fruits, and other ornaments, that there seemed no room for the enormous
bed.

Wishing her good-morning, Hilary began to mount the stairs. On the first
floor he paused. Here, in the back room, the little model lived.

He looked around him. The paper on the passage walls was of a dingy
orange colour, the blind of the window torn, and still pursuing him,
pervading everything, was the scent of walls and washing and red
herrings. There came on him a sickness, a sort of spiritual revolt. To
live here, to pass up these stairs, between these dingy, bilious walls,
on this dirty carpet, with this--ugh! every day; twice, four times, six
times, who knew how many times a day! And that sense, the first to be
attracted or revolted, the first to become fastidious with the culture
of the body, the last to be expelled from the temple of the pure-spirit;
that sense to whose refinement all breeding and all education is
devoted; that sense which, ever an inch at least in front of man, is
able to retard the development of nations, and paralyse all social
schemes--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