of the bone, I would not
allow the doctor to give me any narcotic. You remember my protests
against that form of relief.

I was afraid. I trembled not only with pain. I trembled with terror.

I believed I was on the threshold of danger. I felt the impending of
ruin. Though I had never experienced the sensation of an opiate I even
found my body already crying for its comfort. I found myself struggling
hour after hour with a desire to try myself. I alternated between a
belief that I was strong enough for the test and the instinct that told
me the blood in my veins was waiting like a wild animal to pounce upon a
first form of self-indulgence.

At last I yielded.

"There is no harm in the proper use of this," said the doctor, seeing
my expression,--"by a woman of your type."

I laughed in his face.

I hardly recognized the sound of this laugh; it was not my own. It was
the laugh of a new personality. It was care-free and desperate at one
time.

"There is no need of your suffering so terribly after each adjustment I
make of these cords," said the doctor a few days later, sympathetically.

"But I suffer so at night," said I.

"I will leave you something," said he. "Do not use it oftener than
necessary."

Why should I tell you the imperceptible steps by which, partly because I
believed myself destined to become a victim, I fell an abject slave to
this drug? I need only say that while my arm was still suffering from
its injury I gave myself false promises from time to time. "When the
pain is gone," I said a thousand times, "there will be no need of this
comforter."

When I was obliged to admit that I suffered no more, it was a shock to
find myself secretly procuring the opiate in order to continue its use
undiscovered.

"This will be the last time," I often said.

Then something laughed within me.

It was my blood laughing. It was my blood mocking me.

I began to experience a cycle of terrible emotions which consumed my
days. They began with shame, with injured pride, and terrible grief.
They then passed first to vain resolves, then to fear of myself,
followed by the feeling that what must be is inevitable and that
struggle to escape from the weakness given me by birth was hopeless.
This belief led me over and over again to surrender, but with surrender
came the fear of exposure of my new secret.

As long as I dared I used a prescription which the doctor had given me.
I made guilty trips to the drug store