So sure as the
habit of concealment sets in, so surely we may be certain that the
dry-rot of the soul has begun. The drinker is tremulous; he finds that
light beverages are useless to him, and he tries something that burns:
his nerve recovers tone; he laughs at himself for his early morning
fears, and he gets over another day. But the dry-rot is spreading; body
and soul react on each other, and the forlorn one soon begins to be
fatally false and weak in morals, and dirty and slovenly in person. Then
in the dead, unhappy nights he suffers all the torments that can be
endured if he wakes up while his day's supply of alcohol lies stagnant
in his system. No imagination is so retrospective as the drunkard's, and
the drunkard's remorse is the most terrible torture known. The wind
cries in the dark and the trees moan; the agonized man who lies waiting
the morning thinks of the times when the whistle of the wind was the
gladdest of sounds to him; his old ambitions wake from their trance and
come to gaze on him reproachfully; he sees that fortune (and mayhap
fame) have passed him by, and all through his own fault; he may whine
about imaginary wrongs during the day when he is maudlin, but the night
fairly throttles him if he attempts to turn away from the stark truth,
and he remains pinned face to face with his beautiful, dead self.
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