“He’s quite right,” said Mr. Cardan. “We are. In the end, I believe, we shall come to sacrifice everything to comfort and cleanliness. Personally, I always have the greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias. As for this particular stink,” he sniffed the air, positively with relish, “I don’t really know what you have to object to it. It’s wholesome, it’s natural, it’s tremendously historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers, you may be sure, smelt just as this does. No, on the whole, I entirely agree with our friend here.” “Still,” said Miss Thriplow, speaking in a muffled voice through the folds of her handkerchief, “I shall stick to my violets. However synthetic.” Having ordered a couple of glasses of wine, one of which he offered to the grocer, Mr. Cardan embarked on a diplomatic conversation about the object of his visit. At the mention of his brother and the sculpture, the grocer’s face took on an expression of altogether excessive amiability. He bent his thick lips into smiles; deep folds in the shape of arcs of circles appeared in his fat cheeks. He kept bowing again and again. Every now and then he joyously laughed, emitting a blast of garlicky breath that smelt so powerfully like acetylene that one was tempted to put a match to his mouth in the hope that he would immediately break out into a bright white flame. He confirmed all that the butcher’s boy had said. It was all quite true; he had a brother; and his brother had a piece of marble statuary that was beautiful and old, old, old. Unfortunately, however, his brother had removed from this village and had gone down to live in the plain, near the lake of Massaciuccoli, and the sculpture had gone with him. Mr. Cardan tried to find out from him what the work of art looked like; but he could gather nothing beyond the fact that it was beautiful and old and represented a man. “It isn’t like this, I suppose?” asked Mr. Cardan, bending himself into the attitude of a Romanesque demon and making a demoniac grimace. The grocer thought not. Two peasant women who had come in for cheese and oil looked on with a mild astonishment. These foreigners.... “Or like this?” He propped his elbow on the counter and, half reclining, conjured up, by his attitude and his fixed smile of imbecile ecstasy, visions of Etruscan revelry. Again the grocer shook his head. “Or like this?” He rolled his eyes toward heaven, like a baroque saint. But the grocer seemed doubtful even of this. Mr. Cardan wiped his forehead. “If I could make myself look like a Roman bust,” he said to Miss Thriplow, “or a bas-relief of Giotto, or a renaissance sarcophagus, or an unfinished group by Michelangelo, I would. But it’s beyond my powers.” He shook his head. “For the moment I give it up.”