nd penitence. I doubt if the best woman in
Christendom would so reproach and abase herself, if convicted of even
a worse sin than the secret use of those stimulants for which the
_charny_ is a Martial equivalent. No Martialist would dream of
poisoning his blood and besotting his brain with alcohol in any form.
But their opiates affect a race addicted to physical repose, to
sensuous enjoyment rather than to sensual excitement, and to lucid
intellectual contemplation, with a sense of serene delight as
supremely delicious to their temperament as the dreamy illusions of
haschisch to the Turk, the fierce frenzy of bhang to the Malay, or the
wild excitement of brandy or Geneva to the races of Northern Europe.
But as with the luxury of intoxication in Europe, so in Mars
indulgence in these drugs, freely permitted to the one sex, is
strictly forbidden by opinion and domestic rule to the other. A lady
discovered in the use of _charny_ is as deeply disgraced as an
European matron detected in the secret enjoyment of spirits and
cigars; and her lord and master takes care to render her sufficiently
conscious of her fault.

And there was something stranger here than a violation of the
artificial restraint of sex. Slightly and seldom as the Golden Circle
touches the lines defining personal or social morality--carefully as
the Founder has abstained from imposing an ethical code of his own, or
attaching to his precepts any rule not directly derived from the
fundamental tenets or necessary to the cohesion of the Order--he had
expressed in strong terms his dread and horror of narcotism; the use
for pleasure's sake, not to relieve pain or nervous excitement, of
drugs which act, as he said, through the brain upon the soul. His
judgment, expressed with unusual directness and severity and enforced
by experience, has become with his followers a tradition not less
imperative than the most binding of their laws. It was so held, above
all, in that household in which Eveena and I had first learnt the
"lore of the Starlight." Esmo, indeed, regarded not merely as an
unscientific superstition, but as blasphemous folly, the rejection of
any means of restoring health or relieving pain which Providence has
placed within human reach. But he abhorred the use for pleasure's sake
of poisons affirmed to reduce the activity and in the long-run to
impair the energies of the mind, and weaken the moral sense and the
will, more intensely than the strictest follo