“And I’ve took an awful fancy to you, Slim. Seems as if you was my whole family. But—but you’re not, sonny. I’ve—I’ve got a family. They’re dead to me and I’m dead to them; but they’re my family. Did ye know that, Slim?” “I didn’t know it, and you needn’t tell me.” “But if I was awful bad, sonny? If I was wuss than anythink that’d ever come into your ’ead?” “We won’t talk about that. Perhaps there are things that I could tell you which would show that there’s not much difference between us.” “I ’ope there is, Slim. And she was terr’ble aggravatin’; a drinkin’ woman, besides. I didn’t drink then—’ardly not at all. It was after I was acquitted I begun that. And my two gells—well, bein’ acquitted didn’t make no difference to them; they’d seen. Only, they didn’t swear that way in their hevidence. They swore she fell down the stairs she was found at the bottom of, her neck broken; and, bein’ a drinkin’ woman, the jury thought—But the two gells knew. And when I was let off they didn’t ’ave no more to do with me—so I come over ’ere—” I rose and went to him, laying my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t, Lovey. That’s enough. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done, we’ll stick it out together. The only thing is that we’ll have to give up the booze.” “For good and all, Slim?” “Yes; for good and all.” “It’ll be awful ’ard.” “Yes, it will be; but the worst of that is over.” He seized one of my hands in both of his. “Slim, if it’s got to be a ch’ice between you and liquor—well, I’m danged if—if I won’t”—he made a great resolution—“give up the liquor—and so ’elp me!” So when I moved Lovey moved with me. Washing windows having become a lucrative profession, he insisted on taking no wages from me and on paying for his own food. In the matter of names we agreed on a compromise. “Before company,” as he expressed it, I was Mr. Melbury and sir; when we were alone together we reverted to the habits of Greeley’s Slip and the Down and Out, and I became Slim and sonny. I was truly sorry to leave the club, for its simple, brotherly ways, wholesome and masculine, if never the most refined, had become curiously a part of me. I had liked the fellowship with rough men who were perhaps all the more human for being rough. For the first time in my life I had known something of genuine fraternity. I do not affirm that we lived together without disagreements or misunderstandings or that there were no minutes electric with the tension that makes for an all-round fight. But there was always some “wise guy,” as we called him, to make peace among us; and on the whole we lived together with a mutual courtesy that proved to me once for all that it is nothing external which makes a gentleman. Finer gentlemen in the essentials of the word I never met than some of those who were just struggling up from the seemingly bottomless pit.