count of my successful writing, had
added weight, or so I thought. At any rate, my reputation as a writer
drew me audiences that my reputation as a speaker never could have drawn.
I was invited before clubs and organisations of all sorts to deliver my
message. I fought the good fight, and went on studying and writing, and
was very busy.

Up to this time I had had a very restricted circle of friends. But now I
began to go about. I was invited out, especially to dinner, and I made
many friends and acquaintances whose economic lives were easier than mine
had been. And many of them drank. In their own houses they drank and
offered me drink. They were not drunkards any of them. They just drank
temperately, and I drank temperately with them as an act of comradeship
and accepted hospitality. I did not care for it, neither wanted it nor
did not want it, and so small was the impression made by it that I do not
remember my first cocktail nor my first Scotch highball.

Well, I had a house. When one is asked into other houses, he naturally
asks others into his house. Behold the rising standard of living.
Having been given drink in other houses, I could expect nothing else of
myself than to give drink in my own house. So I laid in a supply of beer
and whisky and table claret. Never since that has my house not been well
supplied.

And still, through all this period, I did not care in the slightest for
John Barleycorn. I drank when others drank, and with them, as a social
act. And I had so little choice in the matter that I drank whatever they
drank. If they elected whisky, then whisky it was for me. If they drank
root beer or sarsaparilla, I drank root beer or sarsaparilla with them.
And when there were no friends in the house, why, I didn't drink
anything. Whisky decanters were always in the room where I wrote, and
for months and years I never knew what it was, when by myself, to take a
drink.

When out at dinner I noticed the kindly, genial glow of the preliminary
cocktail. It seemed a very fitting and gracious thing. Yet so little
did I stand in need of it, with my own high intensity and vitality, that
I never thought it worth while to have a cocktail before my own meal when
I ate alone.

On the other hand, I well remember a very brilliant man, somewhat older
than I, who occasionally visited me. He liked whisky, and I recall
sitting whole afternoons in my den, drinking steadily with him, drink for
drink,