“Then? Oh, you can have a good time. You can have the best of good times in London—the very best—and forget everything disagreeable, too. I give you my word, it is just like morphia. When I am in a hole, and feel down on my luck, I go to town.”
“Is that the fog? I think I should not like the after effect of morphia.”
“Fog?” he asked. “No, it isn’t fog, and yet it is fog, too; it deadens the brain. When someone threw me over, you bet I felt bad. I went up to town and forgot for a week. I did, really.”
“A week! It lost its effect in a week, so quickly?”
“Well, she wrote then and forgave me, and I hadn’t done anything wrong; she flirted. But she took me back, and I just licked her boots.”
“But suppose she had not taken you back?”
“Then I should have lived and forgotten her; I’m hanged if I wouldn’t,” he said, with energy. “Life does it.”
“Life?—you mean time.”
“I mean living it down.”
“But suppose you could not forget? Suppose you were so fond that you thought of her always?”