Mr. Incoul's Misadventure by Edgar Saltus — Read

There is a peculiarity about Baden-Baden which no other watering-place seems to share -- it has the aroma of a pretty woman. In August it is warm, crowded, enervating, tiresome as are all warm and crowded places, but the air is delicately freighted and a pervasive fragrance is discerned even by the indifferent.

In the summer that succeeded Maida's marriage Baden was the same tame, perfumed _zwei und funfzig_ that it has ever been since the war. The ladies and gentlemen who were to regard it as a sort of continuation of the Bois de Boulogne had departed never to return. Gone was Benazet, gone, too, the click of the roulette ball. The echoes and uproars of the Second Empire had died away, as echoes and uproars ever must, and in place of the paint and cleverness of the _dames du-lac_ had come the stupid loveliness of the _schwaermerisch Maedchen_.