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By Root 7109 0

to hurt them, but he imaged them no more than if his eyes acted only for the level of his own high head. Her own vision acted for every relation – this he had seen for himself: she remarked beggars, she remembered servants, she recognised cabmen; she had often distinguished beauty, when out with him, in dirty children; she had admired ‘type’ in faces at hucksters’ stalls. Therefore she had on this occasion found their antiquario interesting; partly because he cared so for his things, and partly because he cared – well, so for them. ‘He likes his things – he loves them,’ she was to say; ‘and it isn’t only – it isn’t perhaps even at all – that he loves to sell them. I think he would love to keep them if he could; and he prefers at any rate to sell them to right people. We, clearly, were right people – he knows them when he sees them; and that’s why, as I say, you could make out, or at least I could, that he cared for us. Didn’t you see’ – she was to ask it with an insistence – ‘the way he looked at us and took us in? I doubt if either of us have ever been so well looked at before. Yes, he’ll remember us’ – she was to profess herself convinced of that almost to uneasiness. ‘But it was after all’ – this was perhaps reassuring – ‘because, given his taste, since he has taste, he was pleased with us, he was struck – he had ideas about us. Well, I should think people might; we’re beautiful – aren’t we? – and he knows. Then also he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he’s all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it – that is a regular way.’

Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jewelled artistry, were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter where the shopman’s slim light fingers, with neat nails, touched them at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly, as those of a chess-player rest, a few seconds, over the board, on a figure he thinks he may move and then may not: small florid ancientries, ornaments, pendants, lockets, brooches, buckles, pretexts for dim brilliants, bloodless rubies, pearls either too large or too opaque for value; miniatures mounted with diamonds that had ceased to dazzle; snuff-boxes presented to – or by – the too-questionable great; cups, trays, taper-stands, suggestive of pawn-tickets, archaic and brown, that would themselves, if preserved, have been prized curiosities. A few commemorative medals of neat outline but dull reference; a classic monument or two, things of the first years of the century; things consular, Napoleonic,4 temples, obelisks, arches,5 tinily re-embodied, completed the discreet cluster; in which, however, even after tentative re-enforcement from several quaint rings, intaglios,6 amethysts, carbuncles, each of which had found a home in the ancient sallow satin of some weakly-snapping little box, there was, in spite of the due proportion of faint poetry, no great force of persuasion. They looked, the visitors, they touched, they vaguely pretended to consider, but with scepticism, so far as courtesy permitted, in the quality of their attention. It was impossible they shouldn’t, after a little, tacitly agree as to the absurdity of carrying to Maggie a token from such a stock. It would be – that was the difficulty – pretentious without being ‘good’; too usual, as a treasure, to have been an inspiration of the giver, and yet too primitive to be taken as tribute welcome on any terms. They had been out more than two hours and evidently had found nothing. It forced from Charlotte a rueful admission.

‘It ought, really, if it should be a thing of this sort, to take its little value from having belonged to one’s self.’

‘Ecco!’ said the Prince – just triumphantly enough. ‘There you are.’

Behind the dealer were sundry small cupboards in the wall. Two or three of these Charlotte had seen him open, so that her eyes found themselves resting on those he hadn’t visited. But she granted the whole mistake. ‘There’s nothing here she could wear.’

It was only after a moment that