I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o'clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun.
Sitting on Tom's lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner.
When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of "Simon Called Peter"-either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.
Just as Tom and Myrtle-after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names-reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.
The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white.
Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face.
When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms.
She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here.
But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.
Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below.