"I have heard wild tales about you, Johnnie. I don't usually listen to gossip, but these tales are so recurrent and persistent ... about your going about with the degraded people who live in the Bottoms, that I considered I ought to see you about it."
I confessed that, though I did not drink their bootleg booze, I did have a wide acquaintanceship with the folk of the Bottoms, and that I knew all the rowdies among the farmers ... that I passed a lot of time about the livery stables talking with them. That I often rode out to their farms in the hills and spent Saturdays and Sundays there. I avowed that there people were more interesting to me than the carefully tailored professors and students.
My schoolmates had met me on the streets in company with these wild-looking yokels, sometimes taking them to their waggons when they were too drunk to pilot themselves effectively. And they had applied to me the proverb of "birds of a feather."
Before I left, Langworth drew from me the admission that I was away behind in my board bill at the Farmers' Restaurant. My hopes of making immediate money as a writer of poems for the magazines had so far been barren of fruit.
"Sh! sit down a minute and wait." His wife was coming downstairs, querulously, waveringly; her eyes red from weeping.
"Laddie has just died."
"The shepherd dog?" I enquired; for she had spoken as of a human demise.
"Yes, the dog ... but he was human, if anyone was." There was an acidulous resentment in the tone of her answer that indicated that she wanted her husband to send me away.
"She wants you to go," whispered Langworth, humouring his wife like a sick child. He escorted me into the storm porch. "You have no idea," he apologised defensively, "how human a dog can be, or how fond of one you can become...."