inquired. "Why, pray, their mental condition?"
"Because I couldn't understand, Excellency," I replied, "how intelligent men like you and Willys, who have lived abroad, could permit yourselves to attribute the sexually hectic flush of recent literature and life in America to the Volstead Act. All these evils, says Willys, followed prohibition, and he wags his head and mutters, 'Vengeance of Dionysus.' Suppose, now, I seize the same absurd post-hoc-propter-hoc principles and attribute the virginal chastity of French, Italian, and English fiction and private life to the free use of intoxicating beverages?"
"I smell irony, Professor, somewhere," said Oliver, "but I grant you that Willys's logic slipped a cog there. We'll have to grant you that America dry is no more sex-obsessed than Europe wet."
"And then," I went on, "I was a little troubled by Willys's plea that, with the general decline of drinking in America, something of real poetic beauty is passing out of our lives. I honestly can't feel that he speaks realistically about that. I know the Anacreontic tradition, the literary romance of nut-brown ale and blood-red wine, perhaps as well as Willys does, and in the bookish imagination of
