are asked, and no particular
etiquette is observed....

So I set these things down as though looking back across the years
upon the affairs of some unfortunate stranger on the world's far side.
But, Heaven knows, this is not because I have forgotten, or shall ever
forget, any of the squalid misery, the crushing, all-befouling
humiliation and wretchedness of those years. Just as one part of the
period burnt its mark into me for ever by means of its effects upon my
bodily health, just as surely as it burned its way through my poor
wife's constitution; so indelibly did every phase of it imprint itself
upon my brain, and permanently colour my outlook upon life.

Men, and even women, who have never come into personal contact with
the pestilence that infected my married life, are able to speak
lightly enough of it.

'Bit too fond of his glass, I'm told!'

'His wife is a bit peculiar, you know. Yes, he has to keep the
decanters under lock and key, I believe.'

Remarks of that sort, often semi-jocular, are common enough. The
pastry-cooks and the grocers know a lot about the feminine side of
this tragedy, at which so many folk smile. But those who, from
personal experience, know the thing, would more likely smile in the
face of Death himself, or joke about leprosy and famine.

I had seen something of the working of the curse among London's very
poor people. Now, I learned much more than I had ever known. At first
I thought it terrible when, once in a month or so, Fanny became
helpless and incapable from drinking gin. I came eventually to know
what it meant to see ground for thankfulness, if not for hope, in a
period of forty-eight consecutive hours of sobriety for my wife.

The practical difficulties in these cases are very great for people as
comparatively poor as we were. They are intolerably acute in the
households of workmen earning from one to two pounds a week. In such
families the presence of children--and there generally are children--is
an added horror, which sometimes leads to the most gruesome kind of
murder; murder for which some poor, unhinged, broken-hearted devil of
a man is hanged, and so at last flung out of his misery.

I never gave Fanny any money now if I could possibly avoid it.
Accordingly, I discovered one day, when I had occasion to look for my
dress clothes, that, having sold practically every garment of her own,
my wife had cleared out the major portion of my small wardrobe.

But a far worse