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He looked around the room again, where the smell of powder smoke still lingered a little, still lay somewhere on the hot dead air though invisible now, blinking a little with his fierce pale unintroverted eyes. "Well by God," he said again. "Maybe you're right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family without— Come on." We left the office.

When Granny died, Bayard's most overwhelming sensation was the smell of gunpowder inside the old compress. The smell of powder in Redmond's office in this quotation from "An Odor of Verbena" echoes the earlier sensation and links Bayard's two actions. As George Wyatt surveys the scene, he suddenly understands why Bayard decided to confront Redmond unarmed. His heroic refusal to commit violence has won a convert who opposed the idea fiercely only moments before. Wyatt's remark ends abruptly, with a dash—a grammatical echo, perhaps unintentional, of the cycle of violence that Bayard has just broken.

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