must admit I felt an awful fool. After all, I had studied medicine pretty seriously ; and this was the second time that a layman had read me the Riot Act.
But Lou nodded cheerfully enough. The brandy had brought back the colour in her cheeks.
" Yes," she said, " I'd heard that all before, but you know it's one thing to hear a thing and another to go through it yourself."
" Experience is the only teacher," admitted Feccles. " All these things are perfectly all right, but the main thing is to go slow at first, and give yourself a chance to learn the ropes."
All this time Haide' had been sitting there like a statue. She exhaled a very curious atmosphere. There was a certain fascination in her complete lack of fascination.
Please excuse this paradoxical way of putting it. I mean that she had all the qualities which normally attract. She had the remains of an astonishing, if bizarre, beauty. She had obviously a vast wealth of experience. She possessed a quiet intensity which should have made her irresistible ; and yet she was absolutely devoid of what we call magnetism. It isn't a scientific word-so much the worse for science. It describes a fact in nature, and one of the most important facts in practical affairs. Everything of human interest, from niusic-ha.11 turns to empires, is run on magnetism and very little else. And science ignores it because it can't be measured by mechanical instruments !
The whole of the woman's vitality was directed to some secret interior shrine of her own soul.
Now she began to speak for the first time. The only subject that interested her in this wide universe was heroin. Her voice was monotonous.
Lou told me later that it reminded her of a dirge droned by Tibetan monks far off across implacable snow.
"It's the only thing there is," she said, in a tone of extraordinary ecstatic detachment. One could divine an infinite unholy joy derived from its own sadness. It was as if she took a morbid pleasure in being something melancholy, something monstrous; there was, in fact, a kind of martyred majesty in her mood.
" You mustn't expect to get the result at once," she went on. " You have to be born into it, married with it, and dead from it before you understand it. Different people are different. But it always takes some months at least before you get rid of that stupid nuisance-life. As long as you have animal passions, you are an animal. How disgusting it is to think of eating and loving and all those appetities, like cattle I Breathing itself would be beastly if one knew one were doing it. How intolerable life would be to people of even mediocre refinement if they were always acutely conscious of the process of digestion."
She gave a little shiver.
" You've read the Mystics, Sir Peter ? " interrupted Feccles.
" I'm afraid not, my dear man," I replied. " Fact is, I haven't read anything much unless I had to."
" I went into it rather for a couple of years," he returned, and then stopped short and flushed.
The thought had apparently called up some very unpleasant memories. He tried to cover his confusion by volubility, and began an elaborate exposition of the tenets of St. Teresa, Miguel de Molinos, and several others celebrated in that line.
" The main point, you see," he recapitulated finally, "is the theory that everything human in us is before all things an obstacle in the way of holiness. That is the secret of the saints, that they renounce everything for one thing which they call the divine purity. It is not simply those things which we ordinarily call sins or vices-those are merely the elementary forms of iniquity exuberant grossness. The real difficulty hardly begins till things of that sort are dismissed for ever. On the road to saintship, every bodily or mental manifestation is in itself a sin, even when it is something which ordinary piety would class as a virtue. Haide' here has got the same idea."
She nodded serenely.
" I had no idea," she said, " that those people had got so much sense. I've always thought of them as tangled up with religious ideas. I understand now. Yes, it's the life of holiness, if you have to go to the trouble of putting it in the terms of morality, as I suppose you English people have to. I feel that contact of any sort, even with myself, contaminates me. I was the chief of sinners in my time, in the English sense of the word. Now I've forgotten what love means, except for a faint sense of nausea when it comes under my notice. I hardly eat at all-it's only brutes that want to wallow in action that need three meals a day. I hardly ever talk-words seem such waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view. Human life or heroin life ? I've tried them both ; and I don't regret having chosen as I did."
I said something about heroin shortening life. A wan smile flickered on her hollow cheeks. There was something appalling in its wintry splendour. It silenced us.
She looked down at her hands. I noticed for the first time with extreme surprise that they were extraordinarily dirty. She explained her smile.
"Of course, if you count time by years, you're very likely right. But what have the calculations of astronomers to do with the life of the soul ? Before I started heroin, year followed year, and nothing worth while happened. It was like a child scribbling in a ledger. Now that I've got into the heroin life, a minute or an hour-I don't know which and I don't carecontains more real life than any five years' period in my unregenerate days. You talk of death. Why shouldn't you ? It's perfectly all right for you. You animals have got to die, and you know it. But I am very far from sure that I shall ever die ; and I'm as indifferent to the idea as I am to any other of your monkey ideas."
She relapsed into silence, leaned back and closed her eyes once more.
I make no claim to be a philosopher of any kind but it was quite evident to the most ordinary common sense that her position was unassailable if any one chose to take it. As G. K. Chesterton says, " You cannot argue with the choice of the soul."
It has often been argued, in fact, that mankind lost the happiness characteristic of his fellow-animals when he acquired self-consciousness. This is in fact the meaning of the legend of " The Fall." We have become as gods, knowing good and evil, and the price is that we live by labour, and-" In his eyes foreknowledge of death."
Feccles caught my thought. He quoted with slow emphasis -
" He weaves and is clothed with derision, Sows and he shall not reap.
His life is a watch or a vision,
Between a sleep and a sleep."
The thought of the great Victorian seemed to chill him. He threw off his depression, lighting a cigarette and taking a strong pull at his brandy.
" Haide'," he said, with assumed lightness, " lives in open sin with a person named Baruch de Espinosa. I think it's Schopenhauer who calls him 'Der Gottbetrunkene Mann.' "
" The God-intoxicated man," murmured Lou faintly, shooting a sleepy glance at Haide' from beneath her heavy blue-veined eyelids.
" Yes," went on Feccles. " She always carries about one of his books. She goes to sleep on his words ; and when her eyes open, they fall upon the page."
He tapped the table as he spoke. His quick intuition had understood that this strange incident was disquieting to us. He wriggled his thumb and forefinger in the air towards the waiter. The man interpreted the gesture as a request for the bill, and went off to get it.
" Let me drive you and Sir Peter back to your hotel," said our host to Lou.
