Constance did not share in the applause.  At last she understood.  Adele was a dope fiend, too.  She felt it with a sense of pain.  Always, she knew, the fiends tried to get away alone somewhere for a few minutes to snuff some of their favorite nepenthe.  She had heard before of the cocaine “snuffers” who took a little of the deadly powder, placed it on the back of the hand, and inhaled it up the nose with a quick intake of breath.  Adele was one.  It was not Adele who danced.  It was the dope.

Constance was determined to speak.

“You remember that man the girls spoke of?” she began.

“Yes.  What of him?” asked Adele with almost a note of defiance.

“Well, I really do know him,” confessed Constance.  “He is a detective.”

Constance watched her companion curiously, for at the mere word she had stopped short and faced her.  “He is?” she asked quickly.  “Then that was why Dr. Price—­”

She managed to suppress the remark and continued her walk home without another word.

In Adele’s little apartment Constance was quick to note that the same haggard look had returned to her friend’s face.

Adele had reached for her pocketbook with a sort of clutching eagerness and was about to leave the room.

Constance rose.  “Why don’t you give up the stuff?” she asked earnestly.  “Don’t you want to?”

For a moment Adele faced her angrily.  Then her real nature seemed slowly to come to the surface.  “Yes,” she murmured frankly.

“Then why don’t you?” pleaded Constance.

“I haven’t the power.  There is an indescribable excitement to do something great, to make a mark.  It’s soon gone, but while it lasts, I can sing, dance, do anything—­and then—­every part of my body begins crying for mere of the stuff again.”

There was no longer any necessity of concealment from Constance.  She took a pinch of the stuff, placed it on the back of her wrist and quickly sniffed it.  The change in her was magical.  From a quivering wretched girl she became a self-confident neurasthenic.

“I don’t care,” she laughed hollowly now.

“Yes, I know what you are going to tell me.  Soon I’ll be ’hunting the cocaine bug,’ as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals running around and biting me.”

She said it with a half-reckless cynicism.  “Oh, you don’t know.  There are two souls in the cocainist—­one tortured by the pain of not having the stuff, the other laughing and mocking at the dangers of it.  It stimulates.  It makes your mind work—­without effort, by itself.  And it gives such visions of success, makes you feel able to do so much, and to forget.  All the girls use it.”

“Where do they get it?” asked Constance “I thought the new law prohibited it.”

“Get it?” repeated Adele.  “Why, they get it from that fellow they call ‘Sleighbells.’  They call it ‘snow,’ you know, and the girls who use it ‘snowbirds.’  The law does prohibit its sale, but—­”