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, preserved her virginity.  Young lodgers would take liberties with her, but at a certain stage would receive a stinger on the face.  The girl liked me and would kiss me, but nothing else.  And then—­out of this home of drunkenness and shame—­May fell in love with some pretty boy she met by chance, whom she never asked to her home.  She began to neglect me, even to neglect drink, and to dream, preoccupied.  I felt a restless jealousy, but she would look at me, without resentment, without recognition, without seeing me, look me straight in the eyes as I was talking to her, and dream and dream.  This same pretty boy seduced her, I believe.  When next I met her she was ‘on the town,’ her one dream of spring over....

“About this time I had one of those salutary turns that have marked epochs in my life, and as a result I left that house and resolutely abstained from drink....  I was now in a small up-country town.  I commenced to play croquet and to ride out.  Sometimes I was invited to dinner by a young man at the bank, whose house was kept by his sister.  She had a small figure, a pretty but rather narrow face, and well-bred