delicious vocable! And
the contrast with what his own nostrils reported to his consciousness
made him slightly shiver. It was on a Friday night in Lent that, weary
in flesh and spirit, his conscience out of tune, he had entered the
church and taken the first vacant seat. Without, the air was sluggish;
after leaving his club the idea of theatres or calls had set his teeth
on edge. He longed to be alone, to weigh in the silence of his heart the
utter futility of life. Religion had never been a part of his training
as the only son of a millionnaire, and if he preferred the Roman
Catholic ritual above all others, it was because the appeal was to his
aesthetic sense; a Turkish mosque, he assured his friends, produced the
same soothing impression--gauze veils gently waving and slowly obscuring
the dulling realities of everyday existence. This _morbidezza_ of the
spirit the Mahometans call _Kef_; the Christians, pious ecstasy.

But now he could not plunge himself, despite the faint odour of incense
lingering in the atmosphere, into the deepest pit of his personality. At
first he ascribed his restlessness to the sultry weather, then to his
abuse of tea and cigarettes,--perhaps it was the sharp odour of the
average congregation, that collective odour of humanity encountered in
church, theatre, or court-rooms. The smell of poverty was mingled with
the heavy scents of fashionable women, who, in the minority, made their
presence felt by their showy gowns, rustling movements, and attitudes of
superior boredom. In a vast building like this extremes touch with
eagerness on the part of the poor, to whom these furtive views of the
rich and indolent brought with them a bitter consolation.

Baldur remarked these things as he leaned back in his hard seat and
barely listened to the sermon, which poured forth as though the tap
would never be turned off again. And then a delicate note of iris, most
episcopal of perfumes, emerged from the mass of odours--musk, garlic,
damp shoes, alcohol, shabby clothing, rubber, pomade, cologne,
rice-powder, tobacco, patchouli, sachet, and a hundred other tintings of
the earthly symphony. The finely specialized olfactory sense of the
young man told him that it was either a bishop or a beautiful woman who
imparted to the air the subtle, penetrating aroma of iris. But it was
neither ecclesiastic nor maid. At his side was a short, rather thick-set
woman of vague age; she might have been twenty-five or forty. Her