tion is
what counts, and the situation was that social intercourse for me was
getting painful and difficult. On the other hand, it must be stated that
on rare occasions, on very rare occasions, I did meet rare souls, or
fools like me, with whom I could spend magnificent hours among the stars,
or in the paradise of fools. I was married to a rare soul, or a fool,
who never bored me and who was always a source of new and unending
surprise and delight. But I could not spend all my hours solely in her
company.

Nor would it have been fair, nor wise, to compel her to spend all her
hours in my company. Besides, I had written a string of successful
books, and society demands some portion of the recreative hours of a
fellow that writes books. And any normal man, of himself and his needs,
demands some hours of his fellow men.

And now we begin to come to it. How to face the social intercourse game
with the glamour gone? John Barleycorn. The ever patient one had waited
a quarter of a century and more for me to reach my hand out in need of
him. His thousand tricks had failed, thanks to my constitution and good
luck, but he had more tricks in his bag. A cocktail or two, or several,
I found, cheered me up for the foolishness of foolish people. A
cocktail, or several, before dinner, enabled me to laugh whole-heartedly
at things which had long since ceased being laughable. The cocktail was
a prod, a spur, a kick, to my jaded mind and bored spirits. It
recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own
imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with
the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the
satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no other way to talk.

A poor companion without a cocktail, I became a very good companion with
one. I achieved a false exhilaration, drugged myself to merriment. And
the thing began so imperceptibly that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn,
never dreamed whither it was leading me. I was beginning to call for
music and wine; soon I should be calling for madder music and more wine.

It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for the
pre-dinner cocktail. I WANTED it, and I was CONSCIOUS that I wanted it.
I remember, while war-corresponding in the Far East, of being
irresistibly attracted to a certain home. Besides accepting all
invitations to dinner, I made a point of dropping in almost every
afterno