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September Peter and I have had a long, nasty quarrel, and I had to pull his hair for him. It broke one of my nails. I've let them go very long. I don't know when I was manicured last.

For some reason, they're dry and brittle. I must have them done. I'd send the boy out, but I don't like the idea of a strange girl coming here. One never knows what may go wrong. It doesn't really matter, either. The body is merely a nuisance, and it hurts.

" So blood wrenches its pain Sardonic through heart and brain."

I am beginning to hate that horrible poem. It haunts me. I don't know why I should remember it like I do.

Have I been reading it, I wonder ? Or perhaps it is the incredible access of intellectual power which heroin gives that has improved my memory. Anyhow, the fact is that odd bits of it come swimming into my mind like goldfish darting in and out among streaming seaweed.

Oh, yes, my quarrel with Cockie. He said we mustn't risk being absolutely short of the suit ; and I must go and get a new supply from Mabel before we ran clean out. I can't help seeing that Cockie is degenerating morally. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to have made proper arrangements for a regular supply instead of relying on me.

He lies there all the time perfectly useless. He hasn't washed or shaved in a month, and be knows perfectly well that I detest dirt and untidiness. One of the things that attracted me most about him was his being so spruce and well-groomed and alert. He has changed altogether, since we came to London. I feel there is some bad influence at work on him....

This place is full of vermin. I found what had been annoying me. I think I shall bob my hair. I'm awfully proud of its length, but one must be practical....

I am lying down for a bit. It was a frightful nuisance getting ready to go out. Cockie nagged and bullied all the time.

I'm stiff all over, and it seems such waste of time to wash and dress, besides, the irritation of the interruption, and my clothes are impossible. I've been sleeping in them. I wish we'd brought some trunks from the Savoy. No, I don't, it would have been a lot of trouble, and interfered with our heroin honeymoon.

It's best the way it is. I wish I had Jacqueline here all the same. I need a maid, and she could have gone out and got things. But we both felt that any one at all would be a pill. The old woman doesn't bother us, thank goodness. I'm sure she still thinks we're spies. Bother, what's this ?...

Damn ! It's a letter from Basil !

(Note. The original of this letter was destroyed. It is now printed from the carbon copy in the files of Mr. King Lamus. Ed.)

Dear Unlimitted Lou, -Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. You will, I am sure, forgive me for boring you with a letter; but you know what a crank I am, and it is my mania just now to collect information about the psychology of people who are trying to advance spiritually in the way we spoke about when you so charmingly dawned on my studio the other morning.

" Do you find, in particular, that there is any difficulty in calling a halt ? If so, is it not perhaps because you hear on all sides-especially from people quite ignorant of the subject, such as journalists, doctors and parrots

-that it is in fact impossible to do so ? Of course, I don't doubt that you immediately killed any such 'pernicious suggestion' by a counter-suggestion based on my positive statement, from experience, that people of strong character and high intelligence like yourself and Sir Peter-to whom please give my most cordial Greetings !-were perfectly well able to use these things in moderation as one does soap. "

" But, apart from this, do you find that the life of a 'Heroine' makes you abnormally 'suggestible ?'

" As you know, I object to the methods of Coue' and Baudouin. They ask us deliberately to abandon free will and clear mentality for the semi-hypnotic state of the medival peasant ; to return like 'the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire' from which we have been extricated by evolution."

" Now, doesn't waltzing with the Hero's Bride or making Snow Men tend to put you into a state of mind which is too dreamy to resist the action of any strenuous idea which is presented to it strongly enough, is too dead to feeling to wish to resist, or so excitable that it is liable to be carried away by its admiration for any fascinatingly forceful personality ? "

" I should be so glad to have your views on these points ; and, of course, your personal confirmation of my theory that people like you and Sir Peter can use these substances with benefit to yourselves and others, without danger of becoming slaves. I have trained myself and many others to stop at Will ; but every additional affidavit to this effect is of great value to me in my present campaign to destroy the cowardly superstition that manhood and womanhood are incapable of the right and proper use of anything whatever in nature. We have tamed the wild lightning, after all ; shall we run away from a packet of powder ? "

Love is the law, love under will.

With my kind regards to Sir Peter, Yours ever,

" BASIL KING LAMUS."

Satirical, sneering stupidity-or is he a devil incarnate, as Gretel told us he was ? Does he gloat ?

I loathe the beast-and I thought-once-well, never mind! Peter took the letter. Anything, anything to distract the mind from its boredom! Yet we haven't the energy to do anything: we take whatever comes to us, and clutch at it feebly. " It's true," said Cockie, to my amazement, " and we've got to be able to tell him we've won." There was a long quarrel-as there is over every incident of any sort. That is natural, with this eternal insomnia and sleeping at the wrong time. I hated Peter (and K.L.) the more because I knew all the time he was right. If K.L. is a Devil, it's up to us to get the last laugh. I tore the beastly letter into shreds. Peter has gone out-I hope he has gone to kill him. I want to be thrilled-just once moreif I had to be hanged for it myself.

Our watches have run down. It doesn't matter. I can call on Mabel any time I like. I may as well go now. I'll drink a small bottle and go along....

It is night. Cockie has not returned. just when I needed him most ! I'm frightened of myself. I'm stark staring sober. I went to the glass to take my hat off. I didn't know who I was. There is no flesh on my face. My complexion's entirely gone. My hair is lustreless and dry, and it's coming out in handfuls. I think I must be ill. I've a good mind to send for a doctor. But I daren't. It has been a frightful shock !

I must pull myself together and write it up.

It was about five o'clock when I got to Mount Street. If Mabel wasn't in, I could waft.

A strange man answered the door. It annoyed me. I felt frightened. Why had she changed Cartwright ? I felt faint. Had something told me ?

It embarrassed me to ask " Is Mrs. Black at home ? The man answered as if he had been asked the time.

" Mrs. Black is dead."

Something inside me screamed. " But I must see her, " I cried insanely, feeling the ground cut suddenly from under my feet.

" I'm afraid it's impossible, madame," he said, misunderstanding me altogether. " She was buried yesterday morning. "

So that was why she hadn't sent the stuff ! I stood as if I was in a trance. I heard him explaining, mechanically. I did not take in what he was saying. It was like a record being made on a gramophone.

" She was only ill two days," the man said. " The doctors called it septic pneumonia."

I suppose I thanked him, and went away automatically. I found myself at home without knowing how I got here. Something told me that the real cause of her death was heroin, though, as a matter of fact, septic pneumonia can happen to any one at any moment. I've known two or three people go off like that.

As my Uncle John used to say, conscience makes cowards of us all.

King Lamus was always saying that as long as one has any emotion about any thing, love or fear or anything else, one can't observe things correctly. That's why a doctor won't attend his own family, and I can see coldly and clearly like a drowning man that when-ever the idea of H. comes into my mind, I begin to think hysterically and come to the most idiotic conclusions; and heroin has twined itself about my life so closely that everything is connected with it one way or another.

My mind is obsessed by the thought of the drug. Sometimes it's a weird ecstasy, sometimes a dreadful misgiving.

Not thirst in the brain black-bitten In the soul more sorely smitten I One dare not think of the worst I Beyond the raging and raving Hell of the physical craving,

Lies, in the brain benumbed,

At the end of time and space, An abyss, unmeasured, unplumbedThe haunt of a face

September 12

Peter came in just as I had finished writing this account. He seemed much more cheerful, and his arms were full of books.

" There," he said, throwing them on the bed, " that will refresh my memory, in case we have any trouble in stopping. I'll show Mr. King Lamus what it means to be a Pendragon."

I told him about Mabel. And now a strange thing happened. Instead of being depressed, we felt a current of mysterious excitement, rippling at first, then raging and roaring in every nerve. It was as if the idea of her death exhilarated us. He took me in his arms for the first time in-is it weeks or months ? His hot breath coiled like a snake about my ear, and thrilled my hair like an electric machine. With a strange ghastly intensity his voice, trembling with passion, strummed the intoxicating words:

" Olya ! the golden bait

Barbed with infinite pain, Fatal, fanatical mate

Of a poisoned body and brain I Olya, the name that leers

Its lecherous longing and knavery, Whispers in crazing ears

The secret spell of her slavery."

The room swam before my eyes. We were wreathed in spirals of dark blue smoke bursting with crimson flashes.

He gripped me with epileptic fury, and swung me round in a sort of savage dance. I had an intuition that he was seeing the same vision as I was. Our souls were dissolved into one; a giant ghost that enveloped us.

I hissed the next lines through my teeth, feeling myself a fire-breathing dragon.

Horror indeed intense,

Seduction ever intenser,

Swinging the smoke of sense

From the bowl of a smouldering censer !

We were out of breath. My boy sat on the edge of the bed. I crept up behind him. I shook out my hair all over his face, and dug my nails into his scalp.

We were living the heroin life, the life of the world of the soul. We had identified ourselves with the people of the poem. He was the poet, wreathed with poppies, with poisonous poppies that corrupted his blood, and I was the phantom of his delirium, the hideous vampire that obsessed him.

Little drops of blood oozed from his scalp and clotted to black under my greedy nails. He spoke the next lines as if under some cruel compulsion. The words were wrenched from him by some overwhelming necessity. His tone was colourless, as if the ultimate anguish had eaten up his soul. And all this agony and repulsion exercised a foul fascination. He suffered a paroxysm of pleasure such as pleasure itself had never been able to give him. And I was Olya, I was his love, his wife, world without end, the demon whose supreme delight was to destroy him.

" Behind me, behind and above, She stands, that mirror of love. Her fingers are subtle-jointed Her nafls are polished and pointed, And tipped with spurs of gold: With them she rowels the brain. Her lust is critical, cold ;

And her Chinese cheeks are pale, As she daintily picks, profane With her octopus lips, and the teeth jagged and black beneath,

Pulp and blood from a nail."

I jerked his head back, and fastened my mouth on his. I sucked his breath into my lungs. I wanted to choke him ; but there was time enough for that. I would torture him a few years longer first.

I leapt away from him. He panted heavily. When he got his breath back, he glared at me horribly with the pin-point pupils of his sightless eyes.

He began with romantic sadness, changing to demoniac glee.

" She was incarnate love

In the hours when I first awoke her. Little by little I found

The truth of her, stripped of clothing, Bitter beyond all bound,

Leprous beyond all loathing."

We shouted with delight, and fell into a fit of hysterical laughter. We came out of it completely exhausted. I must have slept for a while.

When I woke he was sitting at the table under the yellow gas jet, reading the books he had bought.

Somehow, the past had been washed out of us. We found ourselves intent on the idea of stopping H.; and the books didn't help very much. They were written in a very positive way. The writers quarrelled among themselves like a Peace Conference.

But they all agreed on two points : that it was beyond the bounds of human possibility to break off the habit by one's own efforts. At the best, the hope was pitifully poor. The only chance was a " cure " in a place of restraint. And they all gave very full details of the horrors and dangers of the process. The physician, they said, must steel his heart against every human feeling, and refuse inexorably the petitions of the patient. Yet he must always be ready with his syringe, in case of a sudden collapse threatening life itself.

There were three principal methods of cure: Cutting the drug off at once, and trust to the patient's surviving ; then there was a long tedious method of diminishing the daily dose. It was a matter of months. During the whole of the time, the agony of the patient continues in a diluted form. It was the choice between plunging into boiling oil and being splashed with it every day for an indefinite period. Then there was an intermediate method in which the daily amount was reduced by a series of jerks. As Peter said, one was to be sentenced to be flogged at irregular intervals without knowing exactly when. One would be living in a state of agonising apprehension which would probably be more morally painful than in either of the other ways.

In all cases alike there was no hint of any true comprehension of the actual situation. There was no attempt to remove the original causes of the habit ; and they all admitted that the cure was only temporary, and that the rule was relapse.

There was also a horribly disquieting impression that the patient could not trust the honesty of the doctor. Some of them openly advocated attempts to deceive the patient by injecting plain water. Others had a system of giving other drugs in conjunction with the permitted dose, with the deliberate intention of making the patient so ill that he would rather bear the tortures of abstention than those devised by his doctor.

I felt too, that if I went to one of those places, I should never know what trick might be played on me next. They were cruel, clumsy traps set by ignorant and heartless charlatans. I began to understand the intensity of jealousy with which the regular physician regards the patent-medicine vender and the Christian scientist.

They were witch-doctors with a licence from government to torture and kill at extravagant prices. They guarded their prerogatives with such ferocity because they were aware of their own ignorance and incompetence; and if their victims found them out their swindle would be swept away. They were always trying to extend their tyranny. They were always wanting new laws to compel everybody, sick or well, to be bound to the vivisection table, and have some essential organ of the body cut out. And they were brazen enough to give the reason. They didn't understand what use it was ! And everybody must be injected with all sorts of disgusting serums and vaccines ostensibly to protect them against some disease which there was no reason whatever to suppose they were likely to get....

The last three days have been too dreadful. This is the first time I have felt like writing, and yet I have been itching insanely to put down that hideously luxurious scene when our love broke out like an abscess. All the old fantastic features were there. They had assumed a diabolical disguise; but my mind has been in abeyance. We shut the medical books with a shudder, and slung them out of the window into the street. A little crowd gathered; they were picked up, and the passers-by began talking about what was to be done. We realised the rashness of our rage. The last thing was to attract attention ! We pulled the frowsy old curtains across, and put out the light.

The reaction of our reading was terrific. We Venomously contrasted the calm confidence of King Lamus with the croaking clamour of the " authorities."

Cockie summed up the situation with a quotation.

"Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore !"'

Our thoughts splashed to and fro like an angry sea in a cave. These three days have been a flux of fugitive emotion. We are resolved to stop taking H. ; and there the memory of Lamus's letter was like a rope held by a trustworthy leader for a novice on some crumbling crag.

If we could only have relied on that ! But our minds were shaken by panic.

Those cursed medical cowards! Those pompous prophets of evil ! Every time we came back to the resolution to stop, they pulled us off the rock.

" It's beyond human power."

But they -know which side their bread's buttered. it's their game to discourage their dupes.

But they had over-played their hand. They had painted their picture in too crude colours. They revolted us.

Again, the effect of Mabel's death, and the fact that our supplies were so short, combined to drive us into the determination to stop at whatever cost.

We struggled savagely hour by hour. There were moments when the abstinence itself purged us by sheer pain of the capacity to suffer. Our. minds began to wander. We were whirled on the wings of woe across the flaming skies of anguish.

I remember Peter standing at the table, lost to all sense of actuality. He cried in a shrill, cracked voice

" Her cranial dome is vaulted, Her mad Mongolian eyes Aslant with the ecstasies Of things immune, exalted Far beyond stars and skies, Slits of amber and jet-"

I heard him across abysses of aching inanity. A thrill of Satanic triumph tingled in my soul, and composed a symphony from its screams. I leapt with lust to recognise myself in the repulsive phantasm pictured by the poet.

" Her snout for the quarry set Fleshy and heavy and gross,

Bestial, broken across,

And below it her mouth that drips Blood from the lips

That hide the fangs of the snake, Drips on venomous udders '

Mountainous flanks that fret, And the spirit sickens and shudders At the hint of a worse thing yet."

We had, on the other side, some spasms of weakness; a ghastly sensation of the sinking of the spirit. It's the same unescapable dread that seizes one when one is in a lift which starts down too quickly, or when one swoops too suddenly in a 'plane. Waves of weakness washed over us as if we were corpses cast up by the sea from a shipwreck. A shipwreck of our souls.

And in these hideous hours of helplessness, we drifted down the dark and sluggish river of inertia towards the stagnant and stinking morass of insanity.

We were obsessed by the certainty that we could never pull through. We said nothing at first. We were sunk in a solemn stupor. When it found voice at last, it was to whimper the surrender. The Unconditional Surrender of our integrity and our honour !

We eked out our small allowance of H. with doses of strychnine to ward off the complete collapse of all our physical faculties, and we picked ourselves up a bit on the moral plane by means of champagne.

In these moments of abdication we talked in fragile whispers, plans for getting supplies. We had both of of us a certain shame in admitting to each other that we were renegades. We felt that in future we should never be able to indulge frankly and joyously as we had hitherto done. We should become furtive and cunning; we should conceal from each other what we were doing, although it was obvious to us both.

I slipped out this afternoon on tiptoe, thinking Peter was asleep, but he turned like a startled snake just as I made for the door.

" Where are you going, Lou ? "

His voice was both piteous and harsh. I had not thought of inventing a pretext; but a lie slipped readymade from my tongue.

" I am going to Basil, to see if he can't give me something to help us out."

I knew he didn't believe me, and I knew he didn't care where I went or what I did. He was not shocked at my lying to him-the first time I had ever done so.

I took a taxi round to the studio. My lie was half truth. I was going to ask him to help in the cure ; but my real object was to induce him, no matter how, to give me at least one dose. I didn't care how I got it. I would try pretending illness. I would appeal to our old relations, and I would look about slyly to see if I couldn't find some and steal it. And I didn't mean to let Peter know.

On the top of everything else was the torture of shame. I had always been proud of my pride. A subtle serenity made my brain swim when I got into the street. It delighted me to be alone-to have got rid of Peter. I felt him as a restraining influence, and I had shaken him off. I despised myself for having loved him. I wanted to go to the devil my own way.

I found Basil in, and alone. What luck ! That hateful tall thin girl was out of the way.

Basil received me with his usual greeting. It stung me to the quick like an insult. What right had he to reproach me ? And why should " Do what thou wilt " sound like a reproach ?

As a rule he added something to the phrase. He slid into ordinary conversation with a kind of sinuous grace. There was always something feline about him. He reminded me of a beautiful, terrible tiger winding his way through thick jungle.

But to-day, he stopped short with dour decision. It was as if he had fired a shot, and was waiting to see the effect. But he motioned me silently into my usual arm-chair, lit a cigarette for me and put it into mv mouth, switched in the electric kettle for tea, and sat on the corner of his big square table swinging his leg. His eyes were absolutely motionless ; yet I felt that they were devouring my body and soul inch by inch.

I wriggled on my chair as I used to do at school when I didn't feel sure whether I had been found out in something or not.

I tried to cover my confusion by starting a light conversation ; but I soon gave it up. He was taking no notice of my remarks. To him they were simply one of my symptoms.

I realised with frightful certitude that my plans were impossible. I couldn't fool this man, I couldn't play on his passions, I couldn't steal in his presence.

Despite myself, my lie had become the truth. I could only do what I said I was coming to do ; to ask him to help me out. No, not even that. I had not got rid of Peter after all.

With King Lamus, I found I couldn't think of myself. I had to think of Peter. I was absolutely sincere when I said with a break in my voice, " Cockie's in an awful mess."

I had it in my mind to add, " Can't you do something to help him ? " and then I changed it to " Won't you ? " and then I couldn't say it at all. I knew it was wasting words. I knew that he could and he would.

He came over and sat on the arm of my chair, and took down my hair, and began playing with the plaits. The action was as absolutely natural and innocent as a kitten playing with a skein of wool.

It stabbed my vanity to the heart for a second to realise that he could do a thing like that without mixing it up with sexual ideas. Yet it was that very superiority to human instincts that made me trust him.

" Sir Peter's not here," he said lightly and kindly,

I knew that it had pleased him that I had not mentioned my own troubles.

" But it's you, my dear girl, that I see in my wizard's spy-glass, on a lee shore with your masts all gone by the board, and the Union Jack upside down flying from a stump, and your wireless hero tapping out S.O.S."

He dropped my hair and lighted his pipe. Then he began to play with it again.

" And some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, they all came safe to land."

One's familiarity with the New Testament makes a quotation somehow significant, however little one may believe in the truth of the book.

I felt that his voice was the voice of a prophet. I felt myself already saved.

" You take some of this," he went on, bringing a white tablet from a little cedar cabinet, and a big glass of cold water. " Throw your head back, and get it well down, and drink all this right off. Here is another to take home to your husband, and don't forget the water. It will calm you down; your nerves have all gone west. I've got some people coming here in a few minutes. But this will help you through the night, and I'm coming round in the morning to see you. What's the address ? "

I told him. My face blazed with the disgrace. A house where the top social note was a fifth-rate musician in a jazz-band, and the bottom where we don't give it a name.

He jotted it down as if it had been the Ritz. But I could feel in my over-sensitive state the disgust in his mind. It was as if he had soiled his pencil.

The tablet made me feel better ; but I think that the atmosphere of the man did more than its share of the work. I felt nearly normal when I got up to go. I didn't want his friends to see me. I knew too well what I was looking like.

He stopped me at the door.

" You haven't any of that stuff, I take it ? " he said.

And I felt an inexpressible sense of relief. His tone implied that he had taken charge of us.

" No," I said, " we used up the last grain some time ago."

" I won't ask you to remember when," he replied.

I know too well how muddled one gets. And besides, when one starts this experiment, the clock doesn't tell one much, as you know."

My self-respect came back to me with a rush. He insisted on our regarding ourselves as pioneers of science and humanity. We were making an experiment; we were risking life and reason for the sake of mankind.

Of course, it wasn't true. And yet, who can tell the real root of one's motives ? If he chose to insist that we were doing what the leaders of thought have always done, how could I contradict him ?

A buoyant billow of bliss bounded in my brain. It might not be true; but, by God, we'd make it come true.

I suppose a light leapt in my eyes, and enabled him to read my thought.

Respice finem ! judge the end;

The man, and not the child, my friend !

he quoted gaily.

And then, to my absolute blank amazement, he took me back into the studio, got a bottle of heroin from the cedar cabinet and shook out a small quantity on to a scrap of paper. He twisted it up, and put it in my hand.

" Don't be surprised," he laughed, " your face tells me that it's all right. You hadn't got that look of a dying duck in a thunderstorm which shows that you're wholly enslaved. As Sir Peter very cleverly pointed out the other day, you can't stop unless you've got something to stop with. You're keeping your magical diary, of course."

" Oh, yes," I cried gladly, I knew how important he thought the record was.

He shook his head comically.

" Oh, no, Miss Unlimited Lou, not what I call a magical diary. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for not knowing the hours, minutes, and seconds since the last dose. Nous allons changer tout cela. You can take this if you like, and when you like. I merely put it up to you as a sort of sporting proposition that you should see how long you can manage to keep off it. But I trust you to make a note of the exact time when you decide on a sniff, and I trust you to tell me the truth. Get it out of your mind once for all that I disapprove of your taking it. It's entirely your business, not mine. But it's every one's business to be true to himself ; and you must regard me as a mere convenience, an old hand at the game whose experience may be of use to you in training for the fight."

I hurried home a different woman. I didn't want to save myself. I felt myself as a suit of armour made for the purpose of protecting Peter. My integrity was important not for my own sake but for his.

Peter is out, so I have written this up. How surprised he will be....

I wonder why he is so long, and where he has gone. It is very uncomfortable, waiting, with nothing to do. I should like a dose. The tablet has not made me sleepy; it seems to have calmed me. It has taken the edge off that hateful restlessness. I can bear it as far as that goes, if only I had something to do to take my mind off things. My mind keeps prowling around the little packet of paper in my bag. I turn a thousand comers; but it is always waiting behind all of them. There is something terrifying about the fatality of the stuff. It seems to want to convince you that it's useless to try to escape. One's thoughts always recur to lots of other subjects which we don't think of as obsessing. Why should we have this idea in connection with dope and be unable to do anything to throw it off ? What's the difference ?