Rita O’Keefe had been a drunken, unattractive, quarrelsome fifty-five-year-old with an insatiable appetite for gin and sex.

In the first place, I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in a hundred thousand is a genuine, chemical dipsomaniac.

I survived, through no personal virtue, but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barleycorn.