exquisite pleasure, but the orgasm
came with me before it did with her, and in spite of her
disappointment and protests I stood up and pulled her out of the
place for fear some one should find us there. Still protesting
she followed me, but her foot slipped on the paved court, and she
fell down on her face. When she rose I saw that her front teeth
were broken. I looked at her without pity, with impatience, and
abruptly leaving her I went into the hotel to 'the colonel.' I
commenced to tell him lies, when he asked me with a weak laugh
what had been keeping me. I smiled with low cunning and drunken
vanity, evading the question. Then he accused me directly. I only
laughed; but, drunk as I was, I remember the look of the ageing
bachelor as he saw he had been betrayed by a younger man. He had
known her for years....

"I was now living in the home of a woman who was separated from
her husband and kept lodgers. She had a daughter, with whom I
walked out, a pretty girl who drank like a fish, as her mother
also did. There were other lodgers coming and going. I would lie
down all day and keep myself saturated with beer. I commenced to
get fat and bloated, with the ways of a brothel bully. A
broken-down, drunken old woman who visited the house and had been
a beautiful lady in her youth told me I should end my days on the
gallows trap. The same woman when drunk would lift up her dress,
sardonically, exposing herself. Other old women would congregate
in the neglected and dirty bedrooms and tell fortunes with the
cards. One little woman, an onanist, was like a character out of
Dickens, exaggerated, affected, unnatural, with remains of
gentility and society manners. Amidst all this drunkenness and
abandonment May, the landlady's daughter, pres