The young man glowered sulkily at the prescription.

“Do I understand that this will stop the jumps?”

“If you really believe that, you have never heard me say so,” snapped Dr. Bailey.

“Well, what the devil will it do?”

“The directions are there.  You have my memorandum of the regime you are to follow.  It will quiet you till you get to Mulqueen’s.  Those two bits of paper, however, are useless unless you help yourself.  If you want to become convalescent you can—­even yet.  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 apparent, and your naturally quick temper, if you break down a few more cells in that martyred brain of yours, you’ll end in an asylum—­possibly one reserved for the criminal insane.”