It won't be easy; it will hurt;
but you can do it, as I say, even yet. But it is _you_ who must do it,
not I or that bit of paper or Mulqueen!

"Just now you happen to want to get well because the effect of alcohol
poison disturbs you. Things crawl, as you say, on the back of your hand.
Naturally, you don't care for such phenomena.

"Well, I've given you the key to mental and physical regeneration. Yours
is not an inherited appetite; yours is not one of those almost
foredoomed and pitiable cases. It's a stupid case; and a case of gross
self-indulgence in stupidity that began in idleness. And that, my son,
is the truth."

"Is that so?" sneered Quest, rising and pocketing the prescription.

"Yes, it is so. I've known your family for forty years, Stuyvesant. I
knew your parents; I exonerate them absolutely. Sheer laziness and
wilful depravity is what has brought you here to me on this errand. You
deliberately acquired a taste for intoxicants; you haven't one excuse,
one mitigating plea to offer for what you've done to yourself.

"You stood high in school and in college; you were Phi Beta Kappa, a
convincing debater, a plausible speaker, an excellent writer of good
English--by instinct a good newspaper man. Also you were a man adapted
by nature to live regularly and beyond the coarser temptations. But you
were lazy!"

Dr. Bailey struck his desk in emphasis.

"The germ of your self-indulgence lay in gross selfishness. You did what
pleased you; and it suited you to do nothing. I'm telling you how you've
betrayed yourself--how far you'll have to climb to win back. Some men
need a jab with a knife to start their pride; some require a friend's
strong helping arm around them. You need the jab. I'm trying to
administer it without anaesthetics, by telling you what some men think of
you--that it is your monstrous selfishness that has distorted your
normal common sense and landed you where you are.

"Selfishness alone has resulted in a most cruel and unnatural neglect of
your sister--your only living relative--in a deliberate relapse into
slothful and vicious habits; in neglect of a most promising career which
was already yours; in a contemptible willingness to live on your
sister's income after gambling away your own fortune.

"I know you; I carried you through teething and measles, my son: and
I've carried you through the horrors of alcoholic delirium. And I say to
you now that, with the mental degeneration already appare