Diary of a Drug Fiend

168 The Diary of a Drug Fiend yet, my oldest friends—I can’t trust them like I did. They’re all alike. I wonder if that’s a delusion? How can I tell? They do act funnily. I’m unsettled. How can one be sure of anything? One can’t. The more one thinks of it, the more one sees it must be so. Look how Feccles let us down. For all I know, there may be some motive at the back of even a really nice -woman. like Gretel—or Mabel Black. I’m really suspicious of myself. I think that’s it. | I must go home. I hope to God Cockie’s found some somewhere! ... I met Mabel Black coming out of the Burlington Arcade. She looked fine, all over smiles, a very short, white skirt and a new pair of patent leather boots almost up to her knees. She must find them frightfully -hot. She rushed me into a tea place, awfully smart with rose-shaded lights reflected up to a blue ceiling; the combination made a most marvellous purple. We got an alcove shut off by canary-coloured curtains ~ and a set of the loveliest cushions I ever saw. Two big basket chairs and a low table. They have the most delightful tea in egg-shell china and Dolly cigarettes with rose leaves. Mabel talked a hundred miles a minute. She has struck the biggest kind of oil—a romantic boy of sixty- five. He had bought her a riding crop with a carved ivory handle; the head of a race horse with ruby eyes and a gold collar. I asked her laughingly if it was to keep himin order. But what she was really keen on was H. She had got a whole bottle and gave me quite a lotin an envelope. ‘The first go, oh, whatjoy! And then—how strange we all are! The minute I had it in my bag—in my blood—my mind began to work freely. The irritating stupefaction passed off like waking from a nightmare —a nightmare of suffocation—and it came to me with the force of a blow that the effect was not due to the H. at all, or hardly at all. When we got it again in Naples, it didn’t do us much good.