"Something else," said the woman, with some embarrassment.
"I take it that you refer to the odor that comes from underfed bodies," I remarked.
"Precisely," assented the noble lady. "Have you also noticed it?"
"Have you observed it recently?" I asked.
"A few days ago. The smell was new to me."
"Reminded you, perhaps, of the faint odor of a cadaver far off?"
The light of complete understanding came into the woman's eyes.
"Exactly, that is it. Do you know, I have been trying ever since then to identify the odor. But that is too shocking to think of. And yet you are right. It is exactly that. How do you account for it?"
"Malnutrition! The waste of tissue due to that is a process not wholly dissimilar to the dissolution which sets in at death," I explained.
I complimented the woman on her fine powers of discernment. The smell was not generally identified. I was familiar with it for the reason that I had my attention drawn to it first in South Africa among some underfed Indian coolies, and later I had detected it again in Mexico among starving peons.