the underlying economic reason for it. Home life he had never known. The
word "home" aroused nothing but unpleasant associations. In the low
wages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life, he found
sufficient reason for branding wife and children as encumbrances and
causes of masculine misery. An unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and
materialistic, he sought the greatest possible happiness for himself, and
found it in drink.

A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker's work;
the gutter or the workhouse; and the end--he saw it all as clearly as I,
but it held no terrors for him. From the moment of his birth, all the
forces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed his
wretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I could not
shake.

And yet he was not a bad man. He was not inherently vicious and brutal.
He had normal mentality, and a more than average physique. His eyes were
blue and round, shaded by long lashes, and wide apart. And there was a
laugh in them, and a fund of humour behind. The brow and general
features were good, the mouth and lips sweet, though already developing a
harsh twist. The chin was weak, but not too weak; I have seen men
sitting in the high places with weaker.

His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect neck
that I was not surprised by his body that night when he stripped for bed.
I have seen many men strip, in gymnasium and training quarters, men of
good blood and upbringing, but I have never seen one who stripped to
better advantage than this young sot of two-and-twenty, this young god
doomed to rack and ruin in four or five short years, and to pass hence
without posterity to receive the splendid heritage it was his to