Finally Preston ended his husky monotone in a querulous entreaty. "I need a little whiskey to keep me going. Tell _her_, won't you?--to let me have a little drink. My regular allowance was a pint a day, and I haven't had a drop for four weeks. Your Chicago whiskey is rotten bad, though, I tell you. I just stepped into a place to get a drink with Joe Campbell--his father owns a big pulp mill in Michigan--well--we had one or two drinks, and the first thing I knew there was shooting all over the place, and some one grabbed me, and I was thrown into the street--" Mrs. Preston exclaimed, "Do you want to hear _more_?" Sommers rose. "I'll come again to see you, Mr. Preston, and I will leave something that will help you. Good night." "It was good of you to take this interest, doctor. I am glad to have met you, Doctor--?" "Sommers," suggested the doctor, smiling at the evidences of forgotten breeding that cropped out of the general decay. "Well, Dr. Sommers, I hope we shall meet again when I am more myself." When they returned to the room below, Mrs. Preston lit a lamp. After some minutes Sommers asked, "How long has this been going on?" "For years--before he left college; he was taken out of Yale because of it. All I know is what he tells when he is not--responsible." "Ah!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily. "_I_ never knew," Mrs. Preston added quickly, "until we had been married a year. He was away so much of the time, and he was very different then--I mean he didn't ramble on as he does now. He was not flabby and childish, not before the operation." The doctor turned his face away. "About two years ago some of the men he was with brought him home, drunk. Afterward he didn't seem to care. But he was away most of the time, travelling, going from place to place, always living in hotels, always drinking until some illness brought him back." "And this time?" the doctor asked. Mrs. Preston shut her lips, as if there were things she could not say yet. "I was not living with him." In a few moments, she continued quietly: "I suppose I should have been but for one thing. He told me he was going to New York, and I found him with another woman, living in a hotel not a mile from our home. I don't know why I should have made so much of that. I had suspected for months that there were other women; but seeing it, knowing that he knew I had seen it! I nearly starved before I got work." Confession, the details, the whole story, appealed to her evidently as obvious, typical, useless. She tried to select simple words, to leave the facts undimmed by passionate speech.