"I was going to say a gentleman," he says, "but on reflection, I doubt if I was ever anything but a cheap imitation.

I never heard a man say that he was a gentleman at one time, that I didn't doubt him.

Also," he goes on, working himself into a better humour again with the sound of his own voice, "if I HAD ever been a gentleman at any time, enough of it would surely have stuck to me to keep me out of partnership with a man who cheats niggers." He takes another drink and says even twenty years of running around the country couldn't of took all the gentleman out of him like this, if he had ever been one, fur you can break, you can scatter the vase if you will, but the smell of the roses will stick round it still.
I seen now the kind of conversations he is always having with himself when he gets jest so drunk and is thinking hard.

Only this time it happens to be out loud.
"What is a gentleman ?" I asts him, thinking if he wasn't one it might take his mind off himself a little to tell me.

"What MAKES one ?" "Authorities differ," says Doctor Kirby, slouching down in his chair, and grinning like he knowed a joke he wasn't going to tell no one.