A WATER DRINKER
insure that life so much enjoyed and loved, that life which in my own foolish way I had considered so emphatically “first-rate.” But the raising of lucre was necessary, and in the train of necessity, with obvious insistence, came the insurance office. So it happened that I filled up a great white sheet with evasive answers to impertinent questions, and gave references to certain of my friends who, I thought, would lie the firmest for me. But the worst was yet to be. For I was despatched to some wretched studio, or drug trap, near Grosvenor Square, to be examined by the consulting physician to the inquisition. And straightway he bade me strip mother-naked, and not Adam, nor yet Eve, felt the rigour of exposure more keenly than I in this parlour of the damned. And
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