Although on occasion confining its operations to the subconsciousness, and exercising, so to speak, only a backstairs influence upon the mind, olfaction much more frequently insists upon recognition, breaking in upon our privacy, like a disreputable acquaintance, at most inopportune moments. If you do not wish to see you can look the other way. When you would rather not hear you can be inattentive. A proffered handshake you can ignore. A dish you dislike you may decline. But you can’t help smelling—no, not even if you turn up your nose. Olfaction is thus the great leveller among the senses, equality having here a reality but rarely found elsewhere. For odour makes its way into the nose of king and cadger, duke and drayman, lady and lout, indifferently. Nay, by an ironical law of olfaction the fœtors are more powerful than the fragrances, and vervain the feeble turns tail before the onslaught of scatol (as well it might, indeed!), in which case there is nothing to be done but to bear it (without the grin mostly); or to follow the wise example of vervain; or to remove the offence, as we have done in England these latter days, only to render ourselves, as I have carefully pointed out in Chapter I., all the more sensitive to it when it does come. To many of us it comes on the dog. This animal has a regrettable fondness for wallowing, diligently and with forethought, in the Abominable, until his coat is thoroughly well impregnated. For no other reason, I do verily believe, than, as he thinks, to give his human friends for once some of the olfactory pleasure he himself enjoys. A treat he thinks it, without any doubt. Just look at the smirk of pride and satisfaction on his face as he trots in and resumes his place on the drawing-room hearthrug and the amazement with which he receives the sudden toe of your boot! And yet he rolls himself over on the odoriferous for the same reason that a fashionable lady has orris-root put in her bath; namely, for the pleasure and gratification of society at large. There are who say that my lady’s perfume seems as vile to her Pekinese as his then does to her! If so, he is the more tolerant animal of the two. Anyhow, he certainly has the knack of thrusting the Unmentionable upon the attention of the most fastidious, and smell is no longer speechless. Now, if we are to treat fully of things olfactory, we must at least take cognisance of the Unmentionable. But to extend our notice would take us across the garden to the muckrake and the dunghill. And such nearer investigation and description I must decline, even although in these days of outspokenness I may have to apologise for Victorian squeamishness. To attain merit as a writer the advice now given you is: Be frank! And if you disgust, why, so much the better!