The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion. Claude arranged a glass of it, much diluted with water, for the benefit of his hostess, and she began to sip it with an air of determined reverence. "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. "I rather admire you for drinking this stuff," she said. "I am sure you do it to mortify the flesh. A Lenten penance out of Lent is most invigorating to the mind." As Claude went up to dress, he felt as if he never wished to touch absinthe again. The glitter of its personality was dulled for him now that it was looked upon as merely a nasty sort of medicine to be indulged in as a mortification of the flesh, like wearing a hair shirt, or rejecting meat on Fridays. He found Miss Haddon painfully prosaic. It seemed almost silly to be a decadent in her company. To feel Turkish alone was graceful and quaint, almost intellectual, but to have an old lady feeling Turkish, too, and squatting on the floor to emphasise the sensation, was tragic, seemed to bring imbecility very near. Claude dressed with unusual agitation, and made a distinct failure of his tie. All through dinner Miss Haddon talked optimistically about her prospects as a successful decadent, much as if she were discussing her future on the Stock Exchange, or as the editor of a paper. She calculated that at her present rate of progress she ought to be almost on a level with her guest by the end of the week, and spoke hopefully of ceasing to take any interest in the ordinary facts of life, of learning a proper contempt for all healthy-minded humanity, and of appreciating at its proper value what seems to ordinary people, weak-kneed affection in literature, in art, and, above all, in movement and in appearance. Her bright eyes flashed upon Claude beneath her crown of powdered hair, as she talked, and the big room rang with her jovial voice.