He thought more specially of men celebrated in great industries, who
had accumulated power beyond measure, millions almost beyond count--
what extravagantly mad outlets they turned to! The captains of steel,
of finance, were old, spent, before they were fifty, broken by
machinery and strain in mid-life, by a responsibility in which they
were like pig iron in an open hearth furnace. What man would choose to
crumble, to find his brain paralysed, at forty-five or six? Such labor
was a form of desperation, of drowning, forgetting, an affair at best
an implied failure.

That was the strength, the anodyne, of drink, of cocktails, that they
spread a glittering transformation about crass reality; people danced
at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian;
they were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to
move to music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating
chiffons. "The whole damned business is a mess," he said aloud. Then,
reaching the city, he threw himself with a familiar vigor into the
activities he had challenged.

Returning over the familiar road, in his small closed car, he was
quieter mentally, critical of his useless dissatisfaction; he was
making needless trouble for himself. Small things filled his thoughts,
among them the question of how much gin would be consumed by the
cocktail party Fanny and he were having before the dinner dance at the
Country Club. Peyton and Claire Morris, Anette and, if she came, Mina
Raff, with two men, and the Lucians. Perhaps twelve in all; two quarts.
The Country Club dances, principally made up of people who had known
each other long and intimately, decidedly needed an impetus; society
was rather dreadful without rum. Anette was an attractive girl; she had