DANNY'S OWN STORY BY DON MARQUIS TO MY ... - Pink Monkey

we was setting in his room, and he was hitting it
purty hard.
"Danny," he says to me, after a while, like he
was talking out loud to himself too, "what did you
think of Doctor Jackson?"
"I don't like him much," I says.
"Nor I," he says, frowning, and takes a drink.
Then he says, after quite a few minutes of frowning
and thinking, under his breath like: "He's a blame
sight more decent than I am, for all of that."
"Why?" I asts him.
"Because Doctor Jackson," he says, "hasn't
the least idea that he ISN'T decent, and getting his
money in a decent way. While at one time I
was--"
He breaks off and don't say what he was. I
asts him. "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.