There was something peculiarly horrifying to him in the exhibition Randolph was making of himself.  He’d never in his life taken a drink, except convivially, and then he took as little as would pass muster.  He’d always found it hard to be sensibly tolerant of the things men said and did in liquor, even when their condition had overtaken them unawares.  Going off alone and deliberately fuddling one’s self as a means of escaping unpleasant realities, struck him as an act of the basest cowardice.  Whether Randolph’s revelation of himself were true or distorted by alcohol, didn’t seem much to matter.  But for that picture of Rose, he’d have gone long ago and left the man to his bemused reflections.  Only ...

He’d said that Rose understood everything and didn’t despise him.  A drunken fancy likely enough.  She had seen something though.  Her letter proved that.  And having seen it, she’d asked him to drop in on the doctor for a visit.  Did she mean she wanted him to try to help?

He tried, though not very successfully, to conceal his violent disrelish of the task, when he said: 

“Look here, Jim!  What the devil is the matter with you?  Are you sober enough to tell me?”

Randolph put down his glass.  “I have told you,” he said.  “It’s a thing that can be told in one word.  I’m a prostitute.  I’m Eleanor’s kept man.  Well kept, oh, yes.  Beautifully kept.  I’m nothing in God’s world but a possession of hers!  A trophy of sorts, an ornament.  I’m something she’s made.  I have a hell of a big practise.  I’m the most fashionable doctor in Chicago.  They come here, the women, damn them, in shoals.  That’s Eleanor’s doing.  I’m a faker, a fraud, a damned actor.  I pose for them.  I play up.  I give them what they want.  And that’s her doing.  They go silly about me; fancy they’re in love with me.  That’s what she wants them to do.  It increases my value for her as a possession.

“I haven’t done a lick of honest work in the last year.  I can’t work.  She won’t let me work.  She—­smothers me.  Wherever I turn, there she is, smoothing things out, trying to making it easy, trying to anticipate my wants.  I’ve only one want.  That’s to be let alone.  She can’t do that.  She’s insatiable.  She can’t help it.  There’s something drives her on so that she never can feel sure that she possesses me completely enough.  There’s always something more she’s trying to get, and I’m always trying to keep something away from her, and failing.

“And why?  Do you want to know why, Aldrich?  That’s the cream of the thing.  Because we’re so damnably in love with each other.  She wants me to live on her love.  To have nothing else to live on.  Do you know why she won’t have any children?  Because she’s jealous of them.  Afraid they’d get between us.  She tries to make me jealous with that poodle of hers—­and she succeeds.  With that!  I’d like to wring his neck.