that he would get himself into some dangerous scrape.  And was this truly the Mrs. Whistler whose tricks of telepathy and other extraordinary antics had puzzled and angered the wise men of two continents?  He did not have much time for reflection.  A grilled door opened, and presently he was in a room furnished very much like a physician’s office.  Electric bulbs, an open grate, and two bookcases gave the apartment a familiar, cheerful appearance.  Baldur sat down on a low chair, and Mrs. Whistler removed her commonplace headgear.  In the bright light she was younger than he had imagined, and her head a beautifully modelled one—­broad brows, very full at the back, and the mask that of an emotional actress.  Her smoke-coloured eyes were most remarkable and her helmet of hair blue black.

“And now that you are my guest at last, Mr. Baldur, let me apologize for the exercise of my art upon your responsive nerves;” she made this witch-burning admission as if she were accounting for the absence of tea.  To his relief she offered him nothing.  He had a cigarette between his fingers, but he did not care to smoke.  She continued:—­

“For some time I have known you—­never mind how!  For some time I have wished to meet you.  I am not an impostor, nor do I desire to pose as the goddess of a new creed.  But you, Irving Baldur, are a man among men who will appreciate what I may show you.  You love, you understand, perfumes.  You have even wished for a new art—­don’t forget that there are others in the world to whom the seven arts have become a thrice-told tale, to whom the arts have become too useful.  All great art should be useless.  Yet architecture houses us; sculpture flatters us; painting imitates us; dancing is pure vanity; literature and the drama, mere vehicles for bread-earning; while music—­music, the most useless art as it should have been—­is in the hands of the speculators.  Moreover music is too sexual—­it reports in a more intense style the stories of our loves.  Music is the memory of love.  What Prophet will enter the temple of the modern arts and drive away with his divine scourge the vile money-changers who fatten therein?” Her voice was shrill as she paced the room.  A very sibyl this, her crest of hair agitated, her eyes sparkling with wrath.  He missed the Cumaean tripod.

“There is an art, Baldur, an art that was one of the lost arts of Babylon until now, one based, as are all the arts, on the senses.  Perfume—­the poor, neglected nose must have its revenge.  It has outlived the other senses in the aesthetic field.”

“What of the palate—­you have forgotten that.  Cookery, too, is a fine art,” he ventured.  His smile irritated her.