what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the
scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish
coffee and ambergris and dried roses.

His mind wandered away to the question of what
May's drawing-room would look like. He knew that
Mr. Welland, who was behaving "very handsomely,"
already had his eye on a newly built house in East
Thirty-ninth Street. The neighbourhood was thought
remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-
yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning
to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which
the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate
sauce; but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would
have liked to travel, to put off the housing question;
but, though the Wellands approved of an extended
European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt),
they were firm as to the need of a house for the
returning couple. The young man felt that his fate was
sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up every
evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-
yellow doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule
into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow
wood. But beyond that his imagination could not travel.
He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window,
but he could not fancy how May would deal with it.
She submitted cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow
tuftings of the Welland drawing-room, to its sham Buhl
tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe. He saw no
reason to suppose that she would want anything different