She had a daughter, with whom I
walked out, a pretty girl who drank like a fish, as her mother
also did. There were other lodgers coming and going. I would lie
down all day and keep myself saturated with beer. I commenced to
get fat and bloated, with the ways of a brothel bully. A
broken-down, drunken old woman who visited the house and had been
a beautiful lady in her youth told me I should end my days on the
gallows trap. The same woman when drunk would lift up her dress,
sardonically, exposing herself. Other old women would congregate
in the neglected and dirty bedrooms and tell fortunes with the
cards. One little woman, an onanist, was like a character out of
Dickens, exaggerated, affected, unnatural, with remains of
gentility and society manners. Amidst all this drunkenness and
abandonment May, the landlady's daughter, preserved her
virginity. Young lodgers would take liberties with her, but at a
certain stage would receive a stinger on the face. The girl liked
me and would kiss me, but nothing else. And then--out of this
home of drunkenness and shame--May fell in love with some pretty
boy she met by chance, whom she never asked to her home.
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