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Is it any wonder that the men one thus encounters in clubs are stupid and miserable creatures, and that they find their pleasure in such banal sports as playing cards, drinking highballs, shooting pool, and reading the barber-shop weeklies?... The day a man's mistress is married one always finds him at his club.

"She couldn't have been away more than ten minutes, because Johnny was just mixing the highballs, according to our preference for Scotch or rye or plain ginger ale, which both Ralph and I chose. After we'd had our drinks and the sandwiches, we went on with bridge. Polly and Johnny just wandered about the porch or watched the game at the two tables.

A drunkard who indulges in "highballs" and other beverages of fancy price and name, is euphemistically styled a "tippler;" his brother, a poor devil who swallows vile concoctions or red "pizen" is called a plain, ordinary "soak." Whatever name we give to such gluttons, the evil in both is the same; 'tis the evil of gluttony.

I remember, when my first book was published, several Alaskans, who were members of the Bohemian Club, entertained me one evening at the club in San Francisco. We sat in most wonderful leather chairs, and drinks were ordered. Never had I heard such an ordering of liqueurs and of highballs of particular brands of Scotch.

But after he had taken two or three highballs, Susan was forced to engage deeply in conversation with the exasperated and alarmed Sperry to avoid seeing how madly Rod and Constance were flirting. She, however, did contrive to see nothing at least, the other three were convinced that she had not seen.

The day I came out of hospital I took up drinking again as a matter of course. I drank wine at meals. I drank cocktails before meals. I drank Scotch highballs when anybody I chanced to be with was drinking them. I was so thoroughly the master of John Barleycorn I could take up with him or let go of him whenever I pleased, just as I had done all my life.