On his third glass of Bourbon Herf began to talk. Congo sat listening with his heavy lips a little open, occasionally nodding his head. ‘The difference between you and me is that you’re going up in the social scale, Armand, and I’m going down … When you were a messboy on a steamboat I was a horrid little chalkyfaced kid living at the Ritz. My mother and father did all this Vermont blackwalnut grand Babylonian stuff … there’s nothing more for me to do about it … Women are like rats, you know, they leave a sinking ship. She’s going to marry this man Baldwin who’s just been appointed District Attorney. They’re said to be grooming him for mayor on a fusion reform ticket … The delusion of power, that’s what’s biting him. Women fall for it like hell. If I thought it’d be any good to me I swear I’ve got the energy to sit up and make a million dollars. But I get no organic sensation out of that stuff any more. I’ve got to have something new, different … Your sons’ll be like that Congo … If I’d had a decent education and started soon enough I might have been a great scientist. If I’d been a little more highly sexed I might have been an artist or gone in for religion … But here I am by Jesus Christ almost thirty years old and very anxious to live … If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I’d have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven’t even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.’