1925 Drinks Long & Short by Nina Toye and A H Adair

Drinks—Long and Short

q-uently those convivial souls grew quarrelsome, and yourthree-or-more-bottle manfound himself, without quite knowing how he got there, on the duelling ground, while in his ears echoed the grim order;"Pistols fortwoand coffee for one." Not that the duel was the ineluctable last green of a promising drinking career, it was purely incidental, a bunker by the way; but with gout looming ahead as the inevitable i8th hole of a triple-bottled course,the expectation of life must have been distinctly poor. One may doubt,too, whether the cause of conviviality was truly . served by those prodigal potations. Your modern diners-out and above all the hostess who entertains them, are no less imbued by the party spirit but they prefer greater economy of means and, reversing the ancestral process, choose to begin dinner, not only to end it, on good terms with themselves and^ the world. As an introduction to the modern, more brilliant and certainly less uproarious conviviality, the cocktail stands supreme. Nothing else so adequately bridges the dull interval between the guests' arrival and the announcement of dinner, not to mention that awful first quarter of an hour when, uninspired and forlorn in a cock tail-less house,one casts about in one's mind for a subject unconnected with the weather with which to open conversational battle with one's neighbour. Sherry will not do the trick, nor