B926 <=> B928 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 927]

“And another difference is, that in respect of concealing their consumption of the prohibited product from government eyes, the contemporary beings now breeding on the continent America are not by any means so naive as were the beings of the Maralpleicie epoch.

“To what lengths your contemporary favorites have gone in this respect, you can understand very well from the following examples.

“At the present time there in that place, every young man with his ‘mother’s milk’ scarcely dry on his lips, infallibly carries with him what seems to be a perfectly ordinary harmless cigarette case or cigar case; and, sitting in a restaurant or in one of their famous dance halls, he casually produces this cigarette case or cigar case from his pocket and everybody around imagines of course that he is about to smoke.

“But not a bit of it! He just gives a peculiar little twist to this cigarette case or cigar case of his, when, presto, a diminutive tumbler appears in his left hand, whereupon with his right hand he s-l-o-w-l-y and q-u-i-e-t-l-y pours out for himself from this cigarette case or cigar case into this diminutive tumbler of his, some kind of liquid – probably Scotch whisky, but concocted as I have already told you, on some barge off the American coast.

“During my observations there at that time, I once witnessed still another picture.

“In one of the said restaurants sat two young American women not far from my table.

“An attendant of this restaurant, or, as they say, a ‘waiter,’ served them with a bottle of some mineral water and a couple of glasses.

“One of the women gave a certain little twist to the handle of her fashionable umbrella, whereupon a liquid, obviously also Scotch whisky or something of the kind, began likewise to flow very q-u-i-e-t-l-y and very s-l-o-w-l-y from the handle into their glasses.