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MY ESCAPE FROM MORPHINE
T H E R E I was, without a friend
in the world, immured for life
in a New England town that
had been going down hill ever
since the Civil War. I had
nothing to do, nobody to talk to, and no
hope that anything would ever be better.
The only unattached man in the whole
place was the ticket-agent at the railway
station. Every other male person of
marriageable age either was
married already, or hopeless.
For a while
1 made a pretense
of exerc
i s i n g my
horses. I even
made two or
three attempts
to sell the m.
Then I took to having hea
aches. Often I spent the whole
day indoors without once dressing
for the street. I took morphine first
because I had a sick headache. Then I
took it because it seemed better than
committing suicide. When the supply
my father had left was gone I got more
from the druggist. He knew that I
knew he was a victim himself and he did
not dare refuse me. Of course I made
desperate attempts to escape. Twenty
times that first year I quit. And then
when a headache or a black mood descended
on me I began again. What
was the use of quitting? Life wasn't
worth living. And the more morphine
I took the less worth living it seemed.
Then one day as I was sitting in the
bow-window I saw a strange young" man
pass. He was tall, with a fine lean face.
I liked his looks. I turned and looked
at myself in the mirror at the end of the
room. I was pale—a kind of yellow
paleness—and thin. There was a drawn
look about my eves. But worst of all I
looked as if I had been tired for vears.
I was twenty-two years old, a girl who
had never been ill in bed in her life, and
yet I had all the abounding vitality of a
—dish-cloth.
I took to watching for that young
man. The contrast between his springwalk
and my slumping obsessed me. In
the course of a week I found out that
he was a civil engineer wdio was superintending
construction work on the railway.
There was a big bridge
to be built and a short tunnel to
be run within
four or five
miles of our
town. I wanted
more than anything
else in
the world to
meet that
young man on terms of equality.
I quit taking morphine so I
could—perhaps not a very high motive,
but the truth, nevertheless.
In a way that is the whole story of
my escape. It was a case of love at first
sight I suppose. At least it was a case
of arousing a motive stronger than the
desire for morphine.
I say the motive was stronger because
it eventually conquered. It wasn't
stronger all at once. Three days after
I had decided to quit I yielded again.
The craving was intolerable. I had not
the energy to move. I had an ache in
every bone. I could not eat. My mood
grew blacker and blacker. My hope of
knowing the young engineer, of at last
having some one to talk to who came
from the city and who could share my
interests and enthusiasms, seemed absurd.
Why should he be interested in
me ?
The relief of the white tablet? was
almost instantaneous. If it required an
hour for the drug to take its full effect
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