Whitechapel Barfula

A gentleman does not lose his supper in the street. A gentleman withdraws. But the district was what it was in those years and every soul in it was pickled — gin at breakfast, gin at noon, gin instead of the water, which was frankly the wiser choice — and somewhere around the third he came up like a burst main. The linen is finished. The linen was Jermyn Street. He stands there steaming in the fog with his whole evening down his front, and he is not thinking about how he came to be this way at all. He is thinking about the laundress, and what on earth he tells her this time.