The room was full of scent, partly from the flowers outside, and partly from the great jars of pot- pourri inside.

The choice of odours was what my lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing showed birth like a keen susceptibility of smell.

We never named musk in her presence, her antipathy to it was so well understood through the household: her opinion on the subject was believed to be, that no scent derived from an animal could ever be of a sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to any person of good family, where, of course, the delicate perception of the senses had been cultivated for generations.

She would instance the way in which sportsmen preserve the breed of dogs who have shown keen scent; and how such gifts descend for generations amongst animals, who cannot be supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or hereditary fancies about them.

Musk, then, was never mentioned at Hanbury Court.