towards Suzon and drank the brandy.

"Pish!" said Red Shirt, and, turning round, joined his comrades. It was
clear he wanted a pretext to quarrel.

"Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of
you when you were made--" Charley smiled pleasantly as Suzon came over to
him again. "You've answered the question," he said, "and struck the
thing at the centre. Which is it? The difficulty to decide which has
divided the world. If it's only a physical craving, it means that we are
materialists naturally, and that the soil from which the grape came is
the soil that's in us; that it is the body feeding on itself all the
time; that like returns to like, and we live a little together, and then
mould together for ever and ever, amen. If it isn't a natural craving--
like to like--it's a proof of immortality, for it represents the wild
wish to forget the world, to be in another medium.

"I am only myself when I am drunk. Liquor makes me human. At other times
I'm merely Charley Steele! Now isn't it funny, this sort of talk here?"

"I don't know about that," she answered, "if, as you say, it's natural.
This tavern's the only place I have to think in, and what seems to you
funny is a sort of ordinary fact to me."

"Right again, ma belle Suzon. Nothing's incongruous. I've never felt so
much like singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs as when I've been
drinking. I remember the last time I was squiffy I sang all the way home
that old nursery hymn:

"'On the other side of Jordan,