A smell of dust, of pine wood, of pomade, of burning oil, of an iron stove fiercely heated, a thin, bitter smell of ivy and holly; that wonderful, that overpowering, inspiring and revolting smell, of elements strangely fused, of flying vapors, of breathing, burning, palpitating things.

Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it in with great heavings of his chest.  He loved that smell.  It fairly intoxicated him every time.  It soared singing through his nostrils into his brain, like gin.  There could be no more violent and voluptuous contrast of sensations than to come straight from the cold, biting air of Upthorne and to step into that perfect smell.  It was a thick, a sweet, a fiery and sustaining smell.  It helped him to face without too intolerable an agony the line of alien (he deemed them alien) faces in the front row of the audience:  Mr. Cartaret and Miss Cartaret (utter strangers; he had never got, he never would get used to them) and Dr. Rowcliffe (not altogether a stranger, after what he had done one night for Greatorex’s mare Daisy); then Miss Gwendolen (not a stranger either after what she had done, and yet formidably strange, the strangest, when he came to think of it, and the queerest of them all).  Rowcliffe, he observed, sat between her and her sister.  Divided from them by a gap, more strangers, three girls whom Rowcliffe had driven over from Morfe and afterward (Greatorex observed that also, for he kept his eye on him) had shamelessly abandoned.

If Greatorex had his eye on Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe had his eye, though less continuously, on him.  He did not know very much about Greatorex, after all, and he could not be sure that his man would turn up entirely sober.  He was unaware of Greatorex’s capacity for substituting one intoxication for another.  He had no conception of what the smell of that lighted and decorated room meant for this man who lived so simply and profoundly by his senses and his soul.  It was interfused and tangled with Greatorex’s sublimest feelings.  It was the draw-net of submerged memories, of secret, unsuspected passions.  It held in its impalpable web his dreams, the divine and delicate things that his grosser self let slip.  He would forget, forget for ages, until, in the schoolroom at concert time, at the first caress of the magical smell, those delicate and divine, those secret, submerged, and forgotten things arose, and with the undying poignancy and subtlety of odors they entered into him again.  And besides these qualities which were indefinable, the smell was vividly symbolic.  It was entwined with and it stood for his experience of art and ambition and the power to move men and women; for song and for the sensuous thrill and spiritual ecstasy of singing and for the subsequent applause.  It was the only form of intoxication known to him that did not end in headache and in shame.

Suddenly the charm that had sustained him ceased to work.