Page 370 - tender-is-the-night

‘I must ask you to leave.’
‘You ASK me! We ARE leaving!’
‘If you could be a little temperate we could tell you the
results of the treatment to date. Naturally, since you feel as
you do, we would not want your son as a patient—‘
‘You dare to use the word temperate to me?’
Dick called to Doctor Ladislau and as he approached,
said: ‘Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient
and to his family?’
He bowed slightly to Morris and went into his office, and
stood rigid for a moment just inside the door. He watched
until they drove away, the gross parents, the bland, degen-
erate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing
around Europe, bullying their betters with hard ignorance
and hard money. But what absorbed Dick after the disap-
pearance of the caravan was the question as to what extent
he had provoked this. He drank claret with each meal, took
a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes
he tippled with gin in the afternoons—gin was the most dif-
ficult to detect on the breath. He was averaging a halfpint of
alcohol a day, too much for his system to burn up.
Dismissing a tendency to justify himself, he sat down
at his desk and wrote out, like a prescription, a régime
that would cut his liquor in half. Doctors, chauffeurs, and
Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could
painters, brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only
for indiscretion. But the matter was by no means clarified
half an hour later when Franz, revivified by an Alpine fort-
night, rolled up the drive, so eager to resume work that he

370 Tender is the Night