MS-WU-MSS008-3-49

[1144] my appetite. [1145] My appetite! [1146] What a subject. For conversation. [1148] I had
hardly any. I ate like a thrush. But the little I did eat I devoured
with a voracity usually attributed to heavy eaters, and wrongly, for
heq^avy eaters as a rule eat ponderously and with method, that follows
from the very notion of heavy eater. [1149] Whereas I flung myself at the
Eintopf, swallowed the half or the quarter of it in two mouthfuls worthy
of a fish of prey, I mean without chewing (with what would I have chewed?)
then pushed it from me with loathing.

[1150] One would have thought I ate to
live! [1151] Similarly I would engulf five or six Imperial pints of porter with
one gulp, then drink nothing for a week. [1152] What do you expect, one is what
one is, partly at least. [1153] Nothing or little to be done. [1154] Now as to the
substances she insinuated thus into my various systems, I could not say
whether they were stimulants or whether they were not rather depressants.

[1155] The truth is, kinaesthetically speaking of course, I felt more or less
the same as usual, viz — betrayal! — so terror-stricken that in a
sense I lost the power of feeling, not to say consciousness, and drowned
in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams, I give
you my word. [1156] Against such harmony of what avail the miserable molys of
Lousse, administered in infinitesimal doses probably, to draw the pleasure
out.

[1157] Not that they remained entirely without effc^eect, no, that woud^ld be
an exaggeration. [1158] For from time to time I caught myself making a little
lep in the air, two or three feet off the ground at least, at least, I
who never leaped. [1159] It looked like levitation. [1160] And it happened too, what
was less surprising, when I was walking, or even propped up against
something, that I suddenly collapsed, like a puppet when its strings are
dropped, and lay long where I fell, literally boneless.

[1161] Yes, that seemed
to me strange for I was used to collapsing thus, but with this difference,
that I felt it coming, and prepared myself accordingly, as an epileptic
will when he feels the fit coming on. [1162] I mean that knowing I was going