“Madame,” said he to me, the first time I ventured to say that, “no man with genuine self-respect ever gets drunk twice; and, if you had the faintest idea of the misery which a little elegant intoxication has produced in scores of families that you know, you would never insinuate again that a little excitement from wine is an agreeable thing. There’s your friend Mrs. Croesus (he thinks she’s my friend, because we call each other ‘dear’!); she is delighted to be a fashionable woman, and to be described as the ‘peerless and accomplished Mrs. Croesus’ in letters from the Watering-places to the Herald; but I tell you, if anything of the woman or the mother is left in the fashionable Mrs. Croesus, I could wring her heart as it never was wrung--and never shall be by me--by showing her the places that young Timon Croesus haunts, the people with whom he associates and the drunkenness, gambling, and worse dissipations of which he is guilty. “Timon Croesus is eighteen or nineteen, or, perhaps, twenty years old; and Polly, I tell you, he is actually _blasé_, worn out with dissipation, the companion of blacklegs, the chevalier of Cyprians, tipsy every night, and haggard every morning. Timon Croesus is the puny caricature of a man, mentally, morally, and physically. He gets ‘elegantly intoxicated’ at your parties; he goes off to sup with Gauche Boosey; you and Mrs. Croesus think them young men of spirit,--it is an exhilarating case of sowing wildcats, you fancy,--and, when, at twenty-five, Timon Croesus stands ruined in the world, without aims or capacities, without the esteem of a single man or his own self-respect--youth, health, hope, and energy, all gone forever--then you and your dear Mrs. Croesus will probably wonder at the horrible harvest. Mrs. Potiphar, ask the Rev. Cream Cheese to omit his sermon upon the maidenhood of Lot’s wife, and preach from this text: ‘They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.’ Good heavens! Polly, fancy our Fred growing up to such a life! I’d rather bury him to-morrow!” I never saw Mr. P. so much excited. He fairly put his handkerchief to his eyes, and I really believe he cried! But I think he exaggerates these things: and as he had a very dear friend that went worse and worse, until he died frightfully, a drunkard, it is not strange he should speak so warmly about it. But as Mrs. Croesus says: “What can you do? You can’t curb these boys, you don’t want to break their spirits, you don’t want to make them milk-sops.” When I repeated this speech to Mr. P., he said to me with a kind of solemnity: “Tell Mrs. Croesus that I am not here to judge nor dictate: but she may be well assured, that every parent is responsible for every child of his to the utmost of the influence he can exert, whether he chooses to consider himself so or not; and if not now, in this world, yet somewhere and somehow, he must hear and heed the voice that called to Cain in the garden, ‘Where is Abel, thy brother?’”