Diary of a Drug Fiend

16 The Diary of a Drug Fiend unreasonable, equally repugnant to the better regulated type of mid-Victorian mind, the best thing you can do is to sleep with your forefathers. So that’s that. Good-night. I told you that Lou was “ quite an ordinary and not a particularly attractive girl.” Remember that this was the first thought of my “ carnal mind” which, as St. Paul says, is ‘‘ enmity against God.” My real first impression had been the tremendous psychological experience for which all words are inadequate. Seated by her side, at leisure to look while she babbled, I found my carnal mind reversed on appeal. She was certainly not a pretty girl from the standpoint of a music-hall audience. There was something indefinably Mongolian about her face. The planes were flat; the cheek-bones high; the eyes oblique; the nose wide, short, and vital; the mouth a long, thin, rippling curve like a mad sunset. The eyes were tiny and green, with a piquantelfin expression. Her hair was curiously colourless; it was very abundant; she had wound great ropes about her head. It reminded me of the armature of a dynamo. It produced a weird effect— this mingling of the savage Mongol with the savage Norseman type. Her strange hair fascinated me. It was that delicate flaxen hue, so fine—no, I don’t know how to tell you about it, I can’t think of it without getting all muddled up. One wondered how she was there. One saw at a glance that she didn’t belong to that set. Refinement, aristocracy almost, were like a radiance about her tiniest gesture. She had no affectation about being an artist. She happened to like these people in exactly the same way as a Methodist old maid in Balham might take an interest in natives of Tonga, and so she went about with them. Her mother didn’t mind. Probably, too, the way things are nowadays, her mother didn’t matter. You mustn’t think that we were any of us drunk,