“It is ages since I smelt honeysuckle,” she confessed, “except in a perfumer's shop. I was wondering what it reminded me of.”
“That,” he said, as they turned out into the broad main road, with its long vista of telegraph poles, “is because you have been neglecting the real for the sham, flowers themselves for their artificially distilled perfume. What I was going to try and put into words without sounding too priggish, Lady Cynthia,” he went on, “is this. It is just you people who are cursed with a restless brain who are in the most dangerous position, nowadays. The things which keep us healthy and normal physically—games, farces, dinner-parties of young people, fresh air and exercise—are the very things which after a time fail to satisfy the person with imagination. You want more out of life, always the something you don't understand, the something beyond. And so you keep on trying new things, and for every new thing you try, you drop an old one. Isn't it something like that?”
“I suppose it is,” she admitted wearily.
“Drugs take the place of wholesome wine,” he went on, warming to his subject. “The hideous fascination of flirting with the uncouth or the impossible some way or another, stimulates a passion which simple means have ceased to gratify. You seek for the unusual in every way—in food, in the substitution of absinthe for your harmless Martini, of cocaine for your stimulating champagne. There is a horrible wave of all this sort of thing going on to-day in many places, and I am afraid,” he concluded, “that a great many of our very nicest young women are caught up in it.”
“Guilty,” she confessed. “Now cure me.”
“I could point out the promised land, but how, could I lead you to it?” he answered.
“You don't like me well enough,” she sighed.
“I like you better than you believe,” he assured her, slackening his speed a little. “We have met, I suppose, a dozen times in our lives. I have danced with you here and there, talked nonsense once, I remember, at a musical reception—”
“I tried to flirt with you then,” she interrupted.
He nodded.