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, on this occasion, she had 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;
snuffboxes 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, templ