“Too much of what?” asked Sophy, looking up.
“Oh, there are many secrets in Rangoon,” said Fuchsia, nodding her head; “I have grasped that, although I have only been here two months, and you a whole year. Have you never noticed anything? Have you no suspicions about people?”
“No—not of anything that matters. I suspect that the eldest Miss Wiggin rouges and darkens her eyebrows, that Lady Puffle wears a wig, and that the Grahams are thoroughly sick of their paying guest. But you are ten times cleverer than I am, Fuchsia, and, according to Mr. Gregory, singularly intelligent and acute.”
“Acute—rubbish!” Fuchsia dismissed the idea with a gesture of her tiny hand. “I’m not thinking of wigs, or paint, or such piffle. Say, have you never heard of the cocaine business?”
“Oh, yes; Mr. Shafto is tremendously keen on the subject.”
“Pat FitzGerald is mad about it, too, and is having a great big try to rope in the boss smugglers. He has told me the most terrible tales. Once the drug—it’s cocaine and morphia mixed—gets a fast hold of a man, or woman, he or she is doomed!”
“Oh, Fuchsia, surely not so bad as that!”
“It’s true; the poor thieve to get a few annas to spend in the dens; the rich and educated buy it by stealth, and absorb it at home in secret.”
“What are the symptoms?” inquired Sophy. “Have you ever seen anyone who took those drugs?”
“Well, I could not say,” she answered evasively; “but I am aware that the symptoms are unaccountable drowsiness and lethargy, followed by a deathlike sleep, and, they say, the most heavenly dreams. Later, the dreamer wakes up, haggard, feverish, and miserable; the skin has a dried, shrunken look. And you can always tell a drug-taker by the eyes; the pupil is either as small as a pin’s point or else enormously enlarged.”