them to his nostrils together with
the smell of grapes and vine-leaves. He had become curious in sensation,
and as he leant back upon the cushions covered with glistening yellow
silk, he was trying to analyze a strange ingredient in the perfume of the
air. He had penetrated far beyond the crude distinctions of modern times,
beyond the rough: "there's a smell of roses," "there must be sweetbriar
somewhere." Modern perceptions of odor were, he knew, far below those of
the savage in delicacy. The degraded black fellow of Australia could
distinguish odors in a way that made the consumer of "damper" stare in
amazement, but the savage's sensations were all strictly utilitarian. To
Lucian as he sat in the cool porch, his feet on the marble, the air came
laden with scents as subtly and wonderfully interwoven and contrasted as
the harmonica of a great master. The stained marble of the pavement gave
a cool reminiscence of the Italian mountain, the blood-red roses
palpitating in the sunlight sent out an odor mystical as passion itself,
and there was the hint of inebriation in the perfume of the trellised
vines. Besides these, the girl's desire and the unripe innocence of the
boy were as distinct as benzoin and myrrh, both delicious and exquisite,
and exhaled as freely as the scent of the roses. But there was another
element that puzzled him, an aromatic suggestion of the forest. He
understood it at last; it was the vapor of the great red pines that grew
beyond the garden; their spicy needles were burning in the sun, and the
smell was as fragrant as the fume of incense blown from far. The soft
entreaty of the flute and the swelling rapture of the boy's voice beat on
the air together, and Lucian wondered whether there were in the nature of
things any true distinction between the impressions of sound and
scent and color. The violent blue of the sky, the one mystery than
distinct entities. He could almost imagine that the boy's innocence was
indeed a perfume, and that the palpitating roses had become a sonorous
chant.

In the curious silence which followed the last notes, when the boy and
girl had passed under the purple ilex shadow, he fell into a reverie. The
fancy that sensations are symbols and not realities hovered in his mind,
and led him to speculate as to whether they could not actually be
transmuted one into another. It was possible, he thought, that a whole
continent of knowledge had been undiscovered; the energies of men hav