“Now the Seven Deadly Arts are:  Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Dancing, Acting.  The mercy of God has luckily purified these once pagan inventions, and transformed them into saving instruments of grace.  Yet it behooves us to examine with the utmost diligence the possible sources of evil latent in each and every one of those arts.  Then we shall consider some of the special forms of sin that may develop from them.  St. Chrysostom warned the faithful against the danger of the Eighth Deadly Art—­Perfume....”

His phrases, which began to fall into the rhythmic drone of a Sunday sermon, lulled Baldur to dreaming.  Perfume—­that delicious vocable!  And the contrast with what his own nostrils reported to his consciousness made him slightly shiver.  It was on a Friday night in Lent that, weary in flesh and spirit, his conscience out of tune, he had entered the church and taken the first vacant seat.  Without, the air was sluggish; after leaving his club the idea of theatres or calls had set his teeth on edge.  He longed to be alone, to weigh in the silence of his heart the utter futility of life.  Religion had never been a part of his training as the only son of a millionnaire, and if he preferred the Roman Catholic ritual above all others, it was because the appeal was to his aesthetic sense; a Turkish mosque, he assured his friends, produced the same soothing impression—­gauze veils gently waving and slowly obscuring the dulling realities of everyday existence.  This morbidezza of the spirit the Mahometans call Kef; the Christians, pious ecstasy.

But now he could not plunge himself, despite the faint odour of incense lingering in the atmosphere, into the deepest pit of his personality.  At first he ascribed his restlessness to the sultry weather, then to his abuse of tea and cigarettes,—­perhaps it was the sharp odour of the average congregation, that collective odour of humanity encountered in church, theatre, or court-rooms.  The smell of poverty was mingled with 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,