“Because Doctor Jackson,” he says, “hasn't the least idea that he _isn't_ decent, and getting his money in a decent way. While at one time I was--” He breaks off and don't say what he was. I asts him. “I was going to say a gentleman,” he says, “but on reflection, I doubt if I was ever anything but a cheap imitation. I never heard a man say that he was a gentleman at one time, that I didn't doubt him. Also,” he goes on, working himself into a better humour again with the sound of his own voice, “if I _had_ ever been a gentleman at any time, enough of it would surely have stuck to me to keep me out of partnership with a man who cheats niggers.” He takes another drink and says even twenty years of running around the country couldn't of took all the gentleman out of him like this, if he had ever been one, fur you can break, you can scatter the vase if you will, but the smell of the roses will stick round it still. I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himself when he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard. Only this time it happens to be out loud. “What is a gentleman?” I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it might take his mind off himself a little to tell me. “What _makes_ one?” “Authorities differ,” says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair, and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one. “I heard Doctor Jackson describe himself that way the other day.” Well, speaking personal, I never had smelled none of roses. I wasn't nothing but trash myself, so being a gentleman didn't bother me one way or the other. The only reason I didn't want to see them niggers bunked so very bad was only jest because it was such a low-down, ornery kind of trick. “It ain't too late,” I says, “to pull out of this nigger scheme yet and get into something more honest.” “I don't know,” he says thoughtful. “I think perhaps it _is_ too late.” And he sets there looking like a man that is going over a good many years of life in his mind. Purty soon he says: “As far as honesty goes--it isn't that so much, O Daniel-come-to-judgment! It's about as honest as most medicine games. It's--” He stopped and frowned agin. “What is it?” “It's their being _niggers_,” he says. That made the difference fur me, too. I dunno how, nor why. “I've tried nearly everything but blackmail,” he says, “and I'll probably be trying that by this time next year, if this scheme fails. But there's something about their being niggers that makes me sick of this thing already--just as the time has come to make the start. And I don't know _why_ it should, either.” He slipped another big slug of whiskey into him, and purty soon he asts me: “Do you know what's the matter with me?” I asts him what. “I'm too decent to be a crook,” he says, “and too crooked to be decent. You've got to be one thing or the other steady to make it pay.” Then he says: “Did you ever hear of the descent to Avernus, Danny?”