y but physically. Lucy Fulton simply had to go on living
among the people with whom she had been brought up, and in the manner
to which she was accustomed; and Fulton seeing her pine and grow
sorrowful in other conditions, and bored and fretful, gradually fell
into her ways and wishes, as a gentleman shouldn't (but does always),
and made his new friends among those who are born to be amused. Her
love and happiness were far more important to him than changed ways and
the injured feelings of old friends. Once he talked to me about this
(for we grew quite intimate). I remember he said:

"Somehow I don't seem to see my old friends any more or keep up with
them. If anything happened to Lucy, I'd be absolutely alone in the
world, except for the babies. A man does wrong to drift away from
those who he knows by a thousand proofs care for him, on any pretext or
for any cause."

And yet he had come to wear the hallmarks of the pack, and to talk the
language of the world that only asks to be happy and amused. He took
to games seriously and played them well, and you couldn't point to him
as one of those cautious persons who never by any chance drank even one
cocktail too many. Indeed, he often became hilarious and witty, and
added no end to the gayety of occasions, and was afterward privately
reproached by Lucy. Coming from another, the hilarity and wit would
have rejoiced her, but, coming from her nearest and dearest, her mind
narrowed, and the cold fear that women have of liquor possessed her.

To me it has always been comical, even when I didn't feel well myself,
to see the husbands come into the club after a big night; each wearing
upon his face, as plainly as if they had been physical scratches, the
marks of the wifely tears which he had been forced to witness, and of
the reproaches which he had been forced to hear, and yet each trying to
look as if he was the master of his own house and his own destiny. No
well-born woman, however cold and calculating, can silently put up with
her husband's drinking, yet how easily she overlooks it in any other
man! How many excuses she will find for him:

"Why, he's quite wonderful! Of course I knew at once that he was
tipsy, but he was perfectly sensible--perfectly."

If men didn't drink, women wouldn't have so many parties to go to or so
much money to spend. How many teetotalers let their wives spend them
into ruin and disgrace? It is the drinking American who indulges hi