The last person who ever suspects that a wife drinks is always the
husband; the last person who ever suspects that any given man is bitten
with drink is that man himself. So stealthily, so softly does the evil
wind itself around a man's being, that he very often goes on fancying
himself a rather admirable and temperate customer--until the crash
comes. It is all so easy, that the deluded dupe never thinks that
anything is far wrong until he finds that his friends are somehow
beginning to fight shy of him. No one will tell him what ails him, and I
may say that such a course would be quite useless, for the person warned
would surely fly into a passion, declare himself insulted, and probably
perform some mad trick while his nerves were on edge. Well, there comes
a time when the doomed man is disinclined for exertion, and he knows
that something is wrong. He has become sly almost without knowing it,
and, although he is pining for some stimulus, he pretends to go without,
and tries by the flimsiest of devices, to deceive those around him. Now
that is a funny symptom; the master vice, the vice that is the pillar of
the revenue, always, without any exception known to me, turns a man into
a sneak, and it generally turns him into a liar as well. So sure as the
habit of concealment sets in, so surely we may be certain that the
dry-rot of the soul has begun. The drinker is tremulous; he finds that
light beverages are useless to him, and he tries something that burns:
his nerve recovers tone; he laughs at himself for his early morning
fears, and he gets over another day. But the dry-rot is spreading; body
and soul react on each other, and the forlorn one soon begins to be
fatally false and weak in morals, and dirty and slovenly in person. Then
in the dead, unhappy nights he suffers all the torments that can be
endured if he wakes up while his day's supply of alcohol lies stagnant
in his system. No imagination is so retrospective as the drunkard's, and
the drunkard's remorse is the most terrible torture known. The wind