Diary of a Drug Fiend

70 The Diary of a Drug Fiend 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. “Y’m afraid not, my dear man,’ I replied. “ Fact is, I haven't read anything much unless I had to.” ““T 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 corfusion 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. Haidée 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 con- tact 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