“If you only knew!” she cried. “It seems to me, as I realize what sort of woman I am, that I am almost worthy of _you_!” And she blazed a look at me that left me rooted there, astounded. But I went down the avenue with a light heart. “Just like a woman,” I was saying to myself cheerfully, “not to know her own mind.” A few blocks, and I stopped and laughed outright--at Langdon's treachery, at my own credulity. “What an ass I've been making of myself!” said I to myself. And I could see myself as I really had been during those months of social struggling--an ass, braying and gamboling in a lion's skin--to impress the ladies! “But not wholly to no purpose,” I reflected, again all in a glow at thought of Anita. XIX. A WINDFALL FROM “GENTLEMAN JOE” I went to my rooms, purposing to go straight to bed, and get a good sleep. I did make a start toward undressing; then I realized that I should only lie awake with my brain wearing me out, spinning crazy thoughts and schemes hour after hour--for my imagination rarely lets it do any effective thinking after the lights are out and the limitations of material things are wiped away by the darkness. I put on a dressing-gown and seated myself to smoke and to read. When I was very young, new to New York, in with the Tenderloin crowd and up to all sorts of pranks, I once tried opium smoking. I don't think I ever heard of anything in those days without giving it a try. Usually, I believe, opium makes the smoker ill the first time or two; but it had no such effect on me, nor did it fill my mind with fantastic visions. On the contrary, it made everything around me intensely real--that is, it enormously stimulated my dominant characteristic of accurate observation. I noticed the slightest details--such things as the slight difference in the length of the arms of the Chinaman who kept the “joint,” the number of buttons down the front of the waist of the girl in the bunk opposite mine, across the dingy, little, sweet-scented room. Nothing escaped me, and also I was conscious of each passing second, or, rather, fraction of a second. As a rule, time and events, even when one is quietest, go with such a rush that one notes almost nothing of what is passing. The opium seemed to compel the kaleidoscope of life to turn more slowly; in fact, it sharpened my senses so that they unconsciously took impressions many times more quickly and easily and accurately. As I sat there that night after leaving Anita, forcing my mind to follow the printed lines, I found I was in exactly the state in which I had been during my one experiment with opium. It seemed to me that as many days as there had been hours must have elapsed since I got the news of the raised Textile dividend. Days--yes, weeks, even months, of thought and action seemed to have been compressed into those six hours--for, as I sat there, it was not yet eleven o'clock.