There is no shyness about the drummer. Before we had eaten our preliminary olive, the fat man at the end of the table had struck up conversation with Haigh; and before the _sopa_ was out of the room, my next-door neighbour, a dapper Marseillais in the ready-made clothing line, was calling me _amigo_. Whilst he helped himself from amongst the red sausages and beans and beef and pork and other trifles on the dish which held the next course, the fat Cuban sketched out a plan for the evening; and as he doused his salad with full-flavoured oil, my little Frenchman endorsed the proposal of the flaxen-haired timber agent opposite that they should stand treat. And while we munched our burnt almonds for dessert, some one ordered in a bottle of bad sherry (which, being imported, is naturally thought more of than the good country wine), and we agreed that we were all dear friends, and had known one another intimately for a matter of ten years. And then we rerolled fresh cigarettes, got our hats, and went to a _cafe_, six of us, where we crammed our _petits verres_ with sugar-knobs and lighted them, meanwhile drinking bitter black coffee till the blue demon of the brandy should have flickered away. You know the style; it's the usual way of beginning. After some half-hour's stay in the _cafe_ we seperated--Haigh and the Cuban going off to a dance, whilst the little Frenchman carried me off elsewhere. He had not defined our destination very clearly, and I had not made inquiries, caring little where I went; but I was a little put out at finding myself, after passing a guard of soldiers who stared curiously, and going down many flights of steps, in an anarchist's club. Perhaps the government of his most Catholic Majesty Alfonzo XIII. can hardly be termed paternal; but that was nothing to me. Politics I abhor, and anarchistic politics I particularly loathe. But as beating an abrupt retreat would have been rude, and as unnecessary rudeness is not one of my characteristics, I made the best of it, and stayed and looked about me.