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Show 10 that it would be something illegal. Wearily he pried the cap off a bottle of near-beer, the two percent kind, and slid it along to me. I wanted to ask if he didn't have something stronger, but my courage was of the two percent kind also. While I sipped the insipid brew, another roisterer entered. Obviously an acquaintance of the past, he made overtures in a way that suggested his already having had something stronger than the drink I was having. The proprietor responded no more warmly to him than to me. Then came something that astonished me, for despite adolescent reveries I had grown up with parents of complete respectability, even puritanical principles. The client inquired leering- "Say, Bert, is Rosemarie upstairs?" The bartender nodded. "O.K.I" the other cried. "I'm goin' up an' an' pay her a little visit!" "She's quit that sorta thing^" the barkeep muttered. "She don't do it any more." Jaw fallen, the customer peered at him a moment. Then, "O.K.," he answered with no great disappointment. He turned and teetered out. And thus the booms, whether big ones like the Horn Silver or pathetic ones like Nada, eventually fizzle out. Remember your last firecracker that Fourth when you were small, and the sad pomp with which you lit the fuse-to find that the powder had leaked out of the red paper cylinder? Father, however, refused to lose hope. He and Mother clung on to Nada. But I was beginning to drift away. |