They was something about him now that didn't fit in much with the Doctor Kirby I had knowed. It seemed like he had spells when he saw himself how he had changed. He wasn't gay and joking all the time like he had been before, neither. I guess the doctor was getting along toward fifty years old. I suppose he thought if he was ever going to get anything out of his gift of the gab he better settle down to something, and quit fooling around, and do it right away. But it looked to me like he might never turn the trick. Fur he was drinking right smart all the time. Drinking made him think a lot, and thinking was making him look old. He was more'n one year older than he had been a year ago.
He kept a quart bottle in his room now. The night after we had took Sam to see Doctor Jackson we was setting in his room, and he was hitting it purty hard.
"Danny," he says to me, after a while, like he was talking out loud to himself too, "what did you think of Doctor Jackson?"
"I don't like him much," I says.
"Nor I," he says, frowning, and takes a drink. Then he says, after quite a few minutes of frowning and thinking, under his breath like: "He's a blame sight more decent than I am, for all of that."
"Why?" I asts him.
"Because Doctor Jackson," he says, "hasn't the least idea that he ISN'T decent, and getting his money in a decent way. While at one time I was—"
He breaks off and don't say what he was. I asts him. "I was going to say a gentleman," he says, "but on reflection, I doubt if I was ever anything but a cheap imitation. I never heard a man say that he was a gentleman at one time, that I didn't doubt him. Also," he goes on, working himself into a better humour again with the sound of his own voice, "if I HAD ever been a gentleman at any time, enough of it would surely have stuck to me to keep me out of partnership with a man who cheats niggers."
He takes another drink and says even twenty years of running around the country couldn't of took all the gentleman out of him like this, if he had ever been one, fur you can break, you can scatter the vase if you will, but the smell of the roses will stick round it still.
I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himself when he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard. Only this time it happens to be out loud.