No. 1, Hound Street, abutting on the garden of a house of better class, was distinctly the show building of the street.  The door, however, was not closed, and pulling the remnant of a bell, Hilary walked in.

The first thing that he noticed was a smell; it was not precisely bad, but it might have been better.  It was a smell of walls and washing, varied rather vaguely by red herrings.  The second thing he noticed was his moonlight bulldog, who stood on the doorstep eyeing a tiny sandy cat.  This very little cat, whose back was arched with fury, he was obliged to chase away before his bulldog would come in.  The third thing he noticed was a lame woman of short stature, standing in the doorway of a room.  Her face, with big cheek-bones, and wide-open, light grey, dark-lashed eyes, was broad and patient; she rested her lame leg by holding to the handle of the door.

“I dunno if you’ll find anyone upstairs.  I’d go and ask, but my leg’s lame.”

“So I see,” said Hilary; “I’m sorry.”

The woman sighed:  “Been like that these five years”; and turned back into her room.

“Is there nothing to be done for it?”

“Well, I did think so once,” replied the woman, “but they say the bone’s diseased; I neglected it at the start.”

“Oh dear!”

“We hadn’t the time to give to it,” the woman said defensively, retiring into a room so full of china cups, photographs, coloured prints, waxwork 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 moonlight bulldog.