He turned to his bottles. “These dope fiends!” he muttered exasperated, to them.
“Dope fiends!” the girl repeated stupidly. “A drug! Oh, don’t tell me,” she cried agonizedly, “—it’s—”
“Since the new laws, you will find opium impossible to get. So I tell them all—and they go crazy!”
Julie stared with wildly dilated eyes, her bloodless lips parted as if to protest. Then she fell against the counter. There was a dead hush in the deserted place. Not even a fly buzzed through the scorching silence. Julie tried to lift her paralyzed arms to ward something off. She was dreaming. She had taken too much medicine. Things like this didn’t happen!
But there, blistering her, was the chemist’s cynical gaze. Day by day she had been moving towards this wall—a blind dupe. She had had a sunstroke on Adams’s grave, and an old woman had offered her some medicine for it, and out of this simple sequence destruction had appeared. The avalanche of final ruin swept over the girl’s fevered mind. She had been dragged down—clear down. The slow but inevitable juggernaut of the East had pulled her under at last, “grist for the mill—you and I,” Adams had said long ago. Out of a clear sky had fallen this final, cruel joke.
“What am I to do?” The piteous question seemed, to fall on rather than be directed to the chemist.
“Why then did you begin?”
She repeated her story lamely, disjointedly and in tears, conscious of its futility—Kantz was so fatally incredulous.
“After a time,” he told the bottles, “they cannot tell the truth.”
The girl looked at him with terrible despair.