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THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY.
Since the day Charley had brought home the paper bought at the post-office, and water-marked Kathleen, he had, at odd times, written down his thoughts, and promptly torn the paper up again or put it in the fire.

In the repression of the new life, in which he must live wholly alone, so far as all past habits of mind were concerned, it was a relief to record his passing reflections, as he had been wont to do when the necessity for it was less.

Writing them here was like the bursting of an imprisoned stream; it was relaxing the ceaseless eye of vigilance; freeing an imprisoned personality.

This personality was not yet merged into that which must take its place, must express itself in the involuntary acts which tell of a habit of mind and body--no longer the imitative and the histrionic, but the inherent and the real.
On the afternoon of the day that old Louis agreed to give him wages, and went to smoke a pipe with the Notary, Charley scribbled down his thoughts on this matter of personality and habit.
"Who knows," he wrote, "which is the real self?
A child comes into the world gin-begotten, with the instinct for liquor in his brain, like the scent of the fox in the nostrils of the hound.