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Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The beer-glass is the abyss.
Here and there some one, not quite sure of his balance, was fumbling for the arm of his chair or the edge of the table. This resulted in his overturning a dish that had been forgotten, or in spilling a beer-glass. While this, in turn, set up a new hubbub, some one else, in his eagerness to betake himself from the scene, fell flat into the very débris.
Slingsby, a man of finer taste, delighted his guests with the performances of renowned good masters of music, one of whom, a German, played to great perfection on an instrument with five wire strings called the VOIL D'AMORE; whilst my Lord Sunderland treated his visitors to a sight of Richardson, the renowned fire eater, who was wont to devour brimstone on glowing coals; melt a beer-glass and eat it up; take a live coal on his tongue, on which he put a raw oyster, and let it remain there till it gaped and was quite broiled; take wax, pitch and sulphur, and drink them down flaming; hold a fiery hot iron between his teeth, and throw it about like a stone from hand to hand, and perform various other prodigious feats.
In a very short time the cold beef was a thing of the past, and the young man, toying with his beer-glass, sat listening to a lecture on his behavior couched in the severest terms his hostess could devise. "You'll be the laughing-stock of the place," she concluded. "I shall go away," he said, gloomily. "I shouldn't do that," said the girl, with a judicial air; "live it down."
Later, at the Residenz Club, the General leaned over his beer-glass and smilingly addressed his companion. "So I hear you, too, are a conquest of the beautiful South American." For an instant Paul, recognizing only Dona Anna under that epithet, looked puzzled.
Marie gave a quick little sigh one of those sighs which the worldly-wise recognise at once. "You don't seem over-pleased," said Joseph. "I was very happy there," she answered. Joseph leant back in his chair, fingering reflectively his beer-glass. "I'm afraid, mistress," he said half-shyly, "that your life can't have been a very happy one.
He toyed uncertainly with his still unsold papers worn dirty and ragged as his clothes by this time before he ventured in, picking his way between barrels and heaps of garbage; past the Italian cobbler's hovel, where a tallow dip, stuck in a cracked beer-glass, before a cheap print of the "Mother of God," showed that even he knew it was Christmas and liked to show it; past the Sullivan flat, where blows and drunken curses mingled with the shriek of women, as Nibsy had heard many nights before this one.
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