“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is here⁠—the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s little habits and tasks.”