He was rolling on the rug, communicating contagion.  Flasks of treble-distilled lavender water, and their favourite, traditional in the family, eau d’Arquebusade, were on the toilet-table.  They sprinkled his basket, liberally sprinkled the rug and the little dog.  Perfume-pastilles were in one of the sitting-rooms below; and Virginia would have gone down softly to fetch a box, but Dorothea restrained her, in pity for the servants, with the remark:  ’It would give us a nightmare of a Roman Catholic Cathedral!’ A bit of the window was lifted by Dorothea, cautiously, that prowling outsiders might not be attracted.  Tasso was wooed to his basket.  He seemed inquisitive; the antidote of his naughtiness excited him; his tail circled after his muzzle several times; then he lay.  A silken scarf steeped in eau d’Arquebusade was flung across him.

Their customary devout observances concluded, lights were extinguished, and the ladies kissed, and entered their beds.

Their beds were not homely to them.  Dorothea thought that Virginia was long in settling herself.  Virginia did not like the sound of Dorothea’s double sigh.  Both listened anxiously for the doings of Tasso.  He rested.

He was uneasy; he was rounding his basket once more; unaware of the exaggeration of his iniquitous conduct, poor innocent, he shook that dreadful coat of his!  He had displaced the prophylactic cover of the scarf.

He drove them in a despair to speculate on the contention between the perfume and the stench in junction, with such a doubt of the victory of which of the two, as drags us to fear our worst.  It steals into our nostrils, possesses them.  As the History of Mankind has informed us, we were led up to our civilization by the nose.  But Philosophy warns us on that eminence; to beware of trusting exclusively to our conductor, lest the mind of us at least be plunged back into barbarism.  The ladies hated both the cause and the consequence, they had a revulsion from the object, of the above contention.  But call it not a contention:  there is nobility in that.  This was a compromise, a degrading union, with very sickening results.  Whether they came of an excess of the sprinkling, could not well be guessed.  The drenching at least was righteously intended.

Beneath their shut eyelids, they felt more and more the oppression of a darkness not laden with slumber.  They saw it insolidity; themselves as restless billows, driven dashing to the despondent sigh.  Sleep was denied them.

Tasso slept.  He had sinned unknowingly, and that is not a spiritual sin; the chastisement confers the pardon.

But why was this ineffable blessing denied to them?  Was it that they might have a survey of all the day’s deeds and examine them under the cruel black beams of Insomnia?

Virginia said:  ‘You are wakeful.’

‘Thoughtful,’ was the answer.

A century of the midnight rolled on.