As the group thinned out on such occasions Judge Smith would rise and in the manner of a man returning to the higher and more important duties of life bid his fellows good-night.
"A very pleasant evening, gentlemen," he would pronounce, "but duty calls."
He would bow stiffly. Long drinking had made him master to an astonishing point of his physical being while under the influence of drink. Bowing, he would walk with dignity from the room, emerge into the street and enter one of the cabs.
A half-hour later would find him disporting himself in one of his favorite disorderly houses. Here with the aid of further drink the judge became a curious spectacle. He was generally hailed in the places that knew him as "the wild old boy". And his arrival although greeted with enthusiasm was a matter of secret chagrin to the landladies of his acquaintance.
It was his habit to indulge in filthy insults, hurling astounding obscenities at the half-drunken inmates. He would frequently become violent and throw bottles around, break mirrors and electric bulbs and smash chairs. It was difficult to grow angry with him at such times because he covered his violences and insults with a continuous roar of laughter as if they were actually the product of a vast Rabelaisian good humor.
His insults, the obscene invective he hurled at the partners in his orgy, were a curious phase. They were the product of a process of projection. His normal mind, still alive under the paralysis of alcohol, pronounced these outraged denunciations of his behavior against himself. His virtue and decency cried a savage disgust and he must rid himself of these cries, find an outlet for his self-revulsions, if he desired to continue the debauch which was also an outlet for things inside him—things that slept too violently under the repressions of his shell.
Thus he rationalized his two selves by giving voice to the terrific protests of his virtue. Simultaneously he hid himself from their object by fastening the insults that poured into his thought upon those around him. The women explained among each other in their own words that he was a filthy old man and ought to be ashamed of himself.
5
It was afternoon. Mrs. Basine listened to Judge Smith explaining the new moving pictures that were being shown at the vaudeville theaters.