I met Micheal MacLiammoir having lunch with a friend the other day, and was surprised, when the meal was over, to see him draw out a pipe, fill it, light it, and smoke it.
Knowing Micheal to be an inveterate cigarette-smoker, I took the opportunity, when the coffee and liqueur stage had been reached, to ask him what had caused him to give up his beloved French cigarettes, and was told that he was trying to get used to a pipe, because he had to smoke one in "Thunder Rock," the new play , by Robert Ardroy, at the Gaiety.
"I don't like it a bit," he confessed, "but you see nothing looks worse than a man who says he can't do without his pipe and who obviously never smokes it. So you see! I'm doomed to suffer for my part, that's all there is to it." And he puffed away in mournful silence.
"I suppose no job in the world demands more sacrificing of one's pet habits than ours," he said presently. "I played a Chinaman once years ago and had to eat with chop-sticks. So I really learned how to do it, and I'm as good with them now as with a knife and fork. I got to prefer them after a time."
He returned to his pipe with a look of grim, though doubtful, determination.