“Take it from me I’ll never again gallop around the juniper bowl.  I wouldn’t be a lush worker like that Alla McCune for another $10,000 legacy.  She’s just started the habit lately.  She thinks it’s stylish.  Sure, every time she goes out with a crowd that drink anything stronger than beer she thinks she is in society.  Every time she gets a snoot full she falls in love.  Fact.  My, such a scene as she caused in the hotel the other evening.  She doped it out this way:  She was all alone, a stormy night, a bottle of Scotch and a syphon.  Why not light up?  Talk about your Great White Way, why, she had it looking like a dark alley in Darkest Brooklyn.  Along about 6 o’clock in the evening a gentleman called to see her.  As soon as he entered the portal Alla knew that she had at last met her soul twin.

“She was hanging on to the table at the time and when she let go to embrace him, instead of being clasped to his yearning bosom, as she had planned, her knees gave away and she skated on her profile across the divan.  This cluck, being of a timid nature, instead of running for the ammonia, slammed the door and sprinted for the elevator.  Alla, as soon as the door closed, realized that she had been jilted, and resolving not to be canned without a struggle, she threw on her pony coat over her kimono, and pinning her hat roguishly over one ear, she fled the snare and ran down eight flights of steps into the street, with two coon bell boys after her.  She turned into Broadway, going like Hose No. 7, with her kimono streaming to the breeze, and ran all the way down to Rector’s and into the door before she was stopped by the head waiter.  The two bell boys caught up and loaded her into a cab before the police came and managed to get her back up to the hotel, though the fight she put up was a caution.  Wine is sure a mocker and Scotch highballs is fierce.

“I heard from the folks in Emporia the other day and they are still talking over the time I and the two guys in the automobile pulled off.  The minister sprung a long sermon on the effects of strong drink on the young and the Emporia Wasp—­you know they did call it the Bee, but the guy that bought it from the Bee people renamed it the Wasp, because he got stung worse than any bee could sting—­the Emporia Wasp came out with a long editorial about the profligate rich and the Attic Debating Society had a big pow-wow in the basement of the church on the subject, ’Be it Resolved, That more people are killed by strong drink than by hanging.’  All this had such a moral effect on the young that the soda fountain didn’t sell a claret phosphate for three weeks after.  And the Ladies’ Aid got so busy over Azbe Lewis, the town drunkard, that he had three proposals of marriage, but he decided to take the lesser of the evils and stick to drink.  I think he ain’t such a dope at that.