“You talk as if you were always drunk.”

“Oh—­not always.  By day I am frequently sober, but at such times I am fit company for neither man nor beast; I am harsh and unsympathetic; I scheme and I connive.  With nightfall, however, there comes a metamorphosis.  Ah!  Believe me!  When the Clover Club is strained and descends like the gentle dew of heaven, when the Bronx is mixed and the Martini shimmers in the first rays of the electric light, then I humanize and harmonize, For me gin is a tonic, rum a restorative, vermuth a balm.  Once I am stocked up with ales, wines, liquors, and cigars, I become attuned to the nobler sentiments of life.  I aspire.  I make friends with lonely derelicts whose digestions have foundered on seas of vichy and buttermilk, and I show them the joys of alcoholism—­without cost.  We share each other’s pleasures and perplexities, at my expense.  They are my brothers.  I am optimistic; I laugh; I play cards for money; I turkey-trot.  I become a living, palpitating influence for good, spreading happiness and prosperity in my wake.”

“Do you consider yourself in such a condition now?” queried Lorelei, who had been vaguely amused at this Rubaiyat.

“I am, and, since it is long past the, closing hour of one and the tango parlors are dark, suppose we blow this ’Who’s Who in Pittsburg’ and taxi-cab it out to a roadhouse where the bass fiddle is still inhabited and the second generation is trotting to the ’Robert E. Lee’?”

Lorelei shook her head with a smile.

“Don’t you dance?”

“Doesn’t everybody dance?”

“Then how did you break your leg?”

“I don’t care to go.”

“Strange!” Mr. Wharton helped himself to a goblet of wine, appearing to heap the liquor above the edge of the glass.  “Now, if I were sober I could understand how you might prefer these ’pappy guys’ to me, for nobody likes me then, but I’m agreeably pickled.  I’m just like everybody you’ll be likely to meet at this time of night.  Merkle won’t take you anywhere, for he’s full of distilled water and has a directors’ meeting at ten.  I overflow with spirits and have a noontide engagement with an Ostermoor.”

“Why don’t you ask Miss Demorest?  She came with you?”

Wharton sighed hopelessly.  “Something queer about that Jane.  D’you know what made us so late?  She went to mass on the way down.”

“Mass?  At that hour?”

“It was a special midnight service conducted for actors.  I sat in the taxi and waited.  It did me a lot of good.”

Some time later Merkle returned to find Bob still animatedly talking; catching Lorelei’s eye, he signified a desire to speak with her, but she found it difficult to escape from the intoxicated young man at her side.  At last, however, she succeeded, and joined her supper companion at the farther edge of the fountain, where the tireless cupids still poured water from the cornucopias.