Falling into Madness

So before this week I had never read Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, the closest story I had read to it was The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. 
The part that really stood out to me in The Yellow Wallpaper was where she started writing about the smell.
"It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs... Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it -- there is that smell! Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad -- at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met." 

The first thing I thought was that something had died because the way she described the smell reminded me of when there was a dead bird in my room for about a week. At first the smell was barely there, but as the week went on the smell got progressively worse. But for the main character instead of finding the smell progressively worse she starts to like it.