a case something like yours. You'll go
back where you belong. This is a dip, not a drop."

"You sound like a fortune-teller." She was smiling mockingly.
But in truth she had never in all her life heard words that
thrilled her so, that heartened her so.

"I am. A scientific fortune-teller. And what that kind says
comes true, barring accidents. As you're not ignorant and
careless this life of yours isn't physiologically bad. On the
contrary, you're out in the open air much of the time and get
the splendid exercise of walking--a much more healthful life,
in the essential ways, than respectable women lead. They're
always stuffing, and rumping it. They never move if they can
help. No, nothing can stop you but death--unless you're far less
intelligent than you look. Oh, yes--death and one other thing."

"Drink." And he looked shrewdly at her.

But drink she must. And each day, as soon as she dressed and
was out in the street, she began to drink, and kept it up until
she had driven off the depression and had got herself into the
mood of recklessness in which she found a certain sardonic
pleasure in outraging her own sensibilities. There is a stage
in a drinking career when the man or the woman becomes depraved
and ugly as soon as the liquor takes effect. But she was far
from this advanced stage. Her disposition was, if anything,
more sweet and generous when she was under the influence of
liquor. The whiskey--she almost always drank whiskey--seemed
to act directly and only upon the nerves that ached and
throbbed when she was sober, the nerves that made the life she
was leading seem loathsome beyond the power of habit to
accustom. With these nerves stupefied, her natural gayety
asserted itself, and a fondness for quiet and subtle
mockery--her indulgence in it did not make her popular with
vain men sufficiently acute to catch her meaning.

By observation and practice she was soon able to measure the
exact amount of liquor that was necessary to produce the proper
state of intoxication at the hour for going "on duty." That
gayety of hers was of the surface only. Behind it her real
self remained indifferent or somber or sardonic, according to
her mood of the day. And she had the sense of being in the
grasp of a hideous, fascinating nightmare, of being dragged
through some dreadful probation from which she would presently
emerge to ascend to the position she would have earned by her
desperate fortitude.