penetrating aroma of iris.  But it was neither ecclesiastic nor maid.  At his side was a short, rather thick-set woman of vague age; she might have been twenty-five or forty.  Her hair was cut in masculine fashion, her attire unattractive.  As clearly as he could distinguish her features he saw that she was not good-looking.  A stern mask it was, though not hardened.  He would not have looked at such an ordinary physiognomy twice if the iris had not signalled his peculiar sense.  There was no doubt that to her it was due.  Susceptible as he was to odours, Baldur was not a ladies’ man.  He went into society because it was his world; and he attended in a perfunctory manner to the enormous estate left him by his father, bound up in a single trust company.  But his thoughts were always three thousand miles away, in that delectable city of cities, Paris.  For Paris he suffered a painful nostalgia.  There he met his true brethren, while in New York he felt an alien.  He was one.  The city, with its high, narrow streets—­granite tunnels; its rude reverberations; its colourless, toiling barbarians, with their undistinguished physiognomies, their uncouth indifference to art,—­he did not deny that he loathed this nation, vibrating only in the presence of money, sports, grimy ward politics, while exhibiting a depressing snobbery to things British.  There was no nuance in its life or its literature, he asserted.  France was his patrie psychique; he would return there some day and forever....

The iris crept under his nostrils, and again he regarded the woman.  This time she faced him, and he no longer wondered, for he saw her eyes.  With such eyes only a great soul could be imprisoned in her brain.  They were smoke-gray, with long, dark lashes, and they did not seem to focus perfectly—­at least there was enough deflection to make their expression odd, withal interesting, like the slow droop of Eleonora Duse’s magic eye.  Though her features were rigid, the woman’s glance spoke to Baldur, spoke eloquently.  Her eyes were—­or was it the iris?—­symbols of a soul-state, of a rare emotion, not of sex, nor yet sexless.  The pupils seemed powdered with a strange iridescence.  He became more troubled than before.  What did the curious creature want of him!  She was neither coquette nor cocotte, flirtation was not hinted by her intense expression.  He resumed his former position, but her eyes made his shoulders burn, as if they had sufficient power to bore through them.  He no longer paid any attention to his surroundings.  The sermon was like the sound of far-away falling waters, the worshippers were so many black marks.  Of two things was he aware—­the odour of iris and her eyes.