"Nothin'!" I protested, with a repugnant wave of the hand. "You mean we ain't good enough for you to drink with?" demanded the youth called Tony. I could see what he wanted. I could feel what was coming. He was looking for some reason, however tenuous, to start trouble. Without fail he would find it in time. But my one desire was to defer that outcome as long as possible. So I grinned back at him, rather idiotically, I'm afraid. "All righ'," I weakly agreed, blinking about at my tormentors. "Bring me a bran'y an' soda." The other three men looked at the waiter. The waiter, in turn, looked at them. Then he studied my face. There was something decidedly unpleasant in his coldly speculative eyes. "Shimmey, d'you understand? This gen'lmun wants a brandy and soda." The waiter, still studying me, said "Sure!" Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the room. I knew, in my prophetic bones, that there was some form of trouble brewing in that odoriferous little room. But I was determined to side-step it, to avoid it, to the last extremity. And I was still nodding amiably about when the waiter returned with his tray of glasses. "Well, here's how," said the youth, and we all lifted our glasses. That brandy and soda, I knew, would not be the best of its kind. I also clearly saw that it would be unwise to decline it. So I swallowed the stuff as a child swallows medicine. I downed it in a gulp or two, and put the glass back on the table. Then I proceeded to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, after the approved fashion of my environment. It was fortunate, at that moment, that my hand was well up in front of my face. For as the truth of the whole thing came home to me, as sharp and quick as an electric spark, there must have been a second or two when my rôle slipped away from me. I had, it is true, inwardly fortified myself against a draught that would prove highly unpalatable. But the taste which I now detected, the acrid, unmistakable, over-familiar taste, was too much for my startled nerves. I hid my sudden body-movement only by means of a simulated hiccough. The thing I had unmistakably tasted was chloral hydrate. They had given me knock-out drops. The idea, of a sudden, struck me as being so ludicrous that I laughed. The mere thought of any such maneuver was too much for me--the foolish hope that a homeopathic little pill of chloral would put me under the table, like any shopgirl lured from a dance-hall! They were trying to drug me. Drug _me_, who had taken double and triple doses night after night as I fought for sleep! They were trying to drug me, me who on my bad nights had even known the narcotic to be forcibly wrested from my clutch by those who stood appalled at the quantities that my too-immured system demanded, and knew only too well that in time it meant madness!