Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the cave.
I reminded Charmian of the canoe houses from which she had been barred in the South Pacific, where the kinky-haired cannibals escaped from their womenkind and feasted and drank by themselves, the sacred precincts taboo to women under pain of death.

As a youth, by way of the saloon I had escaped from the narrowness of woman's influence into the wide free world of men.

All ways led to the saloon.

The thousand roads of romance and adventure drew together in the saloon, and thence led out and on over the world.
"The point is," I concluded my sermon, "that it is the accessibility of alcohol that has given me my taste for alcohol.

I did not care for it.
I used to laugh at it.