"You're switching idioms again. Stop it."

"Sorry. Anyway, I was afraid I'd spill stuff all over the nice rug. So I drank some. So now there was less in the glass than there was before, but now I was less steady, so I had to drink some more to keep it from spilling on the rug. So after awhile the glass became a pitcher, and the pitcher became a barrel, and the barrel became a hogshead, until finally I was tied in with a direct pipeline that was connected up to all the gin and tonic in the world. There I was, trying to drink up this whole enormous ocean of gin and tonic. It was a challenge.

"But I failed. I fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and by this declension, into the madness wherein now I rave, and all you wail for."

He foamed at the mouth a bit. Obviously, some sort of fit was on him again.

"Do you think it's this?" I said. "It may be, very likely."

"Has there been such a time, I'd like to know, when I have positively said it's so, that I made a mistake?" He was really sore.

"Not that I know," I said. I chinned myself penitently a half a dozen times on the molding over the doorway. When I turned around again, he was asleep, breathing heavily. I covered his face with my pajama top, but Charpentier's Te Deum on the hi-fi, and set off towards the john.