Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/351

Rh your mind while you sat there staring at the wall, tossing the cigar about between your lips, puffing the smoke to the ceiling, knocking off the ashes against the edge of the table, to begin anew and puff, and making a round hole of your mouth for the smoke to escape in circles into the air?'

"He answered: ‘So long as my nerves had not become completely obtuse the tobacco induced a sort of intoxication, during which I could give myself up to indefinite phantasies. That was especially the case after dinner when the body was inclined to indolence, anyway, and the energy of the mind had relaxed. It was the natural indolence of digestion, rendered romantic by the listlessness of artificial stupidity. Later this effect ceased, and the dullness came of its own accord, by the mere belief that the tobacco would cause it. Smoking had become a mere matter of thoughtless and purposeless habit, and I would no longer have known that I was smoking at all if I had not seen the smoke before my face. But now the smoke became the chief thing; I imagined that it was entertaining, a comfort, a "pleasure" to blow the smoke into the air. Therefore, I practiced the art of blowing smoke with variations; now I would blow the smoke from the middle of the mouth, now from the right, now from the left corner, now through the nose. Then again I would expel it while I held the cigar between my lips, and the next time I would take the cigar in my hand. Yes, I even learned to make an essential difference