s--this Sense of Smell awakened within him the centuries of his
gentility, the ghosts of all those Dallisons who, for three hundred
years and more, had served Church or State. It revived the souls of
scents he was accustomed to, and with them, subtly mingled, the whole
live fabric of aestheticism, woven in fresh air and laid in lavender.
It roused the simple, non-extravagant demand of perfect cleanliness. And
though he knew that chemists would have certified the composition of
his blood to be the same as that of the dwellers in this house, and that
this smell, composed of walls and washing and red herrings, was really
rather healthy, he stood frowning fixedly at the girl's door, and the
memory of his young niece's delicately wrinkled nose as she described
the house rose before him. He went on upstairs, followed by his
moonlight bulldog.

Hilary's tall thin figure appearing in the open doorway of the top-floor
front, his kind and worried face, and the pale agate eyes of the little
bulldog peeping through his legs, were witnessed by nothing but a baby,
who was sitting in a wooden box in the centre of the room. This baby,
who was very like a piece of putty to which Nature had by some accident
fitted two movable black eyes, was clothed in a woman's knitted
undervest, spreading beyond his feet and hands, so that nothing but
his head was visible. This vest divided him from the wooden shavings on
which he sat, and, since he had not yet attained the art of rising
to his feet, the box divided him from contacts of all other kinds. As
completely isolated from his kingdom as a Czar of all the Russias, he
was doing nothing. In this realm there was a dingy bed, two chairs, and
a washstand, with one lame leg, supported by an aged footstool. Clothes
and garments were hanging on nails, pans lay about the hearth, a
sewing-machine stood on a bare deal table. Over the bed was hung an
oleograph, from a Christmas supplement, of the birth of Jesus, and above
it a bayonet, under which was printed in an illiterate hand on a rough
scroll of paper: "Gave three of em what for at Elandslaagte. S. Hughs."
Some photographs adorned the walls, and two drooping ferns stood on the
window-ledge. The room withal had a sort of desperate tidiness; in a
large cupboard, slightly open, could be seen stowed all that must not
see the light of day. The window of the baby's kingdom was tightly
closed; the scent was the scent of walls and washing and red herrings,
a