anliness, on the sleek hair, on the pale frocks of
the girls, the bright neckties of the men, the lamplight rioted and
exulted; it rippled and flowed; it darted; it lay suave and smooth as
still water; it flaunted; it veiled itself. Stately and tall and in a
measured order, the lancet windows shot up out of the gray walls, the
leaded framework of their lozenges gray on the black and solemn night
behind them.

A smell of dust, of pine wood, of pomade, of burning oil, of an iron
stove fiercely heated, a thin, bitter smell of ivy and holly; that
wonderful, that overpowering, inspiring and revolting smell, of
elements strangely fused, of flying vapors, of breathing, burning,
palpitating things.

Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it
in with great heavings of his chest. He loved that smell. It fairly
intoxicated him every time. It soared singing through his nostrils
into his brain, like gin. There could be no more violent and
voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold,
biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell. It was a
thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell. It helped him to face
without too intolerable an agony the line of alien (he deemed them
alien) faces in the front row of the audience: Mr. Cartaret and Miss
Cartaret (utter strangers; he had never got, he never would get used
to them) and Dr. Rowcliffe (not altogether a stranger, after what he
had done one night for Greatorex's mare Daisy); then Miss Gwendolen
(not a stranger either after what she had done, and yet formidably
strange, the strangest, when he came to think of it, and the queerest
of them all). Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister.
Divided from them by a gap, more strangers, three girls whom Rowcliffe
had driven over from Morfe and afterward (Greatorex observed that
also, for he kept his eye on him) had shamelessly abandoned.

If Greatorex had his eye on Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe had his eye, though
less continuously, on him. He did not know very much about Greatorex,
after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn
up entirely sober. He was unaware of Greatorex's capacity for
substituting one intoxication for another. He had no conception of
what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man
who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul. It was
interfused and tangled with Greatorex's sublimest feelings. It was the
dr