She had a quality of common sense that seemed to pervade everything around her, as though it were some kind of emanation.

Up to that moment I had been building fancies around the sick man; so that finally all about him, including myself, had become involved in them, or enmeshed, or saturated, or...

But now that she had come, he relapsed into his proper perspective as a patient; the room was a sick-room, and the shadows lost their fearsome quality.

The only thing which it could not altogether abrogate was the strange Egyptian smell.

You may put a mummy in a glass case and hermetically seal it so that no corroding air can get within; but all the same it will exhale its odour.