Diary of a Drug Fiend

54 The Diary of a Drug Fiend hogsheads of it, all those measures that I couldn’t learn at school. She had said to herself, in perfectly general terms, without necessarily contemplating any particular train of events as follows :-— “From one cause or another, those nice kids may find thumselves shy on snow at a critical moment in their careers, so it’s up to me to see that they get it.” While these thoughts were passing through my mind, I had got the manicure scissors, and Lou was snipping the threads of her kimono lining round those places where those fiercely fascinating fingers of hers had felt what we used to call in the hospital a foreign body. Yes, there was no mistake. Gretel had got our psychology, we had got her psychology, everything was going as well as green peas go with a duck. Don’t imagine we had to spoil the kimono. It was just a tuck in the quilting. Out comes a dear little white silk bag; and we open that, and there’s a heap of snow that I’d much rather see than Mont Blanc. Well, you know, when you see it, you’ve got to sniff it. What’s it for? Nobody can answer that. Don’t tell me about ‘‘ use in operations on the throat.”” Lou didn’t need anything done to her throat. She sang like Melba, and she looked like a peach; and she was a Péche-Melba, just like two and two makes four. You bet we sniffed! And then we danced all round the suite for several years—probably as much as eight or nine minutes by the clock—but what’s the use of talking about clocks when Einstein has proved that time is only another dimension of space? What’s the good of astronomers proving that the earth wiggles round 1000 miles an hour, and wiggles on 1000 miles a minute, if you can’t keep going? It would be absolutely silly to hang about and get left behind, and very likely find ourselves on the moon, and nobody to talk to but Jules \Verne, H. G. Wells, and that crowd.