“It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt,” she said after a while.
Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.
“When they drag a trail over a course and satisfy the hounds with a dead rabbit at the end of it,” she explained.
“My dear lady,” he protested plaintively. “Really, you do not grasp the inner meaning of what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect sensation will steal over you, a curious happy detachment from everything, as if you were floating in some exquisite element. You will not care what happens, or what—”
“But must I drink it all before I feel detached?” she asked. “It's really so very nasty, quite disgusting to the taste. Surely you think so.”
“I drink it for its after-effect.”
“Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the moment, and gives us the pleasure of self-satisfaction ultimately?”
“I don't know,” the boy exclaimed abruptly. To compare absinthe to a good act seemed to him quite intolerable.
He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was glad when the dressing gong sounded in the hall.
Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.