…last half -hour. I came here to be alone — utterly alone — save for him!” and here she gave a kind of convulsive sob and stretched her hands appealingly before her. The woman interested me, and I felt that there was much in her that would furnish me with copy — copy for some article on real humanity, on the flotsam and jetsam of womanhood.And so, instead of obeying her injunctions to go, I stayed.Tell me,” I said persuasively, your history. You can confide in me; I am old — old enough to be your ” — then I thought of my bare thirty-seven summers, and blushed — ” well, old enough to be your uncle. May I sit down? “The seats,” she murmured, are free to all. I can go!”She rose, and I touched her gently on the arm. Come! I said, “You can trust me. I’m only…

…till the whiskey flowed. And all the while the alcohol poured from me, and I saw them gulp it down, my thirst and craving for it grew, and I besought and implored them to spare me a drop — just one drop, one tiny drop. But they shook their heads, and murmured. ‘Serve you right! Ask Paul, and see what he says.’ And none of them pitied me, till my youngest niece, Dorothy, whom I had many a time in her childhood half scared to death by my tipsy antics, and who had lately joined the Salvation Army, came into the room, and, on seeing my mother-in-law slyly give my sore and bleeding nose a vicious twist, at once ran up to her and pulled her away, crying out, ‘ For shame! Poor uncle! See how you have hurt him!’ And as she fetched some cold spring water, and bathed…