Diary of a Drug Fiend

Towards Madness 209 her as the central figure. She is standing naked with a disproportionately large head grinning detestably. The body is almost a skeleton covered with greenish skin. It made a perfectly grisly sensation. I wonder you haven't seen it.” As a matter of fact, I had seen a photograph of it in some newspaper, and now I remembered that Bill Waldorf had pointed her out, roaring with laughter, as the Queen of the Dead Souls. Basil had said that London was full of dead souls. _ “Tt’s nothing to do with that story of Gogol’s,” said Maisie. ‘‘ Basil thinks—and it’s only too ghastly true—that most of the people we see walking about, and eating and drinking and dancing, are really dead— ‘dead in trespasses and sins,’ as my old uncle used to say—in the sin of not knowing themselves to be Stars, True and Living Gods Most High——’’ | I sighed with sadness. I, too, was a dead soul—and I had given up the Lord of Resurrection that morning out of loyalty to another dead soul. And—the same afternoon! Faugh! what a charnel-house Life is! How chill and damp and poisonous is the air! How the walls sweat the agony of the damned! “And look at Lala now!’ Maisie went on. ‘“ He had to put her through the most frightful ordeals— for she was very dead indeed—but she got to the other end of the tunnel all right. She’s a Great Soul, if ever there was one in the world, and he has raised her mortal into immortality. Her corruptibility has put on incorruption—and she radiates light and life and love, leaping through the years in utter libert ” “ But what does she do now?” I asked with a dull pain at my heart. | “Why; her True. Will, of course!’’ came back the flaming answer. ‘‘ She knows that she came to this planet to bear witness to the Law of Thelema in her own person, and to help her Titan in his task!” Maisie was really stupefying. Every one knows that she was in love with Basil from the first, and is, and