If Hilary felt that he needed more money so badly, he must have it. There
were certain things Peter declined to do. He wouldn't borrow from the
Urquharts; but he would sell his last treasured possession to soothe
Hilary for a little while. The Berovieri goblet had been bought for a
lot of money, and could at any moment be sold for a lot of money. The
Berovieri goblet must go.

That evening, in the tiny attic room, Peter took the adorable thing out
of the box where it lay hid, and set it on the chest of drawers, in front
of the candle, so that the flame shone through the blue transparency like
the setting sun through a stained-glass window.

It was very, very beautiful. Peter sat on the bed and looked at it, as
a devotee before a shrine. In itself it was very beautiful, a magic thing
of blue colour and deep light and pure shadow and clear, lovely form.
Peter loved it for itself, and for its symbolic character. For it was a
symbol of the world of great loveliness that did, he knew, exist. When he
had been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had
kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was
a materialist: he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion
that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the
super-sensuous.

He slipped his fingers up the chalice's slim stem and round its cool
bowl, and smiled for pleasure that such a thing existed--had existed for
four hundred years--to gladden the world.

"Well, anyone would have thought I should have smashed you before now,"
he remarked, apostrophising it proudly. "But I haven't. I shall take you
to Christie's myself to-morrow, as whole as you were the day Leslie gave
you me."

It was fortunate that Leslie was out of reach, and would not hear of the
transaction. If he had been in England, Peter would have felt bound to
offer him the goblet, and he would have paid for it too enormous a price
to be endured. Leslie's generosity was sometimes rather overwhelming.

When Peter took Hilary and Peggy the cheque he had received, and told
them what he had received it for, Hilary said, "I suppose these things
must be. It was fortunate you did not ask my advice, Peter; I should have
hesitated what to say. It is uncommonly like bartering one's soul for
guineas. To what we are reduced!"

He was an artist, and cared for beautiful goblets. He would much rather
have borrowed the money, or had it given him.

Peg