in the world and earn their own living and be somebody.” (He was probably thinking of himself.) “But a gentleman wants to boast of his past and his family, to tell you that he must go to the city on business—­his lawyers or some directors want to see him.  Then he swills around at hotel bars, stays with some of his lady whores, and then comes back here and expects me to pull him into shape again, to make his nose a little less red.  He thinks he can use my place to fall back on when he can’t go any longer, to fix him up to do some more swilling later on.

“Well, I want to serve notice on all so-called gentlemen here, and one gentleman in particular” (and he heavily and sardonically emphasized the words), “that it won’t do.  This isn’t a hospital attached to a whorehouse or a saloon.  And as for the trashy little six hundred paid here, I don’t need it.  I’ve turned away more men who have been here once or twice and have shown me that they were just using this place and me as something to help them go on with their lousy drinking and carousing, than would fill this building.  Sensible men know it.  They don’t try to use me.  It’s only the wastrels, or their mothers or fathers who bring their boys and husbands and cry, who try to use me, and I take ’em once or twice, but not oftener.  When a man goes out of here cured, I know he is cured.  I never want to see him again.  I want him to go out in the world and stand up.  I don’t want him to come back here in six months sniveling to be put in shape again.  He disgusts me.  He makes me sick.  I feel like ordering him off the place, and I do, and that’s the end of him.  Let him go and bamboozle somebody else.  I’ve shown him all I know.  There’s no mystery.  He can do as much for himself, once he’s been here, as I can.  If he won’t, well and good.  And I’m saying one thing more:  There’s one man here to whom this particularly applies today.  This is his last call.  He’s been here twice.  When he goes out this time he can’t come back.  Now see if some of you can remember some of the things I’ve been telling you.”

He subsided and opened his little pint of wine.

Another day while I was there he began as follows: 

“If there’s one class of men that needs to be improved in this country, it’s lawyers.  I don’t know why it is, but there’s something in the very nature of the work of a lawyer which appears to make him cynical and to want to wear a know-it-all look.  Most lawyers are little more than sharper crooks than the crooks they have to deal with.  They’re always trying to get in on some case or other where they have to outwit the law, save some one from getting what he justly deserves, and then they are supposed to be honest and high-minded!  Think of it!  To judge by some of the specimens I get up here,” and then some lawyer in the place would turn a shrewd inquiring glance in his direction or steadfastly gaze at his plate or out the window, while the others stared at him, “you would think