It is true he smiled absently now and then when the others laughed, but that was only for manners.

Doubtless he was seeing somewhere the saddest of all visions--the things that might have been.

The wretched craving of the lower organs stilled, and something spared for his brain, I believe the chief joy his drink gave him lay in the power once more to feel himself a gentleman.

The washed hands, the shaven face, the clean shirt, had something to do with it, no doubt, but the necromantic whisky had far more.
What faded ghosts of ancestral dignity and worth and story the evil potion called up in the mind of Sir George!--who himself hung ready to fall, the last, or all but the last, mildewed fruit of the tree of Galbraith! Ah! if this one and that of his ancestors had but lived to his conscience, and with some thought of those that were to come after him, he would not have transmitted to poor Sir George, in horrible addition to moral weakness, that physical proclivity which had now grown to such a hideous craving.

To the miserable wretch himself it seemed that he could no more keep from drinking whisky than he could from breathing air..