Smoking is an acquired taste, and it must be as easy to
learn to like one flavour as another. I persevered and I
conquered. Before the year was over I could think of them without
loathing, at the end of two I could smoke them without positive
discomfort. Now I prefer them to any other brand on the market.
Indeed, a good cigar disagrees with me."
I suggested it might have been less painful to have given up
smoking altogether.
"I did think of it," he replied, "but a man who doesn't smoke
always seems to me bad company. There is something very sociable
about smoke."
He leant back and puffed great clouds into the air, filling the
small den with an odour suggestive of bilge water and cemeteries.
"Then again," he resumed after a pause, "take my claret. No, you
don't like it." (I had not spoken, but my face had evidently
betrayed me.) "Nobody does, at least no one I have ever met.
Three years ago, when I was living in Hammersmith, we caught two
burglars with it. They broke open the sideboard, and swallowed
five bottlefuls between them. A policeman found them afterwards,
sitting on a doorstep a hundred yards off, the 'swag' beside them
in a carpet bag.
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