78 DEGRADING ASSOCIATIONS 



guidance of those who knew the ropes, and who took 

 them to the haunts of people they had never en- 

 countered before, people who were not respectable, 

 chiefly women who received them with ravishing 

 smiles and open arms. These women have the habit 

 of scenting themselves somewhat excessively, and the 

 scents and the women and their haunts, and the 

 people and life altogether, became associated in their 

 young impressionable minds. By-and-by the revul- 

 sion comes, respectability and the serious business 

 of life call them back, and they shake themselves 

 free, but, alas ! not free of the vile associations which 

 all perfumes have for them for the remainder of 

 their lives. 



It may be that this feeling, a sense of disgust, in 

 the gentlemen of this island country is of modern 

 growth. At all events, we read in books that in the 

 eighteenth century, down even to the early nine- 

 teenth, when the gentlemen visitors made their exit 

 from a drawing-room, backing gracefully out and 

 bowing low in the elegant manner of those times, they 

 invariably left the scent of pomander behind them. 



A couple of centuries earlier takes us to a time 

 when an Englishman could saturate himself with 

 perfumes as readily as any Venetian lady of that 

 period; when a gentleman could call on his apothe- 

 cary to get him an ounce of civet (a large order in 

 those days) just to sweeten his imagination. 



From associations which degrade something which 

 is lovely in itself we will go on at once in conclusion 

 of this chapter to those which exalt, and the use of 



