Diary of a Drug Fiend

112 The Diary of a Drug Fiend rotten red-tape, but “of course, they’re right in a way, there are quite a lot of chaps that wouldn't know how to use it, might get a bit above themselves and give something away—you know how it is.” So we left him quietly smoking, and went back to our own little cubby and had the most glorious night, whispering imaginary intrigues which somehow lent stronger wing to the real rapture of our love. We neither of us slept. We simply sailed through the darkness to find the dawn caressing the crest of Posilippo and the first glint of sunrise signalling ecstatic greetings to the blue waters of the Bay of Naples. . When the train stopped, there was Hector Laroche at the door, ordering everybody about in fluent Italian. We had the best suite in the best hotel, and our luggage arrived not ten minutes later than we did, and breakfast was a perfect poem, and we had a box for the opera and our passages booked for the following day for Capri, where a suite was reserved for us at the Caligula. We saw the Museum in the morning and automobiled out to Pompeii in the afternoon, and yet M. Laroche had managed everything for us so miraculously well that even this very full day left us perfectly fresh, murmuring through half-closed lips the magic sentence :— “ Dolce far niente.” The majority of people seem to stumble through this world without any conception of the possibilities of enjoyment. It is, of course, a matter of temperament. But even the few who can appreciate the language of Shelley, Keats and Swinburne, look on those con- ceptions as Utopian. Most people acquiesce in the idea that the giddy exaltation of Prometheus Unbound, for example, is an imaginary feeling. I suppose, in fact, that one wouldn’t get much result by giving heroin and cocaine, however cunningly mixed, to the average man. You can’t get out of a thing what isn’t there. _ In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, any stimulant