"Look at this ... to-night ... this infernal trick of Fox's.... And I
helped too.... Why?... I must eat." He paused "... and drink," he
added. "But there is starvation for no end of fools in this little
move. A few will be losing their good names too.... I don't care, I'm
off.... By-the-bye: What is he doing it for? Money? Funk?--You ought to
know. You must be in it too. It's not hunger with you. Wonderful what
people will do to keep their pet vice going.... Eh?" He swayed a little.
"You don't drink--what's your pet vice?"

He looked at me very defiantly, clutching the neck of the empty bottle.
His drunken and overbearing glare seemed to force upon me a complicity
in his squalid bargain with life, rewarded by a squalid freedom. He was
pitiful and odious to my eyes; and somehow in a moment he appeared
menacing.

"You can't frighten me," I said, in response to the strange fear he had
inspired. "No one can frighten me now." A sense of my inaccessibility
was the first taste of an achieved triumph. I had done with fear. The
poor devil before me appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but he was
only one of the lost; one of those that I could see already overwhelmed
by the rush from the flood-gates opened at my touch. He would be
destroyed in good company; swept out of my sight together with the past
they had known and with the future they had waited for. But he was
odious. "I am done with you," I said.

"Eh; what?... Who wants to frighten?... I wanted to know what's your pet
vice.... Won't tell? You might safely--I'm off.... No.... Want to tell
me mine?... No time.... I'm off.... Ask the policeman ... crossing
sweeper will do.... I'm going."