“Mr. Baldur—­listen!  Since Milton wrote his great poem the English-speaking people are all devil-worshippers, for Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost.  But I am no table-tipping medium eager for your applause or your money.  I don’t care for money.  I think you know enough of me through the newspapers to vouchsafe that.  You are rich, and it is your chief misery.  Listen!  Whether you believe it or not, you are very unhappy.  Let me read your horoscope.  Your club life bores you; you are tired of our silly theatres; no longer do you care for Wagner’s music.  You are deracinated; you are unpatriotic.  For that there is no excuse.  The arts are for you deadly.  I am sure you are a lover of literature.  Yet what a curse it has been for you!  When you see one of your friends drinking wine, you call him a fool because he is poisoning himself.  But you—­you—­poison your spirit with the honey of France, of Scandinavia, of Russia.  As for the society of women—­”

“The Eternal Womanly!” he sneered.

“The Eternal Simpleton, you mean.  In that swamp of pettiness, idiocy, and materialism, a man of your nature could not long abide.  Religion—­it has not yet responded to your need.  And without faith your sins lose their savour.  The arts—­you don’t know them all, the Seven Deadly Arts and the One Beautiful Art!” She paused.  Her voice had been as the sound of delicate flutes.  He was aflame.

“Is there, then, an eighth art?” he quickly asked.

“Would you know it if you saw it?”

“Of course.  Where is it, what is it?”

She laughed and took his arm.

“Why did you look at me in church?”

“Because—­it was mere chance—­no, it may have been the odour of iris.  I am mad over perfume.  I think it a neglected art, degraded to the function of anointment.  I have often dreamed of an art by which a dazzling and novel synthesis of fragrant perfumes would be invented by some genius, some latter-day Rimmel or Lubin whom we could hail as a peer of Chopin or Richard Strauss—­two composers who have expressed perfume in tone.  Roinard in his Cantiques des Cantiques attempted a concordance of tone, light, and odours.  Yes—­it was the iris that attracted me.”

“But I have no iris about me.  I have none now,” she simply replied.  He faced her.

“No iris?  What—?”

“I thought iris,” she added triumphantly, as she guided him into one of the side streets off Madison Avenue.  He was astounded.  She must be a hypnotist, he said to himself.  No suggestion of iris clung to her now.  And he remembered that the odour disappeared after they left the church.  He held his peace until they arrived before a brown-stone house of the ordinary kind with an English basement.  She took a key from her pocket and, going down several steps, beckoned to him.  Baldur followed.  His interest in this modern Cassandra and her bizarre words was too great for him to hesitate or to realize