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 hair
was cut in masculine fashion, her attire unattractive. As clearly as he
could distinguish her features he saw that she was not good-looking. A
stern mask it was, though not hardened. He would not have looked at such
an ordinary physiognomy twice if the iris had not signalled his peculiar
sense. There was no doubt that to her it was due. Susceptible as he was
to odours, Baldur was not a ladies' man. He went into society because it
was his world; and he attended in a perfunctory manner to the enormous
estate left him by his father, bound up in a single trust company. But
his thoughts were always three thousand miles away, in that delectable
city of cities, Paris. For Paris he suffered a painful nostalgia. There
he met his true brethren, while in New York he felt an alien. He was
one. The city, with its high, narrow streets--granite tunnels; its rude
reverberations; its colourless, toiling barbarians, with their