Not The Same Man At All

The Philip Marlowe perspective:

"If the rules mean anything at all anymore, they mean you don’t pick a roomful of people as the spot to threaten a man and hit him across the face with a glove when your wife is standing right beside you and you are practically accusing her of a little double time. For a man still shaky from a hard bout with the hard stuff Wade had done all right. He had done more than all right. Of course I hadn’t seen him drunk. I didn’t know what he would be like drunk. I didn’t even know that he was an alcoholic. There’s a big difference. A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before."

Chandler, The Long Goodbye