"The smoke of a cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its waves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence and impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand—and that is not a Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the section of a sea-wave—its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a single moment, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicate directions."
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Essayists from EnglandPoets from EnglandActivists from EnglandCritics from the United KingdomEditors from England
Original Language: English
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'A sibyl smoking a cigarette' is how one of Meynell's contemporaries characterized her.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alice_Meynell
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Alice Meynell
Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson Meynell (11 October 1847 – 27 November 1922) was an English writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet.
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