An ordinary tobacco smoker cannot remain for
long among those who are enjoying the fragrant weed without catching
the infection and beginning to smoke also. Twice to redouble the lure
of my lady Nicotine would be but loosely to estimate the seductiveness
of the Spirit of the Poppy; yet Sir Lucien Pyne smoked one pipe with
Mrs. Sin, and perceiving her to be already in a state of dreamy
abstraction, loaded a second, but in his own case with a fragment of
cigarette stump which smouldered in a tray upon the table. His was
that rare type of character whose possessor remains master of his
vices.
Following the fourth pipe--Pyne, after the second, had ceased to
trouble to repeat his feat of legerdemain, "The sleep" claimed Mrs.
Sin. Her languorous eyes closed, and her face assumed that rapt
expression of Buddha-like beatitude which Rita had observed at
Kilfane's flat. According to some scientific works on the subject,
sleep is not invariably induced in the case of Europeans by the use of
chandu. Loosely, this is true. But this type of European never becomes
an habitue; the habitue always sleeps. That dream-world to which opium
alone holds the key becomes the real world "for the delights of which
the smoker gladly resigns all mundane interests.
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