"I'll take one," said Lillian.
The waiter departed. The four at the table sat gloomily silent. There didn't seem to be anything that anybody wanted to say. After a minute of drumming his fingers thoughtfully on the table Carl spoke.
"You can always have a good time if you know the right places to go," he said. "Now a stranger in town would never find a place like this."
"That's right," Hubert agreed.
"Still, if you know a place like this and can make friends in it," Carl went on, "you're all right. See, I can get a drink here any time at all. Come to think of it, prohibition is a joke, ain't it?"
He addressed his question to Lillian. She was on her mettle. May's boy friend was asking her a serious question. Now was the moment to say something smart and scathing of the Eighteenth Amendment.
"Yeh, it's a joke all right," she said after a moment's thought.
"Damn right, it's a joke," Carl snapped at her as though she had been responsible for prohibition and after months of argument he had forced her to admit its failure.
"I don't know what's funny about it," said May. "If it's a joke it ought to be funny. Before prohibition my old man used to spend half of his pay in the corner saloon on a Saturday night and come home cock-eyed to my old lady. Now liquor is so expensive and so damn lousy that he spends all his pay for it and my old lady has to have the doctor in every Sunday morning for him."
